Rant , september 13 , 2025

That type of system that splits new anime characters every week to ship them with their partner system pisses me off. I used to date two of that type of collective, and it was absolutely detrimental to my general wellbeing. They’d watch a new media, and then literally an hour later log a new part from that media and then go through the entire song and dance with their partner of them confessing all over again. Of course, I’m sure that this type of dynamic works for some people, and it’s completely healthy for them! I just can’t help but wonder if these people have any sort of collective or stable identity at all. If you split a new anime boy every week, to the point of having 700 people logged, I feel as though the common courtesy would be to, at least, not try to have all 700 of them have individual relationships.
My own experience with this was completely bitter. It consisted of a polycule with 3 people, me being one of them. At the last time we were friends at all, they both had around 700 people in their systems, if I remember correctly. Something interesting about this was the fact that they had no frequent fronters – Their front completely cycled with their interests. It was completely opposite to my system, which has always been at least semi-consistent with fronters and hosts, even when we were under the curse (inflicted by them, of course) in which we believed that, we too, split a new anime boy every week. In our defense, if we didn’t “split” a new Genshin Impact character every time they did, they would completely leave us in the dust romantically and attention wise. When we began to stabilize and integrate into a smaller system, they had no reason to really romantically or platonically engage with us, especially considering all the people in their system who cared about us were dormant and hadn’t fronted since their Dream SMP phase. When they realized they couldn’t LARP with us like they did their partner, we were almost completely discarded. Of course, this isn’t telling the whole story, considering at the beginning of the story, the ages of the bodies of the people in this polycule were: 21, 16, and 17. I was the one who was 16. So, y’know, completely fucking weird.
Though this is much more a personal rant/vent than anything of substantial thought or value, it does make me wonder about the solidification of identity and responsibility when it comes to systems. If we believe that the other people in this polycule were, at all, genuine with their intentions and beliefs of being systems, then that kind of begs the question: What sort of life is that? Imagine coming into life, existing for a week or so, gaining a boyfriend, and then basically dissolving as soon as you’re done with your role. And there’s the thought of mental crowding, even when we had 200 people, we would often describe our mind as “crowded,” and as though nobody had enough claim over the brain to even be described as a sliver of a person. Of course, those are kind of mean, rude thoughts. Truthfully, I don’t have a right to any sort of conjecture about another person’s mental state or mind.
These types of relationships, to me, do seem incredibly difficult to maintain. They consist of large webs of internal and external relationships that are only maintained to the point of sweeping the dust off of the more “interesting” ones whenever one party remembers that a certain plotline in the larp hasn’t proceeded or concluded in a significant amount of time. I imagine that these types of relationship dynamics (The hundreds of people in complicated web-polycules with each other part, not the accusing them of being roleplayers part) can work, but they also involve a level of responsibility, commitment, and mental maturity that none of my previous partners had at all. Though, they’re still together, to my knowledge! And it’s been 4 years, so at least something’s going right there? (Though, again, please remember that predatory age gap. I say right in Heavy quotation marks.) When I was involved in those two’s lives, their relationships seemed heavily reliant on conflict. I remember whenever we would meet up in person (Where were our parents?), and the entire time would be spent not having fun or enjoying each other’s company, but using each other as therapists or as solutions to our internal struggles. For example, I remember a situation I was told about in a joking way: Person A’s alter, who was an Awesamdude introject, had wanted to self harm or something, and so Person B’s alter, who was the character that people shipped with Awesamdude, had to restrain him and sit on top of him for an entire night until Person A fell asleep. They told this story, which is absolutely horrifying to think about, to me in a completely jovial way. They would go through this routine, of causing conflicts and problems on purpose, and then having to be comforted, or being the comforter, over and over and over. At least once a day, when we were in person. It was like it was a Therapy Special Hour. It was as insufferable as you can believe. I must admit, I wasn’t completely a passive observer in this, I also participated in this sort of emotional crutch, but… Again, I was 16-18 over the course of our relationship.
I’ll likely write more about these two at some point, and especially tell some specific stories and examples of their Complete Bullshit, but I wanted to at least rant a bit about my hatred for this type of dynamic.