#max talks

[maxanite]

[trans-jon-rights]

I think we've all forgotten this legendary quote by Jonathan Jarchivist Sims so I present you again :

Jonathan Jarchivist Sims, from MAG 114

[cigarettewinestain]

Ten people I’d like to know tag game:

Thanks for the tag @beauty-is-terrror

Last song: Swan Upon Leda by Hozier

Favourite colour(s): dark greens, navy blue, browns

Last book: reread Bacchae and other plays by Euripides

Last movie: Brideshead revisited

Last TV show: I don’t watch them

Sweet/spicy/savoury: savoury

Relationship status: cursed

Last thing I googled: name of the newspaper in my country

Current obsession: ovid

Looking forward to: Going to Switzerland next week

Tagging: @shinaaposts @siriuslyobsessedwithfiction @perpulchra @the-etcetera-archive (no pressure and sorry if anyone has been tagged before)

[raptorish]

i have Thoughts about how gender is a social construct in relation to my theriotype actually

because I know that my raptorself is a female velociraptor, but it doesn't care about human gender because raptor gender is mostly about feather patterns and comparison with other raptors - but it doesn't have that here. it's never lived with other raptors to compare itself with!

so for me, as a raptor, I'm effectively a genderless creature because my raptorself doesn't have a social niche to slot a gender into. which is very interesting!

versus, my human self is constantly engaging with human society with human genders and gender expectations, which means I'm transgender as a human! but I'm completely separate from gender as a raptor, because raptor brain doesn't live in a raptor society.

i think this is an interesting note, because this is not because raptors in general lack a sense of gender! as you can tell whenever you look at birds outside, birds are often very separated between their sexes, and they often have differing roles in their avian relationships - but as a raptor who doesn't have any of those avian relationships, i never developed that sense of having a raptorial gender role.

it's funny, I think it would go both ways? if I were a raptor in body millions of years ago, living with other raptors, I would have a raptor gender - I would be female in the ways so many other birds are female. and I would not be a trans man, as a raptor, because being a trans man relies on the concept of human masculinity. I wouldn't know about human concepts of gender, so I wouldn't have a human gender.

basically, right now, I'm a trans man and a genderless raptor, and it's a very cool intersection of species and gender that I'm going to chew on for a while

[dracononite]

loving reminder that butchness comes in many different forms, and that masculinity is not a requirement or prerequisite to being butch. all the love to androgynous and feminine butches, to butches who are soft or physically weak, to butches w/ long hair <3 butch is not just an aesthetic

[lazyblogposter]

The thing they don't tell you about playing Skyrim for so long is you eventually are able to perfectly imitate the guards

[nighthawk-star-jagerman]

Thank fuck I didn't have to deal with you in high school

Bitch

-@ethan-green-69420

Whatever old nerd. Shut up and go do your taxes or some shit.

[knifedog-machina]

Daemons To Systems, And The Ways They Intertwine

Hey, I’m Max, he/they - I’m the host of our system, the guy who lives in the front and has only ever lived here, the one who identifies our body as my body specifically. A few nights ago, we realized something about our system origins while talking to some other systems, and I’ve honestly never heard of it happening before, so I thought I’d talk about it.

I used to think that I was a singlet before Jude and Gavin walked in. Now I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. See, before I was the host of a system, I was a daemian. I had three daemons, over the course of my time practicing daemonism, interacting with the community. And they were all a little weird.

The first one was Charlie, affectionately longformed as Charlemagne. Xe appeared in January 2018 as a red fox, said that was xir settled form, and never changed from that. That’s an option for daemons - I know other daemons who chose their forms, independent of how well that form represented their daemian, and stayed that way - but it was in contrast to how most people seemed to do it. I never really felt the need to find a form that fit my personality, not when xe was so confident that this was what xe was.

I didn’t try to make xir do anything, I didn’t decide to give xir faux autonomy - xe just did things xirself, with or without my prompting. Xe was playful, optimistic, a cheerful presence always willing to race around and perk me back up. I really needed xir, back then - I was going through a lot of stress in high school, and I needed someone around to remind me of the whimsical little joys in life. Xe fronted sometimes, and I loved when xe did, conjured phantom tail and paws and big fox ears and an unstoppable zest for life.

My next daemon, Martin, appeared in May 2019 after a fever dream. Really. I was sick and tired and miserable, and I didn’t want to do anything, including things that would make me feel better, and a new internal voice appeared in my head. She told me to drink some water and get to sleep. The next morning, she was still there, lounging around as a large black dog, and she stayed.

This became her role, her purpose in our mind, being a shepherd for my needs. She ran our faulty executive functioning, told me to take care of myself when I forgot important things, encouraged me when I failed to meet expectations. She raised her hackles when anyone tried to overstep our boundaries, and advocated for doing what we needed to protect ourselves, regardless of whether it was nice or polite.

Charlie and Martin overlapped in existence for a while. Charlie loved having a big sibling to play with, and Martin was fond of xir. So I had two daemons for a while, and the arrangement was nice. As I transitioned out of high school into college, my circumstances and environment drastically changed. Charlie was sweet, but xe stopped having a function in my life, so over the months, xe popped up less and less, until xe faded away entirely. Xe wasn’t upset to go, and xir memory is a comfort to me - xe served xir purpose, brought me joy, and had a life well lived.

In October 2021, I created a new daemon, compartmentalizing my emotional dysregulation and disordered anxiety into something that was Not Myself, so I could talk to it and understand its needs without being overwhelmed with distress. This became the feral shadow of a dog that we named Cortisol, nicknamed Court - and if Martin was our Freudian superego, who provided guidance for my decisions and stability when I got stressed, Court was our id, feeling all the explosive emotions that I couldn’t externally express and curling up for scritches like a beloved pet when it got what it needed.

We stayed like that for almost a year, getting familiar with the rhythm of life together. Then, in August 2022, my current headmates walked into my brain. My daemons vanished for the duration of their stay.

They only stayed around a few days, that first time - I was moving to a new place and having new people in my brain simultaneously was overloading our mental RAM, so I was forgetting a lot, and I decided that I’d rather live with them some other time. They understood, we said our goodbyes, and they walked out the next morning. (Recounting this to my friend Tanix was hilarious, by the way. “what the fuck (positive)” he said, his own headmates unable to do this. The joys of being a gateway system.) Once the headmates were gone, my daemons returned into my life.

They came back in March 2023, after I settled down into college for a while, and the memory didn’t jam up like it did previously, so we didn’t part ways this time. Martin and Court vanished overnight, again, and looking back on it, I’m noticing some patterns.

Gavin is basically performing the same role that Martin did - he’s the guy reminding us about our responsibilities, talking through the emotions when we feel like garbage, telling me to eat when I forget, or encouraging me to eat when I have enough sensory issues that I can't stomach anything. He consistently fronts when talking to people we don’t especially like, because he feels protective of us and tends to be the most patient with annoyances.

He’s also literally just some guy, just a decent human person who wound up in here because his partner arrived in my brain five minutes before him and understandably got really upset about it, so he followed them in. Somehow. We don't know how it works, but I also don't know exactly where the first two of my daemons came from, so I’m fine leaving it as a mystery.

(He has a lot of complicated feelings about the position he's in, playing a daemon’s role as a completely different person from me, and will probably write his own post about it some time.)

Jude is, unfortunately, kinda in the same role as Court. And since Court held the emotional dysregulation in my brain, Jude also holds the grand majority of the distress and anxiety that we feel on a regular basis. We all really wish it was split more evenly, because Jude tends to not only lose the ability to talk when they panic, they also get stuck in the front, completely unable to talk to me or Gavin.

(It’s not even that they feel the stress that directly affects them, it’s that on top of the stress that we get in our daily life. They regularly had panic attacks over my grades and exams last semester, and they weren’t even the one studying for it at all! It’s fucked up and I don’t love it for us.)

And there are other interesting little coincidences. You know how Court was a sketched-in sort of black dog? Jude only really realized they related to dogs upon arriving in the system with me, and the archetypal form they identify with is, again, a stylized black dog.

It’s really interesting, the ways my brain decided to be plural, because I didn’t think I was a system back then. I had a daemon, then two daemons, and they were daemons because I considered them parts of myself - no matter how autonomous they were, we were bound together in the same identity, as parts of the same person. They were reflections of me, and I loved them like I loved myself, and they loved me with the same ferocity.

With this realization, that my daemons effectively merged into my system, I did have to ask - are my headmates also parts of me, since they’re falling into the same functional compartments in my brain? We don’t think so, or at least, we don’t think it’s that simple. 

They’re completely different people from me, people who arrived here with their own lives and memories and identities. They aren’t autonomous reflections of my psyche like my daemons were. They’re my weird roommates who moved in with me, and my boyfriends, and I guess you could say we’re life partners - because hey, what’s a partner if not someone you share a life with? What’s more intimate than sharing the same body, hearing each other's thoughts and feelings? They aren't parts of me, but we live the same life together, and I think that counts as something just as significant.

[hiccuppps]

why does he always have something on his hip? to emulate the feeling of gus’s hand on his waist? i know what you are matt tholomule....

[maxssillyangstyblog]

Rahh any time talk to source mates I feel bad because there’s hardly any Tubbo or ranboo introjects that remember a teenaged Michael but I really really miss my parents and wanna talk to them but I feel bad for it

[max-jagerman-asks]

Sooo how much prep do you think I’ll need to do before hunting Ruth? Cause like she gave me six to five days but like I probably don’t need to use all that time.

[maxanite]

You either die the hero…

Or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

[trans-jon-rights]

Okay so some of you may be familiar with the fact that alchemy heavily relates to The Magnus Protocol, especially with the latest episode.

It's already admitted that Sam Khalid's name is at least inspired by Prince Khalid Ibn Yazid, a famous alchemist from the 7th century. Well I'd like to go a bit deeper, and point out more connections :

Alice Dyer -> Edward Dyer

Teddy Vaughn -> Thomas Vaughan

Colin Becher -> Johann Joachim Becher

Lena Kelley -> Edward Kelley

Celia Ripley -> George Ripley

Chester -> Robert de Chester

I've yet to find anything about Norris or Augustus but this is what I've got. But there's more ! There are connections !

Edward Dyer and Thomas Vaughan were both Rosicruscians (and friends, too), a subcategory of alchemists

Robert De Chester was the one who translated Khalid Ibn Yazid's works from Arabic to Latin

Johann Joachim Becher was German, then travelled to England and resided in Scotland

Edward Kelley worked with Robert Boyle (mentionned in MAGP 19)

I'm not sure exactly what to do with it, but that's what I've got. I'm going insane over that so expect some more over the next few days.

[cigarettewinestain]

I’m thoroughly convinced that Henry Winter would throw up/get a migraine if he saw an AI generated image.

[raptorish]

Being 'Kin Without A 'Heart

Written by Max on October 28, 2024.

I think I have an interesting disconnect between being otherkin and being otherhearted. I see people who feel as though the two terms are nearly indistinguishable, and for some reason it's not like that for me! There's a clear line between them in my brain, and I wanna journal about my personal experience with that.

I'm a velociraptor, velociraptor therian, raptorkin, raptorkind, a prehistoric bird, a wereraptor. I use those words interchangeably, since they all convey the proper information: I'm a raptor. I also strongly identify as human. I have two species, equal in value, and they fluctuate in intensity - in my daily life, I'm content to see myself as human, and my raptor side is almost a separate creature entirely, but not quite. It's a median headmate, an important part of me, and also different from me. We are the same until we are not.

And I'm not raptorhearted, even when I'm only partly identifying as a raptor, when I'm feeling more human. I don't identify with raptors, with the traits humans have given them or with their reconstructed biology - I don't feel a sense of belonging, or home, or love for their species in a way that's beyond what I feel for other animals. Raptors are, for some strange reason, not very special to me. I just happen to be one.

Even when I'm not a raptor, when I'm a human with a raptor side and raptor instincts, I don't relate to my raptor brain - that's why I separate it from me! I don't feel a sense of familiarity with it, beyond the familiarity of being it and knowing how it works from being it.

Other raptors aren't inherently family to me. I'll call them cousins, as an affectionate shorthand, because they're like me and not quite the same, but I don't feel a sense of caring for them simply because they're raptors. I feel familiar with them because they're like me - I enjoy seeing how much we're alike, what ways we might differ! But I don't deeply care about them, in the same way someone who's raptorhearted might.

Here, for contrast, let me tell you about how I experience being fictionhearted with a particular canon, and why I'm confident in calling that a hearttype.

My heartcanon, the fictional canon which I'm connected with, is a personally-created alternate universe of the video game Detroit: Become Human, which I've named Detroit, Machina. I've named it, given it a different title, because it's so fundamentally important to me and feels so different from the original source from which it was derived that calling DBH in general my heartcanon feels painfully wrong.

I don't identify as any character from Machina. I identify with the beats of the story, with the characters and their struggles, with the joys and failures and everything about creating it. I say I have a heartcanon because I could tell someone about it as a story, as a fanfic, and it would not convey the depth of how this story is embedded into my psyche. I would not be the same person if I hadn't written about it for years of my life, put pieces of myself into it. I'm not fictionkind, I'm not anyone in this story, but the story is an integral part of me anyway. I have such strong feelings about it that I don't know how to put it to words, and I don't feel comfortable trying in a public post. It's important to me. If you told me I could never talk about Machina again, I would crumble to ash.

Contrast that with being a raptor. If you were to tell me I could never have any piece of dinosaur paraphernalia ever again, I would shrug. They're cute, sure, but I don't care about raptors that intensely. I would be just as disappointed if you said I couldn't ever have any cat paraphernalia, and I'm not a cat in any alterhuman sense.

Basically - I don't care about raptors in such a strong, personally intense way that they've changed who I am. I am a raptor, and that's changed who I am, and that doesn't mean I necessarily love them. And that's perfectly okay.

[dracononite]

(asking about my new sona)

I was gonna wait until I had more art of him to share, but here he is! He's got quite a few optional design details, you can see those in the gallery of his Toyhouse.

They're a beastly wyvern who lives deep in a mountain dungeon and heckles adventurers for food and treasure. He uses he/they/dra pronouns.

He also helped model for this year's pride icons! Here's him repping the butch lesbian, lesbian and dragongender flags <3