Tossing out food for thought: What's a soulbond?

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Looking at the two threads started earlier today, it's occurred to me that there may be a problem with people using different definitions of the same word. Understand that I'm not trying to fan the flames or incite argument here; I'm bringing this up because it's a personal curiosity of mine, and because I think that misunderstanding is often the result of people making assumptions about others' experiences and assuming that others define certain words/concepts in the same way as them. (I'll answer this myself, eventually-- I just want to see first what others have to say about it.)

1) What do you consider a soulbond to be? Do you base this definition on your personal experiences, on what you've heard from others, or a combination thereof?

2) Do you believe the word 'soulbond' is useful and/or accurate, or that it's necessary to make a distinction between soulbonds and anyone else in the system? Do you think it's important or helpful to assign different terms to people who were created or arrived via different ways, or do you think it's unneccessarily divisive and creates the appearance of difference when little difference exists?

Comments

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

First, some of our thoughts on this and related subjects.

It's possible to have a character with a certain degree of free will living "in one's head" (or can seem to you to be sitting in the chair opposite your own, or however you experience their presence), but with less free will than an actual person. A character can be destroyed if its author forces it to behave in ways which go against its nature; it just doesn't seem real anymore to the reader of the book, they say "I can't suspend my disbelief". The same thing can happen with plots. However, when the author allows the story to stay true to the characters' natures, it may come to "be real" and/or "fit" in ways that surprise the author him/herself.

Usually when people "create" a character, they "incarnate" it into a book. This way more people than just the author can perceive the creation and respond to it. (Many people have experienced that the character, or the story, or whatever the creative idea is, seems itself to strive towards incarnation; like some people (I forget who) say a woman gives birth to her baby, but the baby also gives birth to the mother, into motherhood.) This is even more true when the character is written into a play; we can actually see the character through the actor, and there is no better test for the "realness" of a character or a story than acting it out.

We think having someone growing and developing in your mind (or perhaps "next to" it) is just another form this incarnation can take. In the case where it's a character you didn't create yourself, it's also a response to something incarnated by someone else (writing fanfiction is another example of something that is both incarnation and response to incarnation, while saying "wow! that story really changed my life!" is only a response to incarnation).

(We get this stuff from Dorothy Sayers' book The Mind of the Maker (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060670770/), which is online here (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/dlsayers/mindofmaker/mind.c.htm).)

Now to the questions.

1) I think the people in here we call soulbonds are called that way because they a) have fictional origins or are based on a character from fiction (our own, written or unwritten, or someone else's), and b) don't have the degree of autonomy usually associated with people who front. I don't know if we would stop calling them soulbonds if they gained that autonomy; maybe we'd say they started out as a soulbond (and you'd have to, sometimes, if someone asked you how come this or that person was in your system). If we had a connection with any people from, or based on, real-life history, perhaps we'd call them soulbonds too; if we felt it was a connection to the real person and not a "copy" of them perhaps we'd say we were kything (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0809130114/) with them. Which I think indicates, together with the non-fronting thing, that we do see a difference somewhere, but right now I can't see between what and what exactly, I'm just sort of relaying this.

2) It's useful if it's supposed to indicate the difference between multiplicity and non-multiplicity I think; but that's not the only thing it's used for. Some systems have actual people they call soulbonds, and then it's maybe useful to indicate a difference between fictional origin and not, but some people will not find that difference important at all if they're just system members like anyone else in there. Also one person may experience something as "imaginative" that another would experience as "real", partly based on their belief system (if you don't believe in alternate worlds or dimensions, you're not going to believe anyone came from them, although you might still use that vocabulary in a metaphorical way). So it's kind of dizzying already the way it's used now. I'm not getting a lot of response here about what kinds of distinctions are useful. Probably some are useful in some contexts, others in other contexts. It's very annoying that "soulbond" is used for several kinds of distinctions.