Plural Possessed Nouns

thedarkericdraven replied to your post: thedarkericdraven replied to your post: [TW:…

I mean, I don’t know when one of you is saying something and then another starts. I do see you as multiple people, but think of “Tegid” as a single personality created by the different inhabitants of your system.

Ah, we understand what you mean. [Offline legal name] is the single personality created by all of us, but Tegid System is actually each of us saying what we mean to say. If you had known us in person before meeting us online, and before knowing we’re plural, then you’d be able to recognize the difference between them very easily.

The reason we don’t sign off on writings is that generally, if one or two of us say something controversial that gets really negative reception by the community, we don’t like hanging those headmates out to dry. It’s pretty common for the community to judge an entire system for the actions of just one or two of its members, and it’s a really hypocritical double standard. Since the same judgmentality occurred whether or not headmates signed off, in those cases we’ve seen of witch hunts against entire systems, we decided we’d just as soon leave it up to the community to ask us, if they want to know which of us said something and which didn’t sign off on it. If they ask us, “who said that?”, then it shows they’re acknowledging our individual agency as members of the system and recognizing that it is not only possible but probable that not all of us unanimously agree to everything said online by somebody in our system. If they don’t ask and just judge us as a unit, then it’s all the better that we didn’t leave the writers’ names out there for them to be scapegoats to hypocritical judgment and hatred. 

If you want to see things which are DEFINITELY written by entirely separate sub-groups at the front, we recommend comparing anything written by us between 10 PM and 4 AM CST to anything written by us between 9 AM and 3 PM CST. Those times cover the different fronting shifts, and they have virtually no overlap in which headmates are awake to front at those times. You’ll find that the attitudes and opinions at each time frame are markedly different, sometimes even starkly in opposition to each other, as our more aggressive and least-social members front in the wee hours of the night, while our more amicable and peaceable members front from midmorning to midafternoon. On the other hand, if you communicate with us in person, with us speaking as our offline [legal name] persona, you’ll find our behaviour incredibly consistent and self-regulated, with few strong, vocal opinions being stated at all.

thedarkericdraven replied to your post: [TW: discussion of plurality denial] A rant: When somebody comes out as a plural system…

Damn it, you made me realize I only think of you as one person. I blame never knowing when a different member is fronting.

Okay, but why should that matter, really? 

Suppose we were a room full of separate-bodied people who all just log into the same forum or tumblr account and post without signing off, but you know there are over a dozen people in the room. Do you think you would regard them as a single person, even after they’ve made it explicitly clear that they aren’t? If you were the guest speaker in a classroom full of children, would you address them as though there was only one child in the classroom? If you are making a presentation to the board of trustees in a city, do you address them as “Mister Committee” or “Missus Council” ?

Odds are good that you wouldn’t know the name of every single child in the class, every person in the room, every trustee on the board, and you wouldn’t expect them necessarily to give their names when speaking. 

The way we see it, blaming it on us not signing off just doesn’t really cut it as an excuse. Please don’t take this as us being angry at you, because we aren’t. 

Just know that, the way we see it, the only real functional difference between us and those scenarios is that our committee happens to all live in the same body, and the accepted consensus is one body = one person, and that ingrained mental block is why you see us as singular instead of plural, not our lack of signing off.

After all, we do use ‘we’ for literally everything we post as a system here and on OKS. It’s not because we see ourselves as royalty.

…it’s imperative to understand, this isn’t somebody coming out.

This is several somebodies coming out. 

The instant they say, “I am… we are a plural system,” it’s time for anybody claiming to be their friend or ally to adjust their perception accordingly.

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(Source: susitar)

roxsrambles replied to your post: It looks like I’m staying here for good.

Hello, I don’t believe we’ve met before. And yikes.. that’s a pretty steep fall. I was curious about some stuff from your universe.. what’s your homeworld like exactly? —Daniel

Namek, where I originally come from, has a green sky (denser atmosphere than on Earth, with more large molecules present in the air) and green grassy terrain and occasional large swathes of blue where hydrangeas and other decorative plants are grown. There aren’t any mountain ranges, but there are a few steep-sided canyons which lead freshwater rivers between the larger seas. There are no deserts, and there aren’t any oceans on the scale of Earth’s oceans. Tree-type plants don’t get very tall, more like dense shrubs. The planet is in the co-orbit of a four-star system, so we have a primary sun and three lesser suns. My species was still pretty low in number the last time I checked, and my extended genetic family are basically the only ones known to survive the last major natural disaster events. My species are photosynthesizers, not consumers (although we can eat food for pleasure, and our digestive system does accommodate for this) of anything but water. We’re an asexual oviparous species with only one biological sex. I’ve been told that my facial structure and vocal tone are fairly typical of the masculine human sex, and I answer to masculine pronouns normally, anyway. There are fewer than two hundred of us Nameks left. Other than Nameks, there are saurian reptilian animals, fish, and amphibians, but their populations are down really badly since the disasters, too.

Namek is quite a bit smaller than Earth. I’d say it’s closer to the size of Mars, or even a little smaller, probably. Our orbital year is less than half of Earth’s year, and our gravity is a lot weaker than Earth’s gravity. 

We have our own language and our own wishing dragon, with a dragon ball based system for obtaining three wishes a year. 

-Dende