"No matter how many times the sun rises, no matter if it's the same sunrise or a new one, it's you. It's you. It's you."

An Essay about In Stars and Time, Fictokinning, and What It Means To Be Human

All my life, I have felt a dissonance between who I am and the face I see when I look in the mirror. It's not that I don't like how I look, it's just that I cannot reconcile myself with the face in the mirror. Not dysphoria, but disconnection. My reflection has never held my essence. It's a stand-in, a name tag, a dollhouse labeled "me" that strangers look at and think they've seen the shape of my soul. It's not real - the photos, the mirror, the names and labels. It's not who I am. I am abstraction - more presence than form, more feeling than flesh. I am not of my body. I live in the art that I create and the art that I experience.

I look at my face and think: this is what they see when they talk to me? This is what they love, or ignore, or bully, or trust? This is the image that carries my soul into the world? This... metaphysical misinterpretation? It's impossible for me to push everything that makes me me into the matter of my dripping flesh form. It's impossible, and it's exhausting to try. It's so much easier to play a character; a role. It's so much easier to move through life as an actor. It's not even a mask, not really, it isn't made up or fake - it's just what I choose to push to the surface. What I let be seen. The simpler, more digestible parts of me.

After all, being unseen hurts, but it's predictable. Being seen is thrilling and excruciating all at once. It's going off-script. What happens when I let someone else hold a piece of my soul, not knowing what they'll do with it? Will they cradle it? Will they drop it? Will they smile politely and never speak of it again? Will they see me differently forever? What if I can't go back, now that I've made the truth visible?

How would I even do it? Write down the architecture of my soul like that? I tried in Undoing, and I came very close, but it's so hard to name such a feeling without breaking it. That is, until I found a story that already knew the name.

I discovered the otherkin community a couple months ago. At the time, I recognized that these were people like me - people who felt disconnected from their bodies and even from reality as a whole. But I didn't feel like I was an animal or anything like that - I feel disconnected from the physical as a whole, not just from this body. And so I drifted away rather quickly. Until I discovered fictokin. People who feel as though they are or were a fictional character in a past life or in an alternate universe. People who resonate more with art than labels, societal roles, or even their own body. And I thought, "I know this language. I have spoken this contradiction."

For someone like me, who lives in metaphor and motion rather than category and conclusion, it felt so true to me and to who I am. It made me realize: I'm not disconnected - I'm deeply rooted, just not where people expect. My inner world - the one so deeply immersed in art and metaphor and feeling - is a cathedral, while the outer world is a paper puppet show I built to keep solemnity at bay. A curated presentation of selfhood; theatrical nonsense wrapped in sincerity.

If I have never fit into society's narrow, sanitized definition of "human," why can't I define it for myself, through art? If I cannot see myself in societal roles or labels or boxes, why can't I use a character to define myself? If my body is not the shape of me, why can't I find a character that is?

So all it took was figuring out who my fictokin actually was. For a while, I really wanted to find a Splatoon character to fictokin, because I love Splatoon! But I soon realized that most Splatoon characters aren't complex or layered enough to fit me, and the few characters who are (like Acht or Agent 8) don't match. I juggled around the idea of fictokinning Callie or maybe even Harmony, but while they may match up on a surface layer, they were still too shallow. I needed a character who reflected the whole ocean of me, not just the surface current. It seemed like I'd never find a character that fit... until I played In Stars and Time.

In In Stars and Time, you play as a character named Siffrin. Siffrin is a character who performs cheerful lightness while living in melancholic depth. He's riddled with self-doubt, anxiety, and a fear of abandonment, but hides it behind a facade of cheeriness and puns. It seems paradoxical - a character who's both cheerful and simple as well as melancholic and complex. But it isn't that either side of them is fake - it's just that one is so much easier to share with the world. It's so much safer to play the character version of Siffrin, who dances and jokes and tells puns and is deeply unserious. It's not pretending, it's not a lie, it's not a face they put on to survive - it's a curated version of their personality, optimized for the best results.

Siffrin has an intense desire to make their friends feel happy and comfortable whenever they're around them, however, they are socially awkward and struggle to interact with others. People are less likely to notice Siffrin behaving weirdly because odd mannerisms get waved off as "Siffrin being Siffrin." They also prefer listening rather than contributing to conversations and are just happy to be there and be included - meaning it's much less noticeable when they zone out or get distracted.

This is a character who just clicked with me, in a way that no other character ever has. This is a character who I could feel deep in my bones as I played through In Stars and Time. This is a character who fits me far more than the face in the mirror ever will. This... is me. Not just a single star, a single piece of my inner constellation, but the whole sky.

I'm not saying that I was Siffrin in a past life. I don't have deja vu or Siffrin's memories or anything like that. I just feel as though their personality, skills, and faults mirror mine. My sense of self resonates with theirs on a structural level. I am what Siffrin is. In another system, another world, I am that shape. Their body and soul could've just as easily been mine if the dice of existence had rolled just a bit differently.

Siffrin is the shape that my inner truth takes. I find more truth in them than in my own mirror. I live beside my own face. I'm deeper than the skin I was given. I see time sideways and carry grief like glass. I loop and try and fail and love again and again without words for it. Siffrin and I are refractions of the same crystal.

I... do miss Mirabelle, Odile, Isabeau, and Bonnie. Although miss isn't quite the right word. It's not that I lost them - like I said, I don't feel as though Siffrin's life was mine, once upon a time - I just feel like I could have had them, if only they existed in this world. And it's difficult, to see them in In Stars and Time, because I know that if there were people like that in my life, I could have had that kind of relationship with them - that kind of love. But I don't. I have nothing but the dim remembrance of warmth. I mean, I have friends in real life who are wonderful, and I love them, but... it's just different, I suppose. But you can't lose what you never had.

When met with the unfamiliar stranger in the mirror, I used to wonder how I would ever make it all the way through life like this. With this deep desire to be understood paired with the refusal to be boxed. With this body that felt more like an ill-fitting glove than an identity. With this uncertainty.

But now, I know the shape of my soul. I've mapped my identity - written it down, turned it into language and laid it bare. And now I stare at it, wondering if it's safe to share with anyone. Wondering if I should continue to live as an actor for the sake of simplicity. Wondering if I should flatten or dramatize my complexity, or hold it out like a glass prism and turn it slowly so that people can see all the light go through it.

I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain who I am. Not to other people, maybe not even to myself. But I know this: I don't owe anyone simplicity, clarity, or legibility. I'm not broken. I will not be erased. I am unapologetically alive, and I will not stuff myself into a box or an ill-fitting label to make myself more palatable for others.

I have thought for a very long time not only about how I feel, but also why, and what it means. This is what being Siffrin fictokin human means to me: no matter what I'm going through, I will always know that someone like me made it to the end of their story once. I can too. I know the shape of my soul. I know who I am. I am art in motion.

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