quoi-: category error, Hell If I Know And I Don’t Care, you’re asking the question wrong, you’re making the wrong assumptions about how we should be defining this/you’re wrong in trying to define this (at least for me), period (definition courtesy of Tumblr user epochryphal.)
For most of our time in the alterhuman community, the voluntary / involuntary dichotomy has made some amount of sense to us. We were fictionkin, our fictomere was Arcade Gannon. We were this due to some involuntary metaphysical situation. Being Arcade was not something we decided to start and it was probably not something we would have chosen if we had been given the option. When we fictionflickered, it was an involuntary reaction to developing a hyperfixation on media we had interacted with recently. Choosing to keep the flicker around a little longer was possible, but we didn’t boot up TF2 and decide “I am going to become the Engineer”.
We were copinglinkers, at least some of us were. They did wake up and decide “I am going to become a Pokemon”. If they wanted to stop being what they are, they could. It might take a bit to undo the mental reinforcement that allows them to take these shapes without focusing 100% of their mental energy on it. But they could do it.
Being Arcade never requires active thought. We don’t have to decide to be this on a day-to-day basis. Trying to decide to be or not be Arcade doesn’t do anything. This is not an entity that allows for that decision tree. Being a Pokemon did require active thought, and retaking those shapes usually requires a bit of a mental kick. There’s a button to press and a decision to make there.
Being a Desert Ranger doesn’t really work like that. We make everything complicated.
Was this voluntary? Well, no. We certainly can’t turn it off when we want to. If we could do that we would be doing that. This comes with a dump truck worth of exotrauma, unsavory instincts, and a general demeanor that doesn’t make it easy to hide who we are from the world. Turning this off would be nice sometimes, especially when we’re working. We didn’t exactly choose to be this. Tycho coming here was a choice made in headspace, the conscious mind didn’t have anything to do with it. Even if that counts as choosing, we didn’t choose for this identity to rub off on everyone around him. There’s people here who identify as women, nonhuman, heterosexual, and Canadian. The collective isn’t any of those things but it is randomly this. We didn’t even notice becoming this until it was already what we were.
Was this involuntary? Well, no. Nicole chose to invite Tycho here. She threw out a shiny golden rope and tugged in another person, along with all their baggage. There was a decision point we had where we remembered two alternate timelines - one where Tycho walked into his favorite spot into the California mountains and one where he walked the road home. He faced East and walked the hundreds-mile road home, into the arms of his brethren. He chose us over another self-conception, and he did so when fronting. This was a choice.
Let’s go a little deeper, shall we?
We don’t have much canon information to go off here. Our presence in the text of Fallout is Tycho’s appearance, one very annoying statue, a few throwaway lines of dialogue, and some loading screens. None of the games take the player anywhere near Warm Springs. To form a coherent self-conception out of this, we had to improvise. We got an episodic memory of someone being chewed out for losing a grenade launcher in Utah. Well, how did he get the grenade launcher? Why was he in Utah? Our mind was silent on that issue, so we got to thinking.
More than half of the information we have on what it is to be a Desert Ranger was actively made up. Some of it was revealed to us at random. We get beautiful visions like everyone else seems to. Some of it came to us after throwing ideas out and having one feel deliciously true. Those are prompted, but they’re still guesses. They existed independent of our choices. Some of it came to us when we thought about how interesting it’d be if something went a certain way. Some of it was decided out of frustration at a huge gaping hole in our knowledge, the choice to cut out a new piece to finish a missing puzzle. We made that shit up.
Voluntary, right? I made it up. It might be that simple if I was the only one in my body, but I’m not. I got here after some of the others, and before those who came later. The ones who come later experience the fantasies of their predecessors as reality. They’re part of the omnibus of Desert Ranger Lore, why wouldn’t they be perceived as real? Even after everyone got here, individuals kept looking at gaps and filling them in with their own writing. I’ll go to sleep believing one thing to be true and wake up to the opposite without having any chance at a veto. A chart of who made what decisions would form an ever-branching tree, each one of us swerving the thread of reality in completely different branching directions.
Those memories are voluntary… for a number of people that is less than the sum total of all Desert Rangers in this body, most commonly one, in a pattern that is sometimes correlated with arrival order or level of introspectiveness but not always. What do you call that?
Let’s zoom out a bit.
Kin-as-a-verb is a controversial little piece of terminology in alterhuman communities. It’s disliked by many, including us, because it implies alterhumanity is an action one takes. Being alterhuman isn’t something one does, it’s something one is. By and large, we agree with this! Saying fictionkin can be a verb creates confusion in the definition that helps prop up the assumptions kin for fun types make. It’s harmful and we think it’s best to try to stop doing it. We’ve fully stopped doing it.
Except… we verb fictionkinity all the time.
We don’t do so when we use it in a sentence, mind you. We’re a terminology stickler. We verb fictionkinity in our day-to-day life. The experience of being a Desert Ranger is just as much the experience of ranging as it is anything else. When we get in our car or hit the trail, when we go buy local produce at a roadside stand, when we give a friend directions back to their house, when we leave cakes out for the dead, we are actively performing the act of ranging. Every day, we make the decision to range, to verb our identity.
This doesn’t happen if we don’t think about it. It’s a very different experience than passively existing as a Desert Ranger, or any other identities we have. Passive existence is self-contained. Exomemories, strange instincts, elaborate daydreams, an eccentric worldview. If you dropped us in a white box isolated from the rest of the world, these things would still be there. Interaction with other people and the world around us influences these things, so the white box would definitely do something weird to them, but it wouldn’t erase them from existence.
The white box would absolutely erase the parts of our identity that are verbed. About half of this experience can only exist in the context of the world around us. All the choices we make on a day-to-day basis mix up into that half of this experience, and it’s very hard to argue we didn’t choose to make… our choices.
Seems voluntary, at least to us, but how is that different from a therian with a fully-involuntary identity doing quadrobics and wearing a tail to school? How is that different from fictionkin who connect to their identities by hanging out in roleplay servers? How is that different from any other active way others express alterhumanity? I don’t know. Maybe this would count as involuntary.
We are a Desert Ranger, which is a choice someone made subconsciously for someone else, draped out to cover the whole of our self-identity. What it means to be a Desert Ranger is pulled directly from a separate collection of universes where it is the product of thousands of people we have never been and can never hope to know. What it means to be a Desert Ranger was made up one day by a student in urban Florida. Being a Desert Ranger is an internal self-identity. Being a Desert Ranger is an external action.
They don’t make a word for it. Otherlink and copinglink are obviously incorrect, and when we’ve tried to speak about this identity in the context of it being ‘linked, we’ve gotten cold responses. Letting our identity be dictated by how other people with a similar identity-mechanism view us would suck, so we aren’t doing that, but it doesn’t feel very useful to slot ourselves into a community that doesn’t want to engage. Fictionkin fits a lot better, as we didn’t go through the act of ‘linking to form this identity, but it’s still a bit constrictive. Even in spaces where fictionkinity is understood to encompass some voluntary identities, the narrative associated with it doesn’t work for us. This wasn’t a consciously chosen identity that eventually fused with our self to the point where we can’t extract it again. It’s not that simple, there is ambiguity and contradiction on every level of this experience. This is quoiluntary.
Should they make a more specific word for it? I don’t really want them to. The nature of our experience with the voluntary / involuntary dichotomy is one of category error. We do not exist in a comfortable in-between space. Some of the mechanics of our identity are so specific to us that they cannot be crafted into broad, overarching narratives that can be shared with others. Whenever one lists a set of qualities that define a certain relationship to the concept of voluntariness, some little thorn of our identity will come poking out. We seem to inherently abhor categorization and definition. Even the definition of quoiluntary has been too restrictive at times - we’ve been told we are much too involuntary to be able to use the term that refers to having a nonsensical and uncategorizable relationship with the voluntary / involuntary dichotomy. I’m not sure how that would even work, but there you go.
Quoiluntary is by far the best word we have for whatever it is we have going on, so we’re going to keep using it in situations where an 1800-word personal essay on what the dichotomy means to us is inappropriate. It’s a beautifully simple word for concepts that cannot be simple, a category for those who cannot be categorized. Whenever categories are mandatory, we’ll be using the one that indicates that they are, inherently, an error.