in short, plurality is when multiple people share one body, or equivalently when one body houses multiple people. - Lilly
bodies are expensive these days, can't have one to yourself sometimes! - Luna
it's a confusing topic, especially with the incredible variety between plurals. the explanations here will be focused more on systems like ours - just keep in mind that others will have vastly different experiences and preferences, and there's no better way to learn about them than to ask.
a system is a collection of individuals in one body. most people could be considered a system with a single member; whereas I'm only one of the members of the Polyfauna system, and all of us share the same body.
each individual in a system is called a headmate. there's a lot of terms that have similar meanings, like alter, facet, part... but all of those come with their own implications, and different people may or may not want to use them. we just use headmate, and it's the most general too.
each headmate has their own name, preferences and dislikes, thoughts and memories, and point of view. the exact degree of separation between headmates varies, but by default, you should treat us like separate people - we certainly are.
not all members of a system might want to present themselves to the outside world, or might only be present some of the time. often, certain headmates will take on the responsibility of presenting their system.
we're just going to babble on about ourselves for this bit - so it's a little difficult to describe, since i've never not been plural actually. but! i can try anyways
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very insightful, Luna.
ok well really, it's like being able to talk to these people whenever i want (or whenever they're around) telepathically, making friends with them & taking care of them. and, that we can hand eachother control of our body, and that means getting to take a break from the world sometimes
which i sorely need, sometimes. we were not made to have one person in front all the time, even if we were ok with that idea to begin with. i care a lot about my headmates, and i want to see them happy and safe, i want to see them make friends and live their lives! even when that means i can't have all the time in the world
for me... it's kind-of like I'm haunted by a collection of particularly friendly ghosts. nobody else can see them, but their presence is very clear to me; we can speak to eachother, they can control my body as they please, and I just have to trust that they'll take care of it. or at least, that's how I used to picture it; it's been a long road to thinking of myself as part of something, and an even longer road to picturing it as something positive, but here I am now.
now, we're like a family working together to live life, taking turns in front and taking care of eachother. we still disagree on things, but we can work through serious topics together; and no, "how dare you like coffee" does not count as serious, Luna.
i think it's important that we get on solid ground on a big thing like that tbh
i don't know how you can stand the stuff, and you call my opinions bad?
at least that's easy enough to ignore. it's harder when it comes to our conflicting goals for our body, or voice, or hair, or any number of other things that aren't exactly easy to hotswap
i'd say that conflict is a pretty fundamental part of our experience - that a big chunk of "being multiple" means being meaningfully different in ways that we can't just ignore. and instead, we gotta split up our one lifetime and manage our one body in a way that can appease us all, and that does mean compromises somewhere
mhm. we're still not sure what those will look like, either... there aren't exactly many role models for us to look up to, or any good representation (that we know of) to relate to... but we'll figure it out in the end.
now, that was an awful lot from us two, does anyone else want to give their thoughts?
hey, I think existing is pretty cool! I even get to have a fluffy tail and everything~ - Hailey
right now everything happens very quickly and im just happy to peek in when its quiet but someday ill catch it and make something for myself - Chloe
alright! let's move on now:
some fairly ordinary questions suddenly become difficult to answer; nobody expects to get more than word, let alone a list of names and explanation out of "what's your name?". even when we're past the initial introductions, getting across the real depth of plurality is hard; there is so much that "multiple people" doesn't get across in itself, things that even we only discover over time.
for the basics, treat us like different people:
don't treat anyone as more or less important for fronting less or more frequently. in fact, don't treat any of us as being more or less important, more or less "real", than any others.
you can refer to us as a group with our system name, Polyfauna, and they/them. use it like a name: "I had a nice discussion with Polyfauna" works fine.
above all else, please feel free to ask us questions.
why are you gay?
(well, I mean, some of us are just here to enjoy ourselves!)
but seriously, that tends to be a pretty touchy subject. unless someone's made it clear they're open to talk about that, save it for the 1am DMs about awkward life lessons and personal revelations please
now for all the important details and terms, which I know you're itching to memorize for the upcoming test.
while many of us inhabit one body, not all of us control it simultaneously. the people in control are in front or fronting; you may also see "the front" used like a place. conversely, everyone else who's conscious but not in control is in the back, as if they're shouting from the back seats.
other systems may cofront, where multiple members are simultaneously in control. for us, we can only have one person in front at once (for any meaningful period of time). we do tend to have someone in the back though, with me and Luna frequently co-conscious.
and for everyone who's not currently present, we refer to them as simply being asleep. if someone is out of it for a very long period - say, months or years - they might also be described as dormant.
swapping out who's in front is aptly referred to as switching. we can switch pretty much whenever we want, if we can sit down and have a moment to ourselves. it takes a bit after that to sorta "recalibrate" everything back to my/whoever's settings, i treat it kind of like stretching after waking up. we can switch faster than that, though a panic-switch like that tends to leave us minorly brain-fried
we try to allocate eachother time in front. this isn't any formal affair, no scheduling apps involved; we simply decide "OK, the next few days are primarily yours", or "OK, you can have this trip uninterrupted". we're still experimenting, but I think a few days is a good chunk of time.
when it comes to text (or any kind of asynchronous communication), you might be talking to multiple of us at once, interleaved much faster than we can switch. here, the person in front is just passing on messages from someone in the back, or possibly passing them control of just e.g. our hands to let them write something, without properly giving up control. that's proxying! like the fronter is just acting like a proxy between you and the person in the back. you can try talking to them like that irl too but don't expect any good results from us
like many systems, our memories are separate. when one person is in front, they will typically be the only one to remember those experiences; anyone active in the back may too. given the need, we can choose to share memories with eachother, though we usually prefer to respect eachother's privacy and keep things separate.
little things sometimes leak through, on the order of words or phrases, usually when one person thinks about a past experience with somebody else around. we can intentionally hide a memory, too, but we don't know just how reliable that is yet.
(i'll fill this in later)