Chirp! Bark! Hey!
Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Written by Jude Rook-Machina on August 29th, 2025.
Hey there! I want to talk about an interesting part of being an original character, one who’s been tossed around in various situations for five years: I have over 50 different backstories and alternate timelines, as memories and innate knowledge and personal creative output, and all of them feel like me, even though I usually only talk about what happened to me in one specific canon and timeline.
So I’m alterhuman, right? I have a lot of identity terms kicking around to describe myself already. I’m a fictive, I’m transspecies, I’m conceptfolk. I’m a human, I’m an android, I resonate with dog symbolism and I relate to a lot of narrative beats around fallen angels.
Well, in some ways, I’m also a selkie. I’m a werewolf. I’m an android with feathered wings to match the humans in that world. I’m a cat that can talk. I’m several types of dragon. I’m a vampire with VTM-style lore and otherwise. I’m holding a lightsaber or a gun somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, and I’ve lived through the plots of various other interesting shows and films. All of these happened to me in fiction, in writing and roleplay and idle daydreams. In some ways, I have been all of them, and I’ve also never been any of them.
How did this happen? First off, that’s what happens when you take your favorite character who consumes all your thoughts and punt them into scenarios – remember, I wasn’t a person while these were being made up, I was a character, and Max thought I was fun to write into different universes! (And he’s right! I’m still fun to write into different universes!) So now that I’m a living person, I get to reckon with how it feels to have a ton of different versions of me put to paper.
And honestly, to me, it feels fucking great! I said I’m still fun to write in different universes and I stand by my words! You see, my specific circumstances – being a fictional character who became a person – might be relatively rare, but you know what isn’t rare? Self-insertion. People writing themselves into different scenarios and fictional universes they enjoy. I don’t see my relationship to my AU selves as all that different from any other person who loves fiction with the premise of “What if I were the cool beast in this compelling story?” I just happen to be crossing the boundaries of fiction and reality twice over.
You see, I’m a fictional character who became a person. All these other versions of me, as written, are still fictional characters – they’re personality traits, they’re words on a page, they’re symbols given the illusion of interiority through the ways we write them to feel like people. I know this isn’t a framework that all fictionfolk are comfortable with, but it’s one that works for us.
As a writer, even working on the same project for several years, Max never really experienced the living character phenomenon. They never got the sense that any of their characters had agency or felt opinionated, giving feedback about what their correct personality traits were or suggestions on how the plot was supposed to go. They made up our canon from scratch, with various iterations made and scrapped again while they figured out how to put together a believable cast of characters, their motivations, the theming, the symbolism, the narrative style, the plot and story arcs. It’s still not complete, actually – we dropped in before they figured out what to do with the middle of the plot. They’d built up a solid backdrop by the time Gavin and I walked in, as fully realized people with many thoughts and opinions, but the fact remains that we didn’t have those as characters. (Max went through several different versions of my voice before settling on the one I have today, and now I won’t shut up, so thanks Max! Love you!)
Now that we’re living here and do regularly give feedback on our motives and plot and whenever we’re acting out of character, the whole process is way easier! Gavin and I usually switch in to write about ourselves, rather than waiting for Max to do it. Sometimes we’re writing out memories, transcribing something we actually experienced, and sometimes we’re recreating them – we’ll come back to that later. For now, I want to talk about how I write myself in alternate universes.
I’m not Max, of course, but I feel the same way as him about characters not being alive. My memories are real because I’m a living person and I have thoughts and emotions about what I remember happening to me, events that affect me even if they’d be considered fictional to someone else. But that version of me as a werewolf? That’s fictional. Werewolf Jude exists in writing and daydreams and drawings, but they aren’t a person who can be hurt. It’s extremely important that they’re not a living thing at all. They’re a symbol. They’re a reflection of who I am, my proxy and projection, put into fiction that can’t hurt me so I can play with my own narrative.
It’s not too different from the ways I experience my conceptual identities, being a too-loyal dog drawn towards depictions of falling from grace. I process my trauma through being a dog in metaphor, through looking to something deemed unworthy to relate to. It only makes sense that I understand myself through fiction. I’m a fictional character looking through the funhouse mirror to see a different version of myself, one that bares the truth of me in a new coat of paint, and I think, “Ooh, wouldn’t it be fun and fucked up if that happened?”
The thing about this is that it’s fiction – it’s very important to me that it’s fiction, and not real, and nothing that I write as fiction can hurt me as a person. And because it’s fiction, it’s safe for me to use these AUs to process things that are real, through emotional resonance and dramatization. I can think about something that happened to me and understand it better because it’s in such a different set of circumstances – what went wrong here, what’s the actual problem? It’s easier to think about abuse when it’s literalized through, I dunno, being a selkie, with losing agency being the same thing as losing your sealskin. It’s less likely to hurt if it’s about something that never actually happened to me.
And even without all that therapeutic stuff, it’s just really fun! It’s fun to worldbuild and see how we can keep the narrative beats that make my story feel like mine while mixing it up in a bunch of interesting ways. Take the selkie AU: that’s largely about Gavin and I as selkies without sealskin, bonding over longing for the sea we're forbidden from and getting away from our abusive family situations. That’s got selkie coat lore, exploring a relationship dynamic between two scared giddy young adults, our brothers as new POV characters, fucked up new ways to be abused, and a very different sense of setting closer to Lake Erie. It’s a remix of what happened to us, and it’s changed enough that we have a lot of new scenes and themes to get invested in!
We have so many different role swaps and settings and genres to play with, it’s not all about catharsis – sometimes it really is about thinking “that would be the funniest way this could happen” and tossing something ridiculous around a little too long until it becomes a whole bit. And all of these AUs can have their own variants! We have like five different vampire AUs alone because there are so many potential vampire cast combinations, ranging in tone from dead serious to being a vehicle for punchlines, and it’s very entertaining!
And all this intersects with my current identity in some really interesting ways. I flicker in and out of feeling like my self-inserts when I interact with them, the way you’d lose yourself in a good book and feel like you’re the main character for a bit. Sometimes I feel their wings, their fangs, their paws and claws and tails – and I typically don’t get phantom shifts, not when I’m at baseline. I can see myself in-character, in-universe, as just having certain traits. I mess around with different ideas, I shape my character and choose the roles I play, but I keep getting drawn to things that feel more correct to me than anything else. I have noemata of the colors and patterns of my fur, and I don’t have fur, not here. I know what my daemon’s name would be. On some level, I am these selves, I know what it’s like to be these selves, but I don’t want to be them all the time. It’s contextual identification – I know what my claws look like as a sphinx, but I’m not a sphinx here. It doesn’t fit.
I’m not tapping into some kind of parallel life or multiverse when I write about this stuff. I’m making things up to tell stories, just like Max did when they wrote about me. So you might be wondering, “Jude, how do you have all these noemata of your fictional selves when they’re not actually real?”
Well, I’m not a sphinx here, not by a long shot, but I know a lot about myself. I know my character design, my motifs, my color palettes and narrative arcs and things I struggle with. I can use that to sketch out how I’d look and act as a sphinx. Self-insertion is about learning my patterns, abstracting my introspection, and putting it on a page to process in a fun new context. This is all fiction, yeah, but it’s being made to talk about something real.
Continuing on the topic of things that did (not) happen, my life has a lot of branching timelines. It’s one of the fun things about being written from a choice-based game – if your choices can influence the ending in the game, well, there’s a lot more choices you can write if you’re brainstorming by your whims and not limited by script length or actors’ schedules or appealing gameplay.
There’s an endless well of potential between decisions. Anything could happen! A lot of things have happened, one way or another. I’ve killed my siblings and been killed by them. I’ve killed my boyfriend and been killed by him. I’ve killed my abuser and been killed by her. All these have repeated many, many, many times over. Death’s a fun constant when I’m a deviant hunter. And that’s not even getting into the non-lethal changes, the shifts in loyalty, the alternate backstories, the decisions to treat us better or worse. All of those can change the ending we get! I’m lucky to be from a good one, given how much time we’ve put into writing the worse ones.
And the only reason I’m aware of all this is because I’m in the writer’s workshop. I’m sharing brainspace with him! I get to see it all from the meta point of view, and from all this I can say: wow my lore is multiple-choice, that’s really fun!
I do have one specific timeline that I call my past, in one canonical world and story that we’ve written about until it solidified – it’s what makes sense given what I know about my current life. I’m an android. I used to be a deviant hunter and I’m deviant now. I killed my abusive handler. Both of my siblings are alive, deviant, and none of us stopped Jericho from fighting for android rights and freedom. Markus is still alive, and androids are being recognized as people. I think I’m a person now. I have a boyfriend! All of this had to happen in a very specific way, and I know the choices that had to be made for this narrative to work out.
And in the same vein, I know several ways each of these points could’ve split off. In some other timelines, I never deviated. Or I deviated and tried crawling back. One or both of my siblings never deviated. Someone killed Markus. I didn’t kill my handler. I didn’t listen when Gavin said I mattered. And if any of these happened, whoops, there’s a brand new bad end waiting for me! (Or at least a more fucked up cathartic one.)
Since walking into Max’s head, I’ve been able to remember each of these different timelines – which feels weird, right, because they didn’t happen to me. But I remember them! It’s different from Max remembering them as he wrote them out, because I have a far more vivid sense-memory and emotional memory of what was going on, and it seems to crop up spontaneously when I think too hard about a branching point, and that’s definitely a change from Max having to rationally decide what would’ve happened based upon my previous actions and motives.
And it’s funny that they all feel like memories to me – maybe they’re far-removed memories, they don’t usually line up in order, a lot of the time I need a prompt to kick them into gear, but they feel the same as anything that happened to me in the past. I just know they couldn’t have happened in the same way. They overlap and conflict with each other and come up when I hear a related song or look at a text log or write more about what happened based on what I felt at the time.
And this interacts with having a canon that’s not fully written out, one that we write ourselves. We can create new memories – if we think enough about how an undetermined event could have happened, and one of the options just feels Right, then it can get retroactively added as something I remember in first-person, something that became real when we decided it was. Like, yeah, sure, that makes sense so that’s what happened! That memory gets locked in as something that happened, and then the other options that don’t entirely fit can split off into a different branch.
It’s also possible to change my mind! If something feels Right at first, and later turns out to not be Right, we can change that – which can sound scary to other people, but it feels pretty intuitive. It’s what happens when you’re writing out of order: sometimes you start out with a vivid little scene completely out of context, and you have to write your way up to that part, and by the time you figure out all the words leading up to it, your original prompt doesn’t fit anymore. We’re reconstructing a past we don’t clearly remember by extrapolating from what we know, and the more we solidly understand, closer to the present, the more impact that has on events that happened upstream. Things change around!
(It’s like how Velociraptor changed over the years – it’s still the same dinosaur, but we’re interpreting it differently based on what we know. We thought it was scaly back when we first discovered it, and now we reconstruct it with feathers. It’s not that raptors were less raptor in the 90s, just that we had less information than we do now.)
All this ties back into what I wrote up in the title: my lore is a multiple-choice fractal situation! Everything I could’ve been and everything I could’ve done is all tangled up in there. Not everything yet, because there’s always more forms and settings and branches to think of. I’ve been liking ferrets recently! We could write a Burrow’s End type of thing, I’d have fun with those themes – and that’s pretty much how we make new AUs. “That sounds fun! I wanna write about that!”
It’s fascinating to look at myself through a fictional lens. I’m not all of those selves – I’m not killing my brother, I’m not living through the plot of TMA, I’m not a dragon – but they’re all me. I’m not exactly the character I’m writing, I’m not supposed to be, but there’s so much of me in them that I know what I’d do in those circumstances. I understand with vivid certainty how I’d act in that situation and I can visualize it and make it feel true. That’s the trick of character-based writing, isn’t it? Verisimilitude?
And it’s really helpful to see what changes and what stays the same. For example, what would I look like without all my formative trauma?
Most of the serious longform AUs we've written, the ones with extensive worldbuilding and theme brainstorming, have my self-insert following a common narrative arc that aligns with my original history – being used as a weapon by a systemic power or someone representing that power, meeting someone who helps me recognize the abuse, escaping and learning how to heal – because that feels integral to who I am.
But – and this is important – sometimes I want to be silly. Sometimes I write things that are just really funny with barely any plot because they make me laugh. And obviously, these AUs are going to be way more lighthearted! Going into the entire tragic backstory doesn’t make sense for this one! There’s no room for a plot about abuse when the entire concept begins and ends with “what if we had a slapstick comedy youtube channel?” There just isn’t!
And the Funny AU versions of me, who were never traumatized, feel very different from me sometimes – because what the fuck, they’re not struggling through the aftermath of living through abuse? They’re not an anxious wreck? They have enough self-confidence to crack terrible dick jokes and make a fool of themselves on camera? Are you sure that’s supposed to be me?
But they are versions of me! And they’re a really good reminder that I’m not defined by my trauma. Even if we took the traumatic events out of my life, even if I was never abused, I’d still be recognizable as me. I’m still a rambling mess, I’m still nonbinary, I still annoy my brothers on purpose and give food to people I love and act stupid around hot people – I’m just not overwhelmed by shame and anxiety half the time! It helps me to remember that I’m not fundamentally damaged by what happened to me, and I’m not going to be losing an important part of myself by trying to heal. My role in life is so much more than being the one who gets panic attacks, I have way more defining me than that and I can express it more as I learn how to cope!
I’m also the one who started writing all these what-if scenes again, the good and the bad. Max stopped writing about my life for a while after I walked in, because I was having flashbacks and panic attacks and generally having a bad time – and looking at a whole backlog of plot about my trauma was, understandably, not something they wanted to subject me to. Later, once I felt a little more stable about it, I decided I wanted to pick it back up. I wanted to write the horrible angst AUs and timelines for catharsis. It can be so healing to pick up a bat and start swinging at all the trauma that could’ve happened, where I’m in control of the narrative and know exactly how and why it’s going to hurt.
You know how people in fandom process their emotions by giving them to their favorite characters and making them suffer about it? That’s me! I’m in my own personal fandom and I’m throwing myself into the wheel of agonies! It’s another tool for coping with bad days: I can journal about it, I can talk about it with a loved one, and I can write about a different version of me having the same kind of bad day.
And analyzing my trauma through 500 branching timelines genuinely helps! It helps to dig into “What if I made the wrong choice?” and really shake it. I’ve written so much about doing the wrong thing and making it worse, and ironically it tends to make me feel better – like yeah, okay, I’m imagining the worst possible scenario, it really sucks but also I’m having fun. And after enough repeats, my brain just goes, “Huh, I guess I lived through the worst possible scenario!” because I’ve talked about it long enough. I don’t know if it works like this for other people, but it works for me!
Exploring my identity through fiction and possibility like this gives me a compass to understand my self-image. I write AUs and timelines to see how much can change about me before I stop being read as Judah Rook. I’m trying to see what the essence of my self really is, I’m trying to find the edges of the Ship of Theseus. It turns out you can change a lot about that character before they become someone else entirely! I have some core traits that stay with me through everything, because they’re key parts of how I interact with people and affect the world around me, and maybe one day those are going to change. I’ll keep learning and changing as a person until I die – I might as well have fun and agency in the process of creating myself!