For anyone who’s spent a fair amount of time in Internet-based communities, it’s nigh impossible to not come across passionate, creative, and sometimes weirdly wild young people who openly and proudly make the following statements:
“I identify as ____________”
“My persona is _______________”
“ _______________ is a ___________ and she’s my alter ego”
Based on the statements and the way they are delivered, it can be easy to negatively categorize, belittle, and verbally shred these people up. It should also be noted that often media corporations tend to do the talking on behalf of these people – and even when they are included, the magic of contextual editing can forcefully take control of your mind’s steering wheel – without you even realizing it.
What it really comes down to is the way certain words are used. Let’s return to the gold standard that is the English dictionary:
👉 persona: a character assumed by an author in a written work, or the personality that a person projects in public
👉 identity: distinguishing character or personality of an individual, or the relation established by psychological identification. Also “sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing”.
A major part of being an active member of a fandom is creating your own original characters (called OCs for short, or personas), and sometimes dressing up as them. So often when people in a fandom say “I identify as character name” or any of the aforementioned statements, it’s kind of a misnomer. What it really means is the temporary and conscious mental shift into the role of the OC – sometimes referred to as “headspace”. It’s pure acting and is not meant to be taken seriously. Admittedly, some people take things to the extreme, and it can be hard to determine if they have actually become mentally delusional or are just playing you up. This is a world of attention-grabbing, after all (not to say everyone makes that their sole goal).
In essence, an OC or persona is just a character whom its maker assumes the role of in acting via various forms – cosplay, stories, or art. Very often these OCs are of a non-human form (in the physical sense). A big factor is how non-human characters are depicted in entertainment, which then influences young fans of said entertainment to make their own characters with personality traits they intimately gravitate towards. This can only emphasize the misconception that these people identify as non-human.
Escapism is also a factor. Life is unfair, stressful, problematic, and chaotic. Slipping into the mental and physical space of these OCs provides a blissful escape from existing (and often past) pain and even trauma – a coping mechanism, if you will. Taking on the role of an OC’s persona can also be a method to cope with social anxiety or self-image insecurity.
The tragedy is that some self-proclaimed “truth-fighters” and “intellectuals” believe this is all a slippery slope of delusion and even mental illness, and they are fearless in their acts of verbally chewing up innocent creative young women and men, spitting them back out into the sewer with a euphoric feeling of moral superiority. Yet they turn around and enjoy watching movies like Zootopia, completely forgetting that there are adults like them who have an imagination and got hired at animation studios because of said imagination, thus allowing the very movie they are watching to become a reality.
I believe the positive conclusion to draw from this is threefold: that the vast majority of young adults who create their own unique characters that they express through various formats are, in fact, not mentally screwed up, and that they are fully functional, non-narcissistic members of society with jobs and consistent tax payments; that having a creative imagination by which you write stories, sew costumes, or make art as an adult should not be something to frown upon or shame others for; and lastly, that the media is ever-powerful over how you perceive communities, and thus direct conversations with people combined with sound independent research is the best way to enrich your mind and heart on the journey of understanding and exploring the world.