About a year and a half ago my partner told me that they had discovered a robot kintype that they wanted to further explore, and to do so together.
My partner and I have been together for ten years in this life. We are both fictionkin, and our metaphysical history and nature is continuous and intertwined. We have known one another in different ways in different times and worlds. It was obvious that if they had a kintype where they were a robot of some kind, that I had been there in some way too. Hearing about it, in fact, immediately resonated with me. I told them of course I wanted to help them explore it.
When they told me about what they knew about that kintype, this was what they initially said:
-they were built and styled to look female
-the robots were all quite doll-like
-they were produced specifically for military combat
-they were an early model or prototype unit
-they had been in storage/stasis/scrap for a long time
-they had been in a war with an enemy who overran them
-they had been almost completely destroyed in combat and remembered shutting down
Hearing all this when they told me evoked an immediate emotional response from me, and I felt almost immediately that I knew something about who I had been when they were a robot.I was positive, immediately, that I had been some sort of mechanic or engineer, and that I had been the one who repaired them after they shut down. I also felt pretty strongly that I knew what I would have looked like; a delicate featured young man with tousled brown hair.
After we discussed our feelings and memories for a few weeks, one thing that my partner wanted to do was to explore fiction, to see if there was a story that matched– if this was an unknown fictionkin type. We both knew that it was just as likely that this was an otherkintype; that the story that matched our experiences might not have been told in this world yet, or not told in a medium that we would ever discover. Personally, I felt like that was most likely the case; that we would only ever find partial matches with things that resonated but weren’t The Thing We Experienced.
But still, we looked. After all, looking at things and figuring out what made them Not The Thing would only help us further our understanding of what we actually had experienced.
So we delved into a LOT of robot fiction.
I combed a LOT of wiki pages. We watched a LOT of shows. A lot of stories that otherwise might have hit were counted out because the character was a cyborg not a robot.
Nier Automata felt close, but the world felt too far apocalyptic, and we both felt that in our world the human population had been reduced, but was still present.
My partner looked at a lot of serious, gritty war stories about science fiction wars.
I looked at a lot of 90s/2000s dating sims and harem anime where young men rescue robots and dolls.
Neither of us found anything that felt ‘right’.
And then, 2 months ago, we found it.
On the evening of this body of mine’s physical birthday, we were watching a youtube video detailing the new anime coming out this season. At the very end of the video, I was about to turn it off, when the youtuber started talking about an anime based on a gacha game, about robot girls. We were both like ‘lol this won’t be it’, but we had made it a policy to at least glance at everything that we found that hit some of the criteria just in case.
So I played the anime’s trailer.
Almost immediately my partner’s reaction was ‘oh no. OH NO’. There was a particular moment of puppet/doll imagery in the trailer in particular that smacked her in the face.
So we went to the wiki.
I was expecting (hoping?) for some detail to jump out that clashed with the things we had figured out on our own. But the more I read, the more everything actually fell into place.
There were military robots built to look female; and who were doll-like. They were in fact explicitly called dolls, something my partner had said a few times before. There was the character who my partner had been describing; who was an early model, who was in storage for a long time, who had been destroyed in a large battle. And there was the tousel-haired young mechanic who had fixed her. He looked almost exactly the way I’d been picturing and describing to my partner.
Rather than elements disproving that this was The Source, everything we learned felt more and more right. As we read the wiki. As we watched the show. As we read the manga. As we caught up with the goddamned chinese mid-tier gacha game. It's called Girls Frontline, or Dolls Frontline, in case anyone was wondering.
Despite all my expectations that there was no way that we’d discover a kintype, remember details about that kintype, and then later discover that there was an actual media that matched it note for note and was The Thing…. There it was.
It was like if I had remembered being Ken Ichijouji and then only later found that Digimon was an actual show that was real. It was like a bucket of ice water over my head. It was a hell of an experience.
I don’t really know what to say to wrap this up. I wanted to share this experience because it's something that has, unsurprisingly, been heavy on my mind lately. It defied my expectations. Its something that in my mind, reminds me that what I experience as metaphysical fictionkin is to me, really stranger than people typically believe reality is.
I’m curious if anyone else has had experiences like this, where they have discovered a kintype and then later discovered source material that matched it. If that’s something that’s happened to you, I’d be really thrilled to hear you share about it.
kintypes turning out to be fictotypes
- DoctorCorby
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