Chatterbox: Down to Earth

AE Clarification 

Hi, so, stuff is happening and I think something really wasn't clear. It's been brought to my attention that there are some different ideas about what AEs are, and I wanted to talk about that. Let's begin.

Both of my AEs are based off of different aspects of myself. I did this because of a description I saw once of AEs being characters created to show different sides of their CBer. I took it to mean that if a CBer wanted to express something like insanity or shyness which didn't fit with the way they usually acted, they would make an AE to embody themselves when that aspect was showing.

I thought this was a great idea. I often talked to myself as though I were multiple people, and so I decided to take one of the louder voices, try to pin most of it down, and shape it into an AE. The result was Nymph, a highly volatile person who was snarky and scared me and had this feeling that I always associate with forests and myself when I was several years younger, and whose shape altered with every tiny change in her mood without her even trying. It actually felt like she made herself; she simply burst in one day and demanded I make her a thread. I love her and think of her as an exaggerated and rather highly altered hidden face of me.

A while after Nymph's arrival, I noticed that another of the voices in my head was saying things that I wanted other people to hear, but it wasn't quite me and it wasn't quite Nymph. I debated with myself for a long time over what to do about this, and there slowly began to emerge someone new. I named this part of myself Sea Glass and observed xyr for a while before introducing her as an AE. Xe was an amplified manifestation of my loneliness and sorrow and contemplative patience, my listening ear and social awkwardness/anxiety, all of which felt as if it wouldn't fit into a girl or a boy. There's a lot to xyr that distinguishes us, but xe is still partly me when I'm feeling drifty. 

At the time, I thought this was a fairly normal thing to do--perhaps no one had ever done it quite the way I had, but it helped give them depth and color, so why not? However, I'm not sure this is true anymore. I think it might actually be more common to just come up with a set of traits out of owhere, a character unrelated to their CBer at all, existing simply to fill a role, provide a different tone of voice or fun interactions, drawing details from the things they do; beings who are changeable and disposable and not at all real. But I'm not sure about this, so I want to hear it from you.

How did your AEs come into being, and where do they fall on the scale between easily manipulable and meaningless creations to existent even without the CB?