Basing tulpa off a character you have strong beliefs about

[Apollo Fire]

Either it's a temporary thing, or forums are just dying out. Tulpa.io died a few months ago.

[solarchariot]

Maybe we should create a section just for the soulbounding folks and capture them up here.

[Pioneer11]

I completely agree. There's a Metaphysical section, why not one for Soulbonds?

[Lucilyn]

well, most of the time soulbonds vs tulpas is just a difference in origin or belief in meta, as far as I know.. TONS of soulbonds have gotten along in this community with no real friction, sometimes just calling themselves tulpas while here even

 

they're about the same thing, really (also, we're off topic, sort of)

[Guest]

Well, technically, if the character kept their backstory, aren't they more of a soulbond?

[Indigo Blue]

Yeah, let's keep it on-topic^^. If you want to discuss soulbonds, here's a thread you can necro.

[Ember.Vesper]

 

Vesper, there is a difference between characters that became tulpas, and tulpas that were made to be characters.

 

 

Agreed, characters that come to life accidentally are in a somewhat different situation than tulpas intentionally designed to be pre-existing characters. I think the latter are actually in a better situation than the former. When a soulbonding system first forms, nobody knows what just happened, or why, or what to do about it, or where to turn for support. When someone intentionally makes a tulpa, character-inspired or not, they've probably already encountered a few very useful pieces of information in guides and online communities:

 

*Making a tulpa is a huge lifechanging commitment on the order of getting married or having a child, maybe greater.

 

*A tulpa is a person with an independent will and deserves to be granted respect and agency.

 

*A tulpa will change from their original design and that's okay.

 

*Whatever problems and weird stuff you encounter along the way, there are people available to provide advice and encouragement.

 

I can only speak from personal experience as a soulbond. No one in this system has ever made a tulpa or ever will, so there are a lot of creation and vocality discussions we absent ourselves from, possibly more in the future depending on responses to this post. But my responses to your first and second points, Apollo, were not really about soulbonds. I stand by the allegations I made:

 

*New tulpas are heavily shaped by the expectations and desires of their creators, regardless of whether these expectations are inspired by a pre-existing character. They can't start choosing their own personality until they are far enough along to already have one they didn't choose, which then will be the primary influence on what they choose.

 

*Successful tulpamancers tend to be dedicated to the point of obsession. Trauma, mental and physical illness, and the vicissitudes of life may pull them away from their tulpas, but disappointment with who the tulpa turns out to be does not.

 

Apollo, you've been very outspoken against basing tulpas on characters for a while now, across various threads and in your guide. I think I have a clear understanding of what you believe. But how did you come to believe as you do? In-system experience? Out-system experience? Or as a matter of philosophy and ethics, as you usually present it?

 

-Vesper

 

(Ember: I’ve taken Indigo’s advice and am continuing the soulbonding discussion in an older thread.)

[evgenirus]

A bit of closure I got from actually making a tulpa:

 

If you really want to base your tulpa on a character, and as an alternative consider giving them most of the character's personality as a template, I think you could as well just use the character?

 

I created Sunny to be similar to Twilight, but also different and definitely not Twilight.

Then she got a mental breakdown from the same fear as mine, that is, becoming just a shadow of that character.

We resolved to not let that happen, but she was slowly turning into Twilight anyway.

And then she just accepted it, then embraced her inner Twilight, and after letting go like that she finally became herself.

Neither Twilight, nor the template I "designed" for her, but something else.

And even after she decided that neither form nor voice really mattered, and took some variations of Twilight's, turned out they were nowhere near the show-canon Twilight.

 

My other tulpa, Pinkie, was a walk-in who we accepted.

Maybe you could attribute her knowing exactly what she was from start, and being fine with it, to her being "just Pinkie", as in, her being the character. (Reading the script before breakfast is just what Pinkies do.)

And she indeed liked to consider herself yet another of the Pinkies of the multiverse, at least for the first few days. She even almost got upset when someone said she'd probably change eventually.

But really, she's her own person, not some Pinkie clone, even if she can't be bothered to even think about changing her name.

She did get in the mood of questioning who she really was supposed to be, once or twice, but generally, she has better things to think about.

 

All in all, at least from my experience, if deep inside you want your tulpa to be like a character, they'll end up becoming similar to that character, but unless you really try to make them be just the character, they'll be their own people despite any similarities. Or maybe they'll end up as something else entirely, regardless of who you try to make them be similar to or different from.

So just learn to stop worrying and love the bomb them the way they are.

[Guest]

I wouldn't have minded if my tulpas didn't deviate from the characters I made, but they would have been less interesting in certain ways if they had. It was entirely up to them, they knew who they were and there are still some similarities, but not many.

[Piano Soul]

if deep inside you want your tulpa to be like a character, they'll end up becoming similar to that character

 

This is definitely a case-by-case thing, considering when Apollo was developing his creator deeply wanted him to be a certain way, but he ended up turning out completely different. In the end I think it depends a lot more on the tulpa, how they develop, and how they identify, than what the host wants.