alter yuri incorporated

more about this page

we're open about having DID and are more than welcome to receiving and answering questions about it. we won't answer anything we're uncomfortable with, of course, but if you want to ask, go right ahead. you can ask us questions about anything else you want too

with that said, we definitively won't answer anything related to online discourse since it's just not something we want to engage with for our mental health

not sure of how much we're going to use tumblr since we've been pretty bad at keeping up with it in the past, so sorry in advance if it takes us a while to get back to anyone

feel free to share or reblog anything we post here. we don't mind at all

we don't give out our discord freely anymore. if we want to contact someone there, we'll reach out first and ask for theirs. please do not ask for our discord account!

notable tags

we'll tag any DID related discussion with "did talk"

tag for pokémon horizons au free fall: "pokemon horizons free fall"

tag for digimon frontier rewrite: "frontiers unexplored"

tag for self-published book series: "a road never walked alone" and "arnwa"

current story info

update schedule:

updated tuesdays: alitia: reflections of truth (ao3)

updated thursdays: morix: chains of justice past (ao3)

updated thursdays: octopath traveler: eight interwoven (ao3)

updated alternating fridays: pokémon horizons: free fall (ao3)

updated on the eighth of the month: a road never walked alone (self-published series; see author website)

other wips:

octopath traveler ii: next part in plural castti series

octopath traveler 0: next part in elrica/zero time travel series

triangle strategy: transfem!serenoa one-shot

mygo and ave mujica: last four mutsumi/mortis/everyone fics (nyamu, anon, umiri, and finale are left)

mygo and ave mujica: miscellaneous mygo and ave mujica analyses and metas

elementary school

in kindergarten, a dog from a local neighborhood got out and wandered into the school. one of the other kindergarten classes took care of him until his owner came by to get him. i later became best friends with a member of this family lmaoooo the dog's name was rex

in first grade, i got locked out during an intruder lockdown. there was no actual intruder, it was just people being paranoid about someone walking outside the school, but i was locked out and no one let me in for like 20 minutes

when i was in the second grade, there was a massive tornado warning that forced everyone into the fetal position in the corner for three hours. i, however, was a lucky fuck who had the flu and was not there. everyone was very upset with me for this when i came back a few days later and revealed i spent the entire day petting my dogs in the basement of my house

that same year, a goose decided to make its nest on the playground. the school didn't pay for a service to relocate the goose. so there was just police caution tape around that part of the playground to keep us from fucking with the goose eggs

in the third grade, we had a really shitty substitute teacher one day who screamed at the kids. the entire class spent recess hiding in the corner of the field by the playground trying to get away from her. i think she cursed at us? our complaints got her fired

in the fifth grade, a boy had a crush on me. to impress me, he tried to look cool by jumping off the swings. i told him not to do it, he didn't listen, and he broke his arm when he hit the ground. he went to the nurse, didn't come back for a few days, and returned with a cast. i felt so guilty that i helped him to write on his assignments the entire time his arm was broken

middle school

my middle school had very strict rules around drinking water. and by that i mean "you are not allowed to have a water bottle without a signed note from a doctor to say you need to drink water"

during flu season, they would cover the water fountains with plastic bags and duct tape to keep sicknesses from spreading, so there was no water without doctor approval since they didn't sell water in the cafeteria either

we also weren't allowed to have backpacks even though both elementary and high school students were allowed to have backpacks. we instead had to put everything into a three inch zipper binder. i still have back issues from this almost a decade after graduating. nice!

cell phones were to be powered all the way off in lockers. one day, the school busted a bunch of students after an amber alert went off during school hours. the faculty went around to every locker that was buzzing, opened it, turned the phone off, and then issued disciplinary action to the students whose phones were on during the alert

kids routinely pulled the fire alarm to keep from having to present in speech and debate class. one time, this led to a kid having a seizure in the middle of an evacuation. i don't think the person who pulled the alarm ever got in trouble for it

when i was in the eighth grade, a fight broke out during lunch where a kid picked up an entire chair and threw it at another student's back

my middle school had this occasional thing called "mix it up day" where instead of being able to sit where you wanted during lunch, the administration would give you a number corresponding to one of the 32 tables in the cafeteria. you had to make conversation for the entire lunch period or they would yell at you. if you brought a book to lunch, they'd confiscate it. the staff insisted this was not a punishment, but it was enforced daily on a younger grade than mine after they started misbehaving. it was absolutely a punishment

one day, my friend was grieving losing one of her online friends to suicide. the assistant principal saw her crying and told her to get over it and get too class. i still hate that woman to this day

freshman center

my school district used to have a unique school for the freshmen since there were so many students at the high schools that they couldn't put all four grades in the high schools. so the freshmen were all crammed into an otherwise retired school building for a single year. this led to absurd rates of bullying, gun/bomb threats, and suicide. i think my year was the first in over half a decade to not have a suicide? batshit

a teacher at the freshman center was openly bullying an autistic student in one of my classes. i tried to report him and the district promoted him to be a principal of an elementary school the following year

the freshman center was so crowded. we were packed in there like sardines. you couldn't even open your locker with how crowded it was

a teacher was exposed for racism and homophobia (violently shouting slurs at students) and also for not letting disabled students get their medication, leading to one diabetic student having a medical episode. and then within a year she was found dead under unknown circumstances

kids also routinely pulled the fire alarm here and then would take off running to escape the school. including on the first day of the school year. going to school with pyrophobia was not fun

on the last day of school during lunch, a group of boys started airdropping nudes from over 15 girls in the grade to anyone who had airdrop on. i tried to report it to the teachers only to be told to sit back down. so the people who did it never got punished and the school year just ended an hour later

this wasn't my year at the freshman center, but the year after me, some kids hosted a party in the staircase. everybody asked to be excused from class, went to the stairwell, and partied. they had a disco ball and food and everything. i don't know how they did this. a teacher found them from the noise and somebody panicked and threw a cake at her head

high school

a few assholes in my grade pulled a "prank" once where they filled water balloons with ketchup and mustard. they threw these water balloons at cars, ruining the paint jobs and fucking all sorts of shit up

a few kids vaped in the choir robe closet during school hours. i will never fucking understand the boldness this takes. somehow bolder than smoking weed in the bathroom because the robes absorbed the vape smell and reeked for weeks

right before covid hit in 2020, almost every bathroom in my school was closed because a group of students was (i am not joking) shitting in the sinks and urinals. and then rubbing their shit all over the walls and writing in it. the girls' bathrooms had used pads stuck on the walls. this was all over snapchat. in the last few weeks before lockdown, there was one individual girls bathroom open and a single boys bathroom on the opposite side of the school

actually the craziest part of that previous story is that this was the second time i had an encounter with a serial shitter. but that is a tale for another post. somebody ask me about it and i'll tell the full story because it took place outside of school but was also batshit wild

one of the boys bathrooms was not closed because of the shit vandalism though. this bathroom was closed because a kid did a backflip off one of the sinks, dislodging it from the wall and flooding the bathroom. this was also on snapchat iirc

one time a goose somehow got into the electrical system under the school during construction. and it died down there, taking power out of the school for a number of hours one day. the reasoning for the power outage was so batshit that half the school thought it was bullshit but nope. that was true

i had a teacher/coach who was um. i guess you could say emotionally abusive? i was on the speech and debate team, and i wear glasses due to severe nearsightedness. however she wouldn't let me wear them during performances since the light reflecting off the lenses was distracting. so i couldn't see anything, and that would make me squint. her way of fixing this was to (i am not joking) throw markers at me when i squinted so i would stop it. i'd flinch and then pry my eyes open to keep from getting hit again. in her words, it worked. this was the last time we spoke before covid hit. her throwing markers at my face

said teacher also gaslit me on a school trip after i was SA'd. she said i imagined it, and even if i didn't imagine it, then it was my fault for not standing up to the boy who did it. she proceeded to tell me about her addiction to aldi's after victim blaming me. i have a petty grudge against aldi's to this day

speaking of the speech and debate team, we had a taxidermy goose in the classroom. it was our mascot. we called him agoosetus. we took him to major tournaments to rub him for good luck

right before i went virtual for covid, one of the history classes had an incident. a student leaked a kahoot code to his friends, and they started spamming it with racist slur nicknames. the culprits? the same kids who threw ketchup and mustard balloons at cars

if anything happened during my senior year, i don't know about it since i was a virtual student and therefore not there at all. i graduated after not seeing any of my friends for over a year and unsurprisingly i am in contact with a whole five people from public school now

crescent - popplio and fennekin

essex - kantonian rapidash or flareon

chrysalis - aurorus

nevada - hisuian zorua

primrose - oricorio (baile)

castti - vaporeon

throné - umbreon

osiris - absol

sigrid - unovan zoroark

air - sprigatito

mortis - unovan lilligant

timoris - yamper

amoris - delcatty

what is DID?

DID stands for dissociative identity disorder, a dissociative disorder caused by trauma in childhood. the theory behind it is that all people start off with different pieces of their mind to handle different matters necessary to early survival (eating, playing, etc). most of the time, people's different pieces come together to form a single identity at some point before the age of 12 (there are debates about when this happens specifically but i'm keeping it loose for the purposes of this post). however, trauma can disrupt this process, causing the pieces to stay separate because of dissociation. the child will dissociate to escape overwhelming trauma, keeping the pieces apart from one another through this developmental period. in the end, the parts do not come together and instead develop separate but parallel to one another with memory barriers keeping them apart. these parts of the mind go on to become alters who live within a system (the collective of all alters in a body). and that's DID. i had to simplify a lot in order to explain this succinctly, so if you don't know much about DID, i highly suggest doing more research into it on your own.

DID is marked by identity alterations (switches between which alter is in control) and memory gaps beyond ordinary forgetting. it also comes with dissociation since it is a well. dissociative disorder. other common symptoms include losing time, hearing voices, detachment from reality, detachment from oneself, and PTSD because of the trauma the people with it went through. DID tends to be comorbid with a lot of other disorders because of the trauma too.

this probably sounds familiar to people who have played three houses. isn't that just jeritza? well, yes, but... as someone who has DID, i do not think he is particularly good representation in canon. he leans into the serial killer alter stereotype which is a very harmful source of stigma against people with DID, and it honestly always left a bad taste in my mouth. (i'm not getting into it too much here, but you can ask me about it later if you're curious.) however, i have come to you all with a new headcanon: giving edelgard DID. this isn't just me throwing things at the wall either; i think there's a decent amount of evidence to back it up, and i'm going to go through it all here. i have normal feelings about the red woman, and now, you have to have normal feelings about her too.

disorganized attachment

one of the biggest indicators for DID is disorganized attachment with caregivers. disorganized attachment in this context means that a parent or guardian was not a reliable source of safety during a time of trauma or stress. the guardian could be the source of trauma, creating a two-sided relationship on the child's end. the child needs the guardian for safety, but the guardian is also a sign of danger. reconciling these two sides of a parent can be difficult for a child, and it can contribute to dissociation, the fuel behind DID. disorganized attachment can also stand for a guardian not being there to support the child during trauma unrelated to them. if a child cannot rely on a guardian while they are facing trauma, then they will struggle a lot more to cope with it than if they had a protective figure to support them, and once again, this can contribute to dissociation. nothing feels safe in reality, so the child has to retreat into their mind to find safety there.

and i think this is very applicable to edelgard. let's look at her parents first. her mother was exiled from the capital before she could remember, so any contact edelgard had with her was limited and based on her leaving the capital to visit her directly. anselma could only do so much to protect edelgard from a distance, especially since edelgard was largely raised in the castle based on what we know in canon. edelgard's father, ionius, was busy with ruling over the empire and had ten other children, so he presumably wasn't very involved with edelgard's life either. the parents who should have been taking care of her could not for some reason or another, and that would lead to disorganized attachment. that doesn't even get into the fact that no adult helped her when she was going through the torturous blood reconstruction surgeries, something that worsens this issue even more.

and it gets worse when you consider her uncle! we don't see much of the original volkhard in canon since he was replaced by thales, but if you ask me, he probably wasn't that great of a guy given the circumstances. he was one of the leaders of the insurrection of the seven and uprooted edelgard's life shortly after starting it. unlike anselma, he was presumably not in exile from the capital, meaning he would have been a caretaker figure for her and probably wouldn't have been the best for the job either. he would have also been pretty busy with his political career and not done much to look after his niece before thales took over. it all comes together to make a recipe for pretty notable disorganized attachment issues, and given how much of an indicator that can be for DID, it bears mentioning here.

trauma history

going on from that, we have known trauma in edelgard's history too. upon returning to the empire from her brief stint in faerghus, she was kidnapped and tortured by those who slither in the dark. this is obviously extremely traumatic, especially given the fact that she watched the rest of her siblings either be driven to madness or die because of what they had to endure. this trauma set edelgard down the current path she is on as of the time of three hopes and three houses. edelgard has notable PTSD from what she went through here, having a particularly bad reaction to rats since they send her into flashbacks instantly. i think this trauma more than qualifies as the sort that would cause someone to develop DID, or at the very least, PTSD.

edelgard also canonically has nightmares about what she went through, something that shows up as early as her C support with byleth. beyond her panic attacks about rats, the nightmares are proof of severe PTSD. nightmares are a very common symptom of trauma, especially prolonged trauma like what she went through. nightmares are also extremely common in DID, and flashback dreams for people with DID can be very vivid and distressing.

one argument i could see people making against this point is that her trauma happened too late in her life to cause DID. i personally disagree with this because of everything i listed previously. if her home life was already unstable (which i believe it was given her parents' emotional and literal distance), then she would probably already have an inclination toward dissociation before all of this happened. the torture at the hands of TWSITD would make the existing issues worse, exacerbating her dissociation and causing the formation of more alters.

dissociation issues

one common symptom of DID is known as emotional amnesia. emotional amnesia involves knowing something traumatic happened to you but having no emotional attachment to it. the best way to recognize this is by summarizing something awful that happened almost clinically with an odd sense of distance from it. to me this, is something you can say of her C support with byleth where she recalls what happened to her siblings and says it all very bluntly. there is some emotional connection, yes, but it is not as much as one might expect given the horrific things she is talking about here. emotional amnesia comes from someone detaching themself from their trauma and pain, and i can't think of a better description for what we see here in this conversation. i also think it applies to her conversations with lysithea where she refuses to admit to her trauma, keeping as much distance from the truth as possible even when lysithea is aware of what she has been through and is trying to press her into opening up about it. emotional amnesia often comes part and parcel with depersonalization and derealization, or the detachment from yourself and reality. it is easy to pull away from the traumas of the past when you barely feel like a person or barely have a connection to reality, marking this as a notable dissociation issue for edelgard.

memory gaps

a lot of portrayals of DID in media are very dramatized, and that includes what we see in three houses. jeritza has black and white memory gaps, and when the death knight is in control, jeritza remembers nothing. this is called blackout amnesia, but it's pretty uncommon in reality. this isn't to say that no one experiences it, of course, since people with DID absolutely can have blackouts. it isn't as common as media makes it out to be though, and a lot of systems instead experience other types of amnesia. instead of having instant blackouts, their memories may fade away with time. this has come to be known as grayout amnesia where someone is aware of what is happening in the moment, but the recollection leaves them as time goes by.

and this happens to edelgard at one point. when she is in the kingdom, she becomes close with dimitri, and the two spend a decent amount of time together. however, she has entirely forgotten about this by the time of her enrollment in the officers academy. the amnesia criteria for DID states that it needs to be memory loss inconsistent with ordinary forgetting, and i can think of no better way to describe this situation. amnesia in DID is a protective mechanism so the system can keep functioning even with their trauma since the constant awareness of it would break them down completely. sometimes, memories of things other than trauma can end up lost in this too, and other life events that coincide with the trauma can fit in this category. say, for example, edelgard made a friend and then immediately went through severe trauma, causing her memories to cave in on one another and make her forget that friend. dimitri has no issues with remembering her, but edelgard has forgotten almost everything about him. this cannot be ordinary forgetting to me, raising red flags that imply DID, or at the very least, dissociative amnesia.

identity alteration

edelgard talks a few times about wishing she could be an ordinary person instead of an emperor. she acts starkly differently when she is at work as a leader opposed to when she is spending time with those she cares about and seeks to relax. this on its own is not a symptom of DID since everyone has different sides that come out depending on their surroundings. a person doesn't act identically at work to how they do with friends. still, i felt the need to mention it before getting into the big piece of evidence here. after all, this could still be an indicator given the other evidence.

okay. we have to talk about three hopes here. more specifically, i have to bring up everything that happens in azure gleam. for the uninformed, azure gleam made some... controversial writing choices with edelgard. in essence, edelgard is forcibly turned into her hegemon form, and when she reverts back again, she is essentially an entirely different person. she acts far younger, staring at the ground and dissociating almost constantly. she only does as others ask of her and has very little autonomy on her own. she is also entirely compliant to thales who she views as her uncle despite volkhard being dead for a long time, something she knows in the present.

edelgard's memories of her life since childhood have entirely melted away, replaced instead with extreme loyalty to thales and notable skill regression. skill regression between alters is very common in DID, and the same is true of having alters who are younger than the body. alters can present as children because of the trauma they endured, and they can act a lot like it too. if you ask me, this is exactly what happened in azure gleam.

the thing that's really damning here is the fact that if you get the arval interlude near the end of three hopes, edelgard... goes back to normal. she describes feeling imprisoned in her mind in the other world, out of control of her actions for a time. she has also lost a lot of her memories of what has happened since she was taken over by this other self of hers. that is how a lot of systems describe switching when they're not the one in control of their body. they're watching themselves from the outside and dissociating through it with minimal access to their memories. edelgard regresses again upon leaving the arval interlude chapters, proof that she can go back and forth between states. what is that but an alter? it's an alter. it absolutely is. (side note: if anyone wants to ask me for a more in-depth analysis of this part and my criticisms of this plot point, feel free to shoot me an ask. i'm not going into it here since it's outside of the scope of this post, but i did talk about it a little bit in this emblemcon presentation a little under 45 minutes in if you want to check that out.)

OEA implications

and i can't talk about all of this without addressing the relation to OEA, or organized extreme abuse. sometimes, this is also known as RAMCOA, but i prefer OEA as a term, so that's what i'm using. OEA refers to organized abuse perpetuated by a group of perpetrators against a victim with the purpose of making them entirely loyal to the group in question. this is often seen in cults or extremist groups. children who are subjected to OEA very commonly develop DID because the dissociation involved with the formation of DID makes them easy to manipulate. if you want to do more research into this, please be careful, and take care of yourself. it's a very heavy topic and one that needs to be addressed with care.

why bring all of that up? i think OEA describes what edelgard went through extremely well. TWSITD forced her to go through torture with the express purpose of creating a weapon who could destroy the gods. part of making a weapon to work for them would be forcibly establishing loyalty to the group, something that comes up when edelgard is regressed in three hopes. she loses all sense of self in favor of being controlled by thales, one of her abusers. OEA victims are victims of torture, and they can end up with certain types of systems because of their trauma. OEA victims with DID can have particularly strong amnesiac barriers as well, and given how edelgard forgot literal years of her life in azure gleam, i think that applies here. this is more than just a child alter in control; this is an entirely compliant child alter in control who lacks any autonomy. she is dissociative, out of touch with reality, and only does as she is told because that is all she has ever been taught in this state. this presentation hits very close to home for me personally because of the OEA undertones, and i really can't talk about all of this without bringing it up. so not only do i think edelgard could have DID, but i think she specifically has a system presentation brought on by OEA.

conclusion

i'm sure one question at least some of you have after reading all of this is "why doesn't she know about it if this is the case?" well, DID is a very covert disorder, and most people who have it don't know about it. DID is a protective mechanism meant to defend the mind from trauma, and that means leaving the alters in the system largely unaware of what is happening within their mind. it takes a very long time for DID to be properly identified in the modern day medical system (over six years on average), and it wasn't any easier to pick out back then since there is no DSM in fódlan. so i think it's a case of her having DID but just not knowing about it, especially since more covert presentations fly under the radar of those who expect florid presentations like what we see with jeritza. even so, i think this interpretation has a lot more backing than one would expect at a glance.

to go back over all of the major points:

edelgard has disorganized attachment issues with her parents due to them not being fully present to raise her (exile and leadership)

she has a prominent trauma history both leading up to and involving the torture she went through at the hands of TWSITD

she is detached from her trauma and speaks of horrible events without the emotional connection one would expect

she has memory issues and completely forgot someone who was dear to her heart even though they left an impact on her

she completely switches in the azure gleam route of three hopes into an alternate state who acts like a child (with child alters being very common in DID)

she is easily manipulated in this state and is entirely loyal to her abusers, something found in victims of extreme organized abuse