#brain octopus

But one of the things I appreciate most about this realistic depiction. One of the things I am really, really glad Black Tabby chose to do. Is that there is no "evil murder alter". And this is a thank you post to Black Tabby for doing it right.

Don't get me wrong, there are Voices that are bad people. The Cold and the Opportunist, in particular, are nasty little buggers, and depending on whether you count the Narrator as a Voice he's up there too.

But there's a very specific trope in fiction about people with multiple personalities, where one of the alters is a serial killer for no fucking reason. Some "good" (ie. bad) examples of this trope are the antagonist system from Split and Fukawa from DanganRonpa. (I love Fukawa, the two of them are great, but they're still an example of the trope.) There's just this kind of ... unspoken assumption among singlets writing systems, that if you are a system, there is some part of you that wants to commit murders, and that part becomes a headmate.

....That's not how that works for most people. Even the systems who it does 'work' that way for don't generally wind up harming others because of it- anecdotally, with the systems I've met, the ~edgy evil red-and-black demon/vampire/slasher villain/hedgehog alter~ winds up doing the housekeeping. (It's a whole thing.)

And in Slay the Princess- there is no Voice of the Murderous. There is no Voice of the Bloodthirsty or the Killer or what have you! In a game that is all about the choice whether to kill someone or be kind to her, it would have been really, really easy to have a Murder Alter who just wants to do Murder- the counterpoint to the Voice of the Hero.

But there isn't! The closest are Stubborn, Cheated, and Cold, and none of them are The Trope. Stubborn's not about killing for the sake of killing- you started a fight, and he's going to finish it. (Again. And again. And again.) Cheated is mad at the Princess specifically- and he's more mad at the Narrator than at her or at you. Cold comes closest, but he's still not The Trope- he's about doing What Needs To Be Done, even if it's at the expense of your feelings, and you technically "need" to slay the Princess to "save the world", so....

There is no Voice who is just bloodthirsty and awful for the hell of it! Every Voice is the personification of some kind of coping mechanism or emotion about the situation, and none of those emotions are Murder Machine! Considering how badly systems get portrayed in so many stories, even stories that are trying to be sympathetic- the fact that the Murder Alter would have been completely justified in this story, and Black Tabby steered away from it anyway, is yet another reason why they're one of the best dev teams currently working.

The more you learn about Jung... the more plural he gets.

He outright says he had multiple personalities when he was a child; he had dream-companions and visions he spoke to throughout his life (including a recurring one named Philemon).

And... a lot of Jungian psychology seems like an attempt to explain How Personality Works from the perspective of someone who is More Than One. The focus on archetypes (many headmates line up with one- there's been some research on fairy tale motifs in DID, fictives, etc.), the focus on individuation and self-actualization as the path to happiness, the interviews with imagined people...

And then he's trying to apply what he's learnt about how his selves work to people who only have one ~self~, but who are masking all the time because that's what you do when you're a person who can get therapy in the 1930s.

....I know a lot of my friends who are plural describe having a brain state they call the "sea" or the "void" or the "soup", and it sounds a lot like how Jung describes the collective unconscious. Similarly, the anima/animus split and the persona/shadow split are very common headmate dualities.

Full game spoilers under the cut.

I'm writing a paper for school about the multiple system/the Voices in Slay the Princess, and I need at least 8 scholarly sources for that paper. Thanks to you guys passing around every crusty-ass .pdf of every dissociation book ever written, I was able to knock out 4 sources without really trying.

I found an incredibly old book on personality theory - like, written in 1957, takes Freud and Jung seriously as authorities instead of historical curiosities, has no shame about talking about 'abnormal' personalities, does not even acknowledge MPD/DID as a concept, takes parapsychology seriously- that old.

Here's some highlights I thought y'all might enjoy, including an alternate and very weird definition of 'autism'.

I think this article is relevant to a lot of the very stupid, wanky debate that I keep seeing going around my dash about TEENS SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH DID. It is a funny quirky article written by a literary fiction author about how one of her characters got into her head during the pandemic and started dispensing Wry Life Advice, disappearing as soon as the stressful situation ended.

there's this bit that I think @pervocracy wrote, about how if your culture only had two words for 'fear', and one of them was "mild nervousness about passing a test" and the other was "the bone-chilling horror of being chased by zombies in a graveyard", that keeps you from talking about a whole range of human experiences. if you have crippling social anxiety, or you have an uncommon phobia, or any kind of fear that isn't 'mild nerves' or 'IMPENDING PHYSICAL DOOM'? you're stuck choosing between two words that do not suit your experience to describe what's going on.

I think "the experience of having an entity in your head that is Not You" is actually remarkably common- way more than 1%- especially among writers/artists/actors/fandom folks, and especially among anyone who's going through a severe physical or mental stress. an entity like this can exist in varying degrees of independence-from-you and interest-in-the-outside-world. Sometimes this entity is a comforting presence, other times it's a malevolent one. some disappear as quickly as they appear, and others stick with you for your whole life.

A lot of historical cultures had a framework to explain this kind of thing. "This is your daemon." "This is your guardian angel." "You're hearing spirits; you're possessed." Mainstream Western culture rejected these explanations, and in some cases, rightfully fucking so. But we don't really have a framework to replace them.

So if you are experiencing this phenomenon, because of how our society has decided to handle it, you really only have two words for it- "imaginary friend", or "DID alter". in the vast majority of cases neither of these words are appropriate, in the same way that severe social anxiety isn't Test Jitters or IMMINENT FEAR OF YOUR LIFE.*

there is a wide range of human experiences here being collapsed into 2 points. but people who are having that experience are going to need the words to describe it. if you're a published litfic author and the experience is over, you can write an article about it and just come off as a Little Quirky. if you're a teenager on TikTok, the experience is ongoing, and the only word you're being offered is DID? you're gonna take that word.

we need more words for this range of experiences. we need more people to be able to talk about this range of experiences- including DID, which is a very different experience from Brain Octopus up there- without getting tarred as Bad Psycho Crazy. we need to stop arguing whether or not you can only have this state of being from Severe Enough Trauma; we need to be able to accept it as a natural part of how humans are without judgement or shame.