Atarangi: Okay, just a minute. I think I know what’s going on. When you met “me”, what name did I give you?
Violet: “Kaleo.” Kallie for short.
Atarangi: Of course. Look, my family is . . . complex. I don’t try to explain the messy details to people I’ve just met.
But Kallie’s basically my sister. I promise it’s not a trick. We look a lot alike, and we got the same tattoo, that’s all. People who get to know both of us can tell the difference. I’m the one with magic. She’s the one with a thing for . . . humans.
Which is fine as long as she doesn’t end up sleeping with my co-workers.
Violet: Hey, it didn’t come up, so we didn’t know. But I’m on your side. Too awkward, won’t do it again.
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I LOVE Atarangi’s exasperated expression in panel 3.
Same, but they’re all pretty good
Also, at the time, they weren’t coworkers, nor did they know they would BE coworkers.
I noticed how she said “basically my sister” and not “my sister”. Headmates is still possible.
I noticed that too! Still rooting for headmates.
And “that’s my identical sibling” is WAY easier to explain than “you met a separate personality who uses my body sometimes but I don’t have any memory of what she does with it”.
I wonder if their country has laws about this sort of thing. Like, if a crime gets committed, who’s responsible? What about legal agreements? Sexual consent agreements? In cases of split personalities, are they legally recognized as another person?
True, much easier to explain. That’s an interesting question. Maybe we’ll find out eventually. I know irl in my country everyone is legally regarded as one entity, much as we wish otherwise.
as another system, we have no issue with legally being regarded as one entity. we do operate as a unit of one body, after all. given that there is no way for us to prove we experience ourselves as different people, from a purely legal standpoint and in some practical matters, it makes sense to consider the unit first – with electing political leaders, for instance, “one body gets one vote” is a reasonable policy. (even if it does mean having to hold internal pre-elections before you cast your group vote.)
aside from that kind of context, I agree with you and wish there weren’t an assumption of “one body = one person, all the time, always”. for us, it’s largely the social and interpersonal rather than legal aspects that cause problems in our life; the expectation of personality consistency has screwed us over before, particularly in the workplace but not just there.
that said, this is for real life; I suppose there could be magic-related workarounds in this universe that would allow legal recognition *without* unwanted legal repercussions from people lying about it as a way to shirk responsibility for their actions.
My guess is that if there were lots of clear laws about this situation, it would be more widely known and hence less awkward to explain. But maybe there are clear laws about it and it’s just rare enough that people still mostly aren’t familiar with it.
Okay, I’m officially jumping on the system theory bandwagon lol. If it pans out I’m super interested to find out just how many there are in her family. They might have a “host”. Or they don’t. Only time and the grace of Author will tell!
Serious question: Presuming this is a DID situation, how would we know which personality is typically in charge?
Interesting situation for a character with DID when only one personality has magic. Can you imagine if someone with DID could draw heartswords, and the weapon changed depending on the personality holding it?
As someone with DID I can say that generally a host, or system member out the most often and in charge of day to day, is present in many systems, but some systems have multiple hosts who share the duty or no host at all. The only way you would know who the host is for sure is if you were told or you spend a lot of time around the system and see their say to day, there is no other way to tell.
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