Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
New theory: Amazi-Girl and Mike have a timeshare arrangement on Amber’s head.
As does a nice couple from Dayton, the Walshes. They only attended the presentation to get a free hotel stay during their vacation in Hawaii, but decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.
If we ever see Amber talking to herself about crocheting or giving advice on golf swings, it’s the Walshes turn in her head.
Hmmm… interesting, but is that how Introjects and alters actually work? Do they each have allocated nutrients, memory and executive processing power or do they have their own?
From what I’ve read, alters share the same brain and nutrients, it’s sort of like dual-booting a computer? The patterns are still stored and preserved, but not necessarily retrieved (like recalling a memory or speaking style) or modified (like storing a memory or emotionally growing). For people with DID, the brain has broken off partitions to deal with difficult info without putting any established personality at risk.
Even people who aren’t plural have a weaker form of this- if we hang out with old friends after a long time, we fall into old mannerisms and emotions, as if we had never grown out of them. For DID, you also actively suppress and separate that mindset, so eventually it becomes its own person.
” The patterns are still stored and preserved, but not necessarily … modified (like storing a memory or emotionally growing).”
Not sure where you got this info from, but everyone in a system definitely stores their own memories, and can change as a person. Unless I’m completely misinterpreting what you meant there…?
Okay, I probably skew a little older than most who read this webcomic, but when I saw the name “Walshes”, I immediately thought of Beverly Hills, 90210.
Look, ever since Rapey McGee’s asshole buddies got arrested, she hasn’t had anyone to fight, Amber. Habits are hard to break and her hands are twitchy.
Replace violence with makeouts and cuddling, it works wonders for most people. Those people currently single, including myself, will just have to imagine it.
So it seems that Sal still doesn’t know about the mental split between Amber and AmaziGirl. As for wanting a fight, I’m convinced that normal(relatively) talking and being is too foreign a concept for Sal.
Two questions today: Do you think Amazi-Girl will actually care that Sal is dating Danny? And how long can Amber keep this up?
I agree, Sal definitely still thinks that Amazi-Girl is something that Amber does, and that the split is a verbal conceit. In fairness to Sal, I’ve met plenty of people who play a character whom they talk about in 3rd person (such as actors, and tabletop roleplayers) and probably not so many people who have DID.
Why, Sal herself might someday learn that she’s related to the Duke of Thingley.
Sal’s been around Amber/AG long enough, and is perceptive enough, that she has to have noticed there’s a split. She may not grasp the severity of it, but she’s likely aware it exists.
I’m afraid I don’t see how anything Sal’s said so far implies that she doesn’t know that Amber and AmaziGirl are two different people. Especially considering previous dialogue implies that she’s aware of it (stating that Jennifer picking a new name “ain’t like you(AmaziGirl) or probably Carla,” for example)
Yeah, Sal knows, but either she can’t totally wrap her head around one alter dating someone but not the other or she recognizes that both AG and Amber were dating Danny, because they were way more synced at the time and Danny figured he was dating both of them. (He was thinking Clark Kent/Superman, but to be fair I think so was AmbG.)
to be fair to sal, individual headmates dating people instead of just the whole system dating someone isn’t super common. usually it’s sort of a package deal situation.
Oh yeah! I’d forgotten that strip. So Sal at least knows that the split exists and that it’s Very Important to Amber & Amazi-Girl. So I guess she’s just pretending that it’s “gaddang semantics” in the hopes of getting a rise out of them, here!
I thought I remembered that Walky once said something along the lines of “you’re really not just one person, are you” but if so, I can’t find it. Was it Sal who said something like that?
Ethan knows too. (and he’s very, very unhappy about it, since Amber’s/AG’s lack of communication kinda led to their best friend being unidentified and alone in a coma for a day.)
Walky knows – at some point he met AG after talking to Amber and them not sharing memories tipped him off (or Amber after talking to AG, I don’t recall.) Plus he told Booster in the reintroducing-the-cast-to-newcomers section, so obviously they know (presumably AmbG aren’t really hiding it to begin with now that AG’s no longer a vigilante, at least to friends they already trusted with the first secret.)
Amber’s talked about it in very blunt ‘sharing a meatbag’ terminology to Danny since the breakup, but I’m not 100% sure he got it at the time – he certainly didn’t BEFORE then. It is however fairly likely he knows since the kidnapping. Likewise ambiguous was Dina, who previously thought AmbG making the distinction in their dorm was for Dina’s benefit I believe? However, I’d lean on the side of her knowing given her pep talk to Amber specifically about Amber’s good points as they were leaving the basement after Ross’s death.
On the subject, because AmbG not sharing memories ultimately caused them all so much trouble, I suspect that most if not all of them were let in on what happened afterwards – at the very least, we know Ethan found out, and I’d bet Joyce, Becky, Dina, and Dorothy all got that with a brief apology. I’d assume Sarah as well when everyone else knows if only out of politeness, but Amber’s much closer friends with the others.
Malaya, Marcie, and Carla may or may not know – we haven’t seen them interact enough to get a good sense either way. No clue about Faz, but I don’t expect to see him any time soon anyway.
Everyone who I haven’t mentioned, I assume doesn’t know – despite their best efforts, neither Joe nor Ruth have made much headway bonding with Amber, and the rest of the major cast don’t really have relationships with her that would merit it. (Booster wouldn’t either if they hadn’t been a handy Exposition Recipient.)
* Most if not all of the kidnapping victims, I mean – of the six non-AmbG victims, Walky definitely knew beforehand and Dina seems like she might have, and Ethan found out afterwards, leaving Joyce, Becky, Dorothy, and Sarah as very possibly knowing now but not finding out onscreen.
Yeah, I think most of the main cast knows she’s AG by now. Off the top of my head, Joyce, Dorothy, Walky, Sal, Danny, Ruth, Marcie, Becky, Sarah, and Ethan all know. Obviously Mike found out too.
Cast members that are in the dark are people who aren’t really ‘main’ characters nor do they interact much with main characters who have reason to put the pieces together – folks like Raidah, Jacob, Malaya, Carla (who is a motherfucking goddess but also doesn’t really know Amber very well), Lucy, Roz, THANKFULLY Mary, and the teachers like Leslie and Robin.
Out of the ‘core’ main cast I think only Joe and Jennifer are in the dark and that’s wilfully so in Jennifer’s case. Meanwhile I think Booster is the only one who knows she’s plural but does NOT know she’s Amaze-Girl.
Amber told Richard that she dissociated sometimes, and for all we know despite appearances he remembered and worked out what it meant after hearing more about the kidnapping over Christmas, as he probably did. Stacy might unconsciously be aware, but I’d be willing to bet she thinks of the change in personality as merely an adorable quirk of Amber’s. “Oh, don’t worry, she just does that sometimes. When she was three she had an imaginary friend I had to leave an extra plate out for. Isn’t that sweet?”
Most of those I’d leave open. There’s long been a tendency around here to not only assume characters recognize Amazi-Girl as Amber, but that they also pick up on hints about Amazi-Girl not being Amber. It’s certainly possible some characters figured it out or got read in on the secret behind the scenes over the timeskip, but I wouldn’t assume it without confirmation.
Reasonable. The reason why I think there’s decent odds the other kidnapping victims know is because the question of ‘if AG (who we think is you) knew they showed up yesterday and were teamed up, why didn’t you warn someone?’ is a bit inevitable, and in that I think Ethan was just the one of those ‘I wasn’t sharing memories with AG’ conversations we saw. But it’s entirely possible Becky and Joyce didn’t ask out of greater trauma.
I get the sense that it’s just a timing issue. Sal knows it might be a few days until she can speak to Amazi-Girl at their next roller derby practice or meet or whatever. And she wants to get this out in the open as soon as possible.
She may not know exactly when Amber and Amazi-Girl get in touch to share memories, but she can presume it’ll happen eventually, and hope that Amazi-Girl doesn’t mind being told via Amber instead.
Didn’t Malaya once claim that Sal’s accent goes away when Sal gets upset? Far be it from me to believe Malaya’s take on anything, but it would be fun if Sal’s accent intensity in this strip means she’s actually very pleased with the interaction.
It also disappeared when she was talking to herself about giving Danny his new hat, that she didn’t know why she couldn’t just go up and give it to him instead of trying to accidentally bump into him at their usual hangout, before going “… yeah I do.”
I’m highly amused by how Sal’s behaving here. But I imagine most of us are.
Aside from that, I think that last comment by her implies she doesn’t know that Amber and Amazigirl (Passion and Resolve? I don’t know if that name change took) are different people.
Yeah. She specifically referred to Amazi-Girl by name after the roller derby meet.
And just two comments ago she didn’t react with surprise when Amber said that Amazi-Girl isn’t available at the moment, and implied that Sal and Amazi-Girl are better friends than Sal and herself.
At the very least, Sal recognizes that AG isn’t just a role that Amber play-acts at will.
I think Sal might not have been sure which of them Danny was dating (and to be fair their split was much less pronounced at the time), so she’s just covering her bases. Now that it’s been made clear, Sal could basically say “tell her the next time you talk or share memories or however it works for you”. If Amber and AG were two physically separate characters, and Amber saw AG more often than Sal, she could say “tell her the next time you see her” and it would make as much sense.
How I’m reading it is that Sal knows there’s a split. She compares Jennifer insisting on no longer being referred to as Billie as a far different thing than how Amber and AG are separate.
What I think might be the issue is that Sal recognizes the both of them as separate, she might not think they have different opinions about it.
I’m not gonna post this under every comment on the subject, but Sal knows about AG and Amber being different people: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/sip/ (‘It’s not like you or probably Carla, with like, some kind of dysphoria.’ Meaning she considers getting AG’s name right on par with not deadnaming Carla.)
But I don’t think she totally gets that different alters in a system can have romantic relationships that aren’t across the board (or for that matter, different sexualities and genders.) And to be fair to Sal, they were effectively both dating Danny – among other reasons, AmbG were getting along a lot better up until the end of that relationship, and it still didn’t get REALLY bad until after the breakup (where AG started blaming Sal for costing ‘us’ Danny, IIRC.) Amber posed as Danny’s fake-not-fake girlfriend on family weekend to get away from Blaine, and when Danny was uncomfortable because he was dating AG Amber got a bit frustrated there as I recall, since she was AG (at the time they weren’t being written as a system, but with the retcon this still makes sense as I’m not sure either of them really realized AG was her own person rather than strong compartmentalizing up until the car chase made Amber realize she wasn’t controlling their body. I believe that was also around the point she didn’t let Danny kiss her because he was AG’s boyfriend, not hers.) So in all the ways that matter, Amber WAS dating Danny along with AG.
My very limited understanding is that alters are created out of necessity and trauma, tulpas are created consciously and/or willingly. WE (a DID system) disagree that Amazigirl is a tulpa as she very clearly operated to help cope with trauma.
To my knowledge, no, although there are likely subtle distinctions. Like, I’m sure the functions they serve differ on average because the circumstances around their creation are different. There are likely some differences in intra-system relationships since relationship-building with people you’re involuntarily living with is very different from that of people you chose to live with. And of course, alters in DID can be separated by amnesia and be unaware of one another and as far as I know, that’s generally not the case for tulpas since the point of the amnesia is to protect the host from the memory of the traumas.
Introjects aren’t a separate category though, they are a sub-category of alter/identity. Introject just means an identity that’s based off of someone from the external world. Introjects can be based off of real people or fictional characters. Similar categories are things like gatekeeper, protector, persecutor, sexual alter, social alter, Little, caretaker, etc. I don’t know how much this terminology differs among tulpas, though I imagine there’s a fair amount of crossover.
Thank you so much for responding; honestly I’m getting more fascinated by the minute!
Can a Tulpa technically be an introject just by being based of a real or fictional character?
Also, does a trauma or event need to be real to trigger the formation of an introject or alter? Can it be in a dream? And if so, could it be in a lucid dream?
Do alters and tulpas have similar capabilities? Can either of them retain your skills or semantic memories (like driving or programming), or do they have to learn those themselves?
I’m afraid that outpaces my knowledge of tulpas BUT if tulpa-systems and other non-trauma-based plurality work more or less the same as DID systems, just minus the trauma and the dissociation, then these would be my answers:
I don’t see why a tulpa couldn’t be an introject. While in DID the creation of alters is mostly involuntary, it’s still based in necessity and so there is a lot of logic to why certain alters are who they are, and sometimes real people or fictional characters are exactly what’s needed. It would follow that if you had more conscious choice in that process that sometimes that would be the case with tulpas too.
I’ve never heard of an alter being created in response to a traumatic dream. Seems like that wouldn’t be impossible but not super likely since alters that front are typically created to deal with an ongoing external reality that the host cannot cope with alone, and alters that don’t front are created to handle the ongoing reality of the inner world– such as storage of memories, emotions, or managing intrasystem relationships. In both cases, an alter is created to handle something that will continue to be necessary to handle. A dream usually doesn’t have long-lasting impact in that way.
The only exception I can think of is that sometimes alters interact or communicate in dreams. If an alter was consistently causing nightmares or terrorizing other alters in dreams, that might necessitate a split to handle that problem.
I don’t know how memory and skills transfer between tulpas. In DID, the degree to which skills transfer between alters depends a great deal on the amount of amnesia and communication between them. If there was no amnesia, then I don’t know whether skill transfer would be inhibited it at all. There is some amount of natural aptitude that varies between alters, just like some people are going to be naturally better at drawing than others. But if communication is good and memories are shared, then most of the necessary information for skill transferring is possible.
And if the amnesia is severe, then skills don’t consistently transfer. Many DID systems don’t drive exactly for this reason– if you could turn into an 8-year-old at any time, it’s not exactly safe to get behind the wheel. And a lot of systems are unable to work formal jobs because not all of them are trained on the skills of the job.
Also, if anyone who knows more than we do about tulpas wants to chime in, we won’t be offended if you correct us! Most of our knowledge is specific to DID systems, and our guesswork is based on the work we’ve done to separate out the disordered aspects of DID from the plurality parts.
See thejeff’s bit about Mask or No Mask, and my discussion of the ‘cost US Danny’ line and Amber being much more willing to do datey things with Danny in the early stages of their relationship. I think ‘Danny was AG’s boyfriend, not mine’ was a line Amber drew at the end of the relationship (when Danny started realizing this shit was dangerous and was trying to discourage the AG stuff,) and after it was over to try and deflect the idea of friendship. It wasn’t really the case for most of their relationship.
It sort of merged over from “you’re dating AG, so we can’t be dating to keep the secret identity secret” over to a more internal distinction over time. I’m not sure there’s a clear dividing line, though it might have snapped into place after the car chase as you kind of suggest above.
And I think that is rooted in the “all good things belong to AG, all bad things are Amber’s because she’s irredeemable garbage” complex.
Subconsciously, things were going “too well” between Amber and Danny, so she compartmentalized their relationship. (And he did have a relationship growing with both of them, whether or not he knew it at the time.)
Yeah, especially once he started going ‘hey, maybe being a vigilante is actually scary dangerous for you and you shouldn’t do it?’ and AmbG took this as A: A rejection of AG, B: A way Sal was ‘poisoning’ him against them, and C: Clearly he couldn’t actually care about AMBER, that couldn’t be the case, she’s the bad one and if he does she must have done something to trick him or something.
All of which were distorted, one of which she has definitely recognized and worked on and another of which seemed to gel for her post-second kidnapping (‘I can at least care as much about myself as Mike did,’) but she still has some self-destructive tendencies and Amber’s still considering herself a monster, which is bad.
Haha, I shoulda just posted my other two posts here instead.
Yeah, Sal definitely knows that Amber and AG are separate identities, but I think what she’s not understanding right now is that Amber and AG’s rules were that Amber didn’t date Danny, AG did.
Which isn’t to say Amber didn’t like Danny, and early on it was harsh compartmentalization of rules and roles. Back when Danny started hanging out with Sal, Amber commented to Dorothy that she missed him while still thinking he was better off without her, and later on when Sal tries to nudge her back towards him she doesn’t comment on it as part of her roles, but rather that Danny deserved someone better.
So I think it’s not that Amber doesn’t care here, but she’s been heavily muted by Mike’s death on top of getting over Danny since they stopped dating by mid-October. If she were in a healthier state of mind I think she’d tell Sal it’s fine as opposed to insisting that her opinion doesn’t matter, since Danny dated AG, not her.
Hot Toys Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 1/6 Scale Darth Vader Deluxe ($495) & Standard ($315) is up for preorder at Sideshow - shrsl.com/4wcx6 #ad
If you preorder make sure to hit the Exclusive versions since they include a commemorative plaque and cost the same.
btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 13h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
Loading ...
New theory: Amazi-Girl and Mike have a timeshare arrangement on Amber’s head.
As does a nice couple from Dayton, the Walshes. They only attended the presentation to get a free hotel stay during their vacation in Hawaii, but decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.
If we ever see Amber talking to herself about crocheting or giving advice on golf swings, it’s the Walshes turn in her head.
Okay, I’d legit love to see this
Wait, so is she two people when the Walshes take over? Or do they alternate?
Amber’s head contains terabytes of crackfic, she’s got a lot of storage and processing power in there.
By overclocking, she can support up to four personalities at once. It’ll come in handy of she ever takes up Bridge.
Makes sense to me, thanks for the insight.
Hmmm… interesting, but is that how Introjects and alters actually work? Do they each have allocated nutrients, memory and executive processing power or do they have their own?
From what I’ve read, alters share the same brain and nutrients, it’s sort of like dual-booting a computer? The patterns are still stored and preserved, but not necessarily retrieved (like recalling a memory or speaking style) or modified (like storing a memory or emotionally growing). For people with DID, the brain has broken off partitions to deal with difficult info without putting any established personality at risk.
Even people who aren’t plural have a weaker form of this- if we hang out with old friends after a long time, we fall into old mannerisms and emotions, as if we had never grown out of them. For DID, you also actively suppress and separate that mindset, so eventually it becomes its own person.
” The patterns are still stored and preserved, but not necessarily … modified (like storing a memory or emotionally growing).”
Not sure where you got this info from, but everyone in a system definitely stores their own memories, and can change as a person. Unless I’m completely misinterpreting what you meant there…?
Not exactly – everyone is running off the same brainpower. (This can actually be a detriment if too many people want to front/speak at once, haha.)
What they decide to do with that brainpower can vary wildly, though.
Hmmm…. is there any way to increase the fixed pie of brainpower and working memory for alters in a system to use?
Mr. Walsh lets Mrs. Walsh talk all the time, he’s not very talkative and she loves talking, so he just lets her enjoy herself.
Okay, I probably skew a little older than most who read this webcomic, but when I saw the name “Walshes”, I immediately thought of Beverly Hills, 90210.
Magikarp-FITE-ME.jpg
[alt since I can’t find that]
“Those mom jeans look good on you.”
(Kill Bill sirens)
Eh, you beat each other up for a bit and then stopped a quixotic murderer together. That’s enough to make things amiable.
“Let’s fight!” “Them’s fightin’ words!” (The Simpsons’ parody of Thelma & Louise)
Lurleen! Mmmmm.
Also, getting along with people is awful. You have my sympathy Sal.
*reads subtext*
What you talking about Amber’s shirt looks pretty nice.
It’s a callback to Joyce’s grasping-at-straws jab at Dorothy the other day.
I know. I actually think it looks good on her.
that’s not the subtext, that’s the hovertext.
the subtext of the strip is that someone who brings up “semantics” to derail a conversation is probably being gratuitously antagonistic.
Hopefully not your intention here though.
JK LOL
please! i would never spend 20+ minutes excruciatingly workshopping a single pointless comment purely for the sake of making it self-referential!
/s …yes this was just a silly joke =P
Just play mario cart
Look, ever since Rapey McGee’s asshole buddies got arrested, she hasn’t had anyone to fight, Amber. Habits are hard to break and her hands are twitchy.
Help a girl out.
Now what *magic words* do you think are gonna be enough to summon AG?
Replace violence with makeouts and cuddling, it works wonders for most people. Those people currently single, including myself, will just have to imagine it.
So it seems that Sal still doesn’t know about the mental split between Amber and AmaziGirl. As for wanting a fight, I’m convinced that normal(relatively) talking and being is too foreign a concept for Sal.
Two questions today: Do you think Amazi-Girl will actually care that Sal is dating Danny? And how long can Amber keep this up?
I agree, Sal definitely still thinks that Amazi-Girl is something that Amber does, and that the split is a verbal conceit. In fairness to Sal, I’ve met plenty of people who play a character whom they talk about in 3rd person (such as actors, and tabletop roleplayers) and probably not so many people who have DID.
Why, Sal herself might someday learn that she’s related to the Duke of Thingley.
Sal apparently doesn’t read the comments.
Rude!
Sal’s been around Amber/AG long enough, and is perceptive enough, that she has to have noticed there’s a split. She may not grasp the severity of it, but she’s likely aware it exists.
I’m afraid I don’t see how anything Sal’s said so far implies that she doesn’t know that Amber and AmaziGirl are two different people. Especially considering previous dialogue implies that she’s aware of it (stating that Jennifer picking a new name “ain’t like you(AmaziGirl) or probably Carla,” for example)
Yeah, Sal knows, but either she can’t totally wrap her head around one alter dating someone but not the other or she recognizes that both AG and Amber were dating Danny, because they were way more synced at the time and Danny figured he was dating both of them. (He was thinking Clark Kent/Superman, but to be fair I think so was AmbG.)
to be fair to sal, individual headmates dating people instead of just the whole system dating someone isn’t super common. usually it’s sort of a package deal situation.
Oh yeah! I’d forgotten that strip. So Sal at least knows that the split exists and that it’s Very Important to Amber & Amazi-Girl. So I guess she’s just pretending that it’s “gaddang semantics” in the hopes of getting a rise out of them, here!
I thought I remembered that Walky once said something along the lines of “you’re really not just one person, are you” but if so, I can’t find it. Was it Sal who said something like that?
Ethan knows too. (and he’s very, very unhappy about it, since Amber’s/AG’s lack of communication kinda led to their best friend being unidentified and alone in a coma for a day.)
Does anyone else know the deal?
— oh yeah! Walky and Sal know that Amber and Amazi-Girl aren’t just a conceit, that they don’t necessarily share memories.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/04-vote-for-robin/themask/
(Walky learns that Amber =/= AG)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/runin/
(Panel 1, Sal’s asking which one knows what)
Walky knows – at some point he met AG after talking to Amber and them not sharing memories tipped him off (or Amber after talking to AG, I don’t recall.) Plus he told Booster in the reintroducing-the-cast-to-newcomers section, so obviously they know (presumably AmbG aren’t really hiding it to begin with now that AG’s no longer a vigilante, at least to friends they already trusted with the first secret.)
Amber’s talked about it in very blunt ‘sharing a meatbag’ terminology to Danny since the breakup, but I’m not 100% sure he got it at the time – he certainly didn’t BEFORE then. It is however fairly likely he knows since the kidnapping. Likewise ambiguous was Dina, who previously thought AmbG making the distinction in their dorm was for Dina’s benefit I believe? However, I’d lean on the side of her knowing given her pep talk to Amber specifically about Amber’s good points as they were leaving the basement after Ross’s death.
On the subject, because AmbG not sharing memories ultimately caused them all so much trouble, I suspect that most if not all of them were let in on what happened afterwards – at the very least, we know Ethan found out, and I’d bet Joyce, Becky, Dina, and Dorothy all got that with a brief apology. I’d assume Sarah as well when everyone else knows if only out of politeness, but Amber’s much closer friends with the others.
Malaya, Marcie, and Carla may or may not know – we haven’t seen them interact enough to get a good sense either way. No clue about Faz, but I don’t expect to see him any time soon anyway.
Everyone who I haven’t mentioned, I assume doesn’t know – despite their best efforts, neither Joe nor Ruth have made much headway bonding with Amber, and the rest of the major cast don’t really have relationships with her that would merit it. (Booster wouldn’t either if they hadn’t been a handy Exposition Recipient.)
* Most if not all of the kidnapping victims, I mean – of the six non-AmbG victims, Walky definitely knew beforehand and Dina seems like she might have, and Ethan found out afterwards, leaving Joyce, Becky, Dorothy, and Sarah as very possibly knowing now but not finding out onscreen.
Yeah, I think most of the main cast knows she’s AG by now. Off the top of my head, Joyce, Dorothy, Walky, Sal, Danny, Ruth, Marcie, Becky, Sarah, and Ethan all know. Obviously Mike found out too.
Cast members that are in the dark are people who aren’t really ‘main’ characters nor do they interact much with main characters who have reason to put the pieces together – folks like Raidah, Jacob, Malaya, Carla (who is a motherfucking goddess but also doesn’t really know Amber very well), Lucy, Roz, THANKFULLY Mary, and the teachers like Leslie and Robin.
Out of the ‘core’ main cast I think only Joe and Jennifer are in the dark and that’s wilfully so in Jennifer’s case. Meanwhile I think Booster is the only one who knows she’s plural but does NOT know she’s Amaze-Girl.
Hey, auto correct, can you fuck off on calling her Amaze-girl two seconds after I post? Thanks and fuck off.
Amber told Richard that she dissociated sometimes, and for all we know despite appearances he remembered and worked out what it meant after hearing more about the kidnapping over Christmas, as he probably did. Stacy might unconsciously be aware, but I’d be willing to bet she thinks of the change in personality as merely an adorable quirk of Amber’s. “Oh, don’t worry, she just does that sometimes. When she was three she had an imaginary friend I had to leave an extra plate out for. Isn’t that sweet?”
Richard is a doctor, I agree it’s far from impossible that he’s got a clue.
He’s a doctor, but this isn’t anywhere near his field. No reason to think he’s worked it out from minimal clues and has kept it to himself since.
Downplaying and deflecting are the entirety of Stacy’s playbook anyway.
It’s possible but we don’t have confirmation he really understood or took it seriously so I’d leave him up in the air.
Most of those I’d leave open. There’s long been a tendency around here to not only assume characters recognize Amazi-Girl as Amber, but that they also pick up on hints about Amazi-Girl not being Amber. It’s certainly possible some characters figured it out or got read in on the secret behind the scenes over the timeskip, but I wouldn’t assume it without confirmation.
That said, Sal does seem to know.
Reasonable. The reason why I think there’s decent odds the other kidnapping victims know is because the question of ‘if AG (who we think is you) knew they showed up yesterday and were teamed up, why didn’t you warn someone?’ is a bit inevitable, and in that I think Ethan was just the one of those ‘I wasn’t sharing memories with AG’ conversations we saw. But it’s entirely possible Becky and Joyce didn’t ask out of greater trauma.
I get the sense that it’s just a timing issue. Sal knows it might be a few days until she can speak to Amazi-Girl at their next roller derby practice or meet or whatever. And she wants to get this out in the open as soon as possible.
She may not know exactly when Amber and Amazi-Girl get in touch to share memories, but she can presume it’ll happen eventually, and hope that Amazi-Girl doesn’t mind being told via Amber instead.
Didn’t Malaya once claim that Sal’s accent goes away when Sal gets upset? Far be it from me to believe Malaya’s take on anything, but it would be fun if Sal’s accent intensity in this strip means she’s actually very pleased with the interaction.
Malaya’s probably right that Sal’s accent wanes at times, but she’s definitely wrong about it going away when she’s pissed [1], [2]
Makes sense. Oh well!
i mean, she does let an “I” slip through in that 2nd link
It also disappeared when she was talking to herself about giving Danny his new hat, that she didn’t know why she couldn’t just go up and give it to him instead of trying to accidentally bump into him at their usual hangout, before going “… yeah I do.”
I’m highly amused by how Sal’s behaving here. But I imagine most of us are.
Aside from that, I think that last comment by her implies she doesn’t know that Amber and Amazigirl (Passion and Resolve? I don’t know if that name change took) are different people.
Yeah, I get a similar feeling that Sal doesn’t know, which makes me wonder how she will respond if/when that comes up.
Sal’s been on a roller-derby team with Amber/AG for a few months now, and she’s a perceptive person.
Yeah. She specifically referred to Amazi-Girl by name after the roller derby meet.
And just two comments ago she didn’t react with surprise when Amber said that Amazi-Girl isn’t available at the moment, and implied that Sal and Amazi-Girl are better friends than Sal and herself.
*two comics ago
Not two comments ago. D’oh!
At the very least, Sal recognizes that AG isn’t just a role that Amber play-acts at will.
I think Sal might not have been sure which of them Danny was dating (and to be fair their split was much less pronounced at the time), so she’s just covering her bases. Now that it’s been made clear, Sal could basically say “tell her the next time you talk or share memories or however it works for you”. If Amber and AG were two physically separate characters, and Amber saw AG more often than Sal, she could say “tell her the next time you see her” and it would make as much sense.
How I’m reading it is that Sal knows there’s a split. She compares Jennifer insisting on no longer being referred to as Billie as a far different thing than how Amber and AG are separate.
What I think might be the issue is that Sal recognizes the both of them as separate, she might not think they have different opinions about it.
My response to panel 4, Amber you say that as if he didn’t fall for both of you, Fractured mind and all…and that both of you didn’t fall for him.
ok but Danny/Sal/Amber/Amazi-girl love square????
I’m not gonna post this under every comment on the subject, but Sal knows about AG and Amber being different people: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/sip/ (‘It’s not like you or probably Carla, with like, some kind of dysphoria.’ Meaning she considers getting AG’s name right on par with not deadnaming Carla.)
But I don’t think she totally gets that different alters in a system can have romantic relationships that aren’t across the board (or for that matter, different sexualities and genders.) And to be fair to Sal, they were effectively both dating Danny – among other reasons, AmbG were getting along a lot better up until the end of that relationship, and it still didn’t get REALLY bad until after the breakup (where AG started blaming Sal for costing ‘us’ Danny, IIRC.) Amber posed as Danny’s fake-not-fake girlfriend on family weekend to get away from Blaine, and when Danny was uncomfortable because he was dating AG Amber got a bit frustrated there as I recall, since she was AG (at the time they weren’t being written as a system, but with the retcon this still makes sense as I’m not sure either of them really realized AG was her own person rather than strong compartmentalizing up until the car chase made Amber realize she wasn’t controlling their body. I believe that was also around the point she didn’t let Danny kiss her because he was AG’s boyfriend, not hers.) So in all the ways that matter, Amber WAS dating Danny along with AG.
Very thorough, although I’m kinda confused about how both AG and Amber were dating Danny in the “ways that matter”.
Also, I’ve heard some commenters refer to AG as a “tulpa”. What’s the difference between a Tulpa and an alter, if there is one?
My very limited understanding is that alters are created out of necessity and trauma, tulpas are created consciously and/or willingly. WE (a DID system) disagree that Amazigirl is a tulpa as she very clearly operated to help cope with trauma.
Thanks for clarifying.
However, I am still curious. Are there any other differences between tulpas, alters and intojects besides HOW they’re created?
To my knowledge, no, although there are likely subtle distinctions. Like, I’m sure the functions they serve differ on average because the circumstances around their creation are different. There are likely some differences in intra-system relationships since relationship-building with people you’re involuntarily living with is very different from that of people you chose to live with. And of course, alters in DID can be separated by amnesia and be unaware of one another and as far as I know, that’s generally not the case for tulpas since the point of the amnesia is to protect the host from the memory of the traumas.
Introjects aren’t a separate category though, they are a sub-category of alter/identity. Introject just means an identity that’s based off of someone from the external world. Introjects can be based off of real people or fictional characters. Similar categories are things like gatekeeper, protector, persecutor, sexual alter, social alter, Little, caretaker, etc. I don’t know how much this terminology differs among tulpas, though I imagine there’s a fair amount of crossover.
Thank you so much for responding; honestly I’m getting more fascinated by the minute!
Can a Tulpa technically be an introject just by being based of a real or fictional character?
Also, does a trauma or event need to be real to trigger the formation of an introject or alter? Can it be in a dream? And if so, could it be in a lucid dream?
Do alters and tulpas have similar capabilities? Can either of them retain your skills or semantic memories (like driving or programming), or do they have to learn those themselves?
I’m afraid that outpaces my knowledge of tulpas BUT if tulpa-systems and other non-trauma-based plurality work more or less the same as DID systems, just minus the trauma and the dissociation, then these would be my answers:
I don’t see why a tulpa couldn’t be an introject. While in DID the creation of alters is mostly involuntary, it’s still based in necessity and so there is a lot of logic to why certain alters are who they are, and sometimes real people or fictional characters are exactly what’s needed. It would follow that if you had more conscious choice in that process that sometimes that would be the case with tulpas too.
I’ve never heard of an alter being created in response to a traumatic dream. Seems like that wouldn’t be impossible but not super likely since alters that front are typically created to deal with an ongoing external reality that the host cannot cope with alone, and alters that don’t front are created to handle the ongoing reality of the inner world– such as storage of memories, emotions, or managing intrasystem relationships. In both cases, an alter is created to handle something that will continue to be necessary to handle. A dream usually doesn’t have long-lasting impact in that way.
The only exception I can think of is that sometimes alters interact or communicate in dreams. If an alter was consistently causing nightmares or terrorizing other alters in dreams, that might necessitate a split to handle that problem.
I don’t know how memory and skills transfer between tulpas. In DID, the degree to which skills transfer between alters depends a great deal on the amount of amnesia and communication between them. If there was no amnesia, then I don’t know whether skill transfer would be inhibited it at all. There is some amount of natural aptitude that varies between alters, just like some people are going to be naturally better at drawing than others. But if communication is good and memories are shared, then most of the necessary information for skill transferring is possible.
And if the amnesia is severe, then skills don’t consistently transfer. Many DID systems don’t drive exactly for this reason– if you could turn into an 8-year-old at any time, it’s not exactly safe to get behind the wheel. And a lot of systems are unable to work formal jobs because not all of them are trained on the skills of the job.
Also, if anyone who knows more than we do about tulpas wants to chime in, we won’t be offended if you correct us! Most of our knowledge is specific to DID systems, and our guesswork is based on the work we’ve done to separate out the disordered aspects of DID from the plurality parts.
See thejeff’s bit about Mask or No Mask, and my discussion of the ‘cost US Danny’ line and Amber being much more willing to do datey things with Danny in the early stages of their relationship. I think ‘Danny was AG’s boyfriend, not mine’ was a line Amber drew at the end of the relationship (when Danny started realizing this shit was dangerous and was trying to discourage the AG stuff,) and after it was over to try and deflect the idea of friendship. It wasn’t really the case for most of their relationship.
It sort of merged over from “you’re dating AG, so we can’t be dating to keep the secret identity secret” over to a more internal distinction over time. I’m not sure there’s a clear dividing line, though it might have snapped into place after the car chase as you kind of suggest above.
And I think that is rooted in the “all good things belong to AG, all bad things are Amber’s because she’s irredeemable garbage” complex.
Subconsciously, things were going “too well” between Amber and Danny, so she compartmentalized their relationship. (And he did have a relationship growing with both of them, whether or not he knew it at the time.)
Yeah, especially once he started going ‘hey, maybe being a vigilante is actually scary dangerous for you and you shouldn’t do it?’ and AmbG took this as A: A rejection of AG, B: A way Sal was ‘poisoning’ him against them, and C: Clearly he couldn’t actually care about AMBER, that couldn’t be the case, she’s the bad one and if he does she must have done something to trick him or something.
All of which were distorted, one of which she has definitely recognized and worked on and another of which seemed to gel for her post-second kidnapping (‘I can at least care as much about myself as Mike did,’) but she still has some self-destructive tendencies and Amber’s still considering herself a monster, which is bad.
Haha, I shoulda just posted my other two posts here instead.
Yeah, Sal definitely knows that Amber and AG are separate identities, but I think what she’s not understanding right now is that Amber and AG’s rules were that Amber didn’t date Danny, AG did.
Which isn’t to say Amber didn’t like Danny, and early on it was harsh compartmentalization of rules and roles. Back when Danny started hanging out with Sal, Amber commented to Dorothy that she missed him while still thinking he was better off without her, and later on when Sal tries to nudge her back towards him she doesn’t comment on it as part of her roles, but rather that Danny deserved someone better.
So I think it’s not that Amber doesn’t care here, but she’s been heavily muted by Mike’s death on top of getting over Danny since they stopped dating by mid-October. If she were in a healthier state of mind I think she’d tell Sal it’s fine as opposed to insisting that her opinion doesn’t matter, since Danny dated AG, not her.
Also, the first time they slept together, she was Amber by the end. “Mask or no Mask?”
Bee Tee Dubs? I love their Asian Zing sauce!
That’s a restaurant?
B-Dubs is– short for Buffalo Wild Wings.
Mmmm… of all the delicious times I love to live and learn!
What’s your favorite SAUCE there?
I just don’t get what is meant by ‘Bee Tee Dubs’. BTW I could understand, but huh?
[/clueless_old_guy]
It’s by the way. Bee Tee Dubs, B T Dub(ble U), BTW.
Thnx
“/clueless_old_guy”
?? you can turn it off?! Please tell me how!
I mean just tell Amber that CapxFalcon was a better ship than Stucky or something.
“It feels unnatural, y’know”
I would like to see Sal and AmaziGirl fight for Danny♡. FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!!!!
If AG is not in a fighting mood, Ghost Mike sure will be.
“I don’t like us getting along but we’re gonna do it anyway or so help me we’re turning this car around on the freeway and flipping it!”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/highstrung/
I’m remembering the last panel from this strip, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else wanted to look back on this Sal and AG interaction.
I’m kinda glad they’re not fighting each other anymore, considering how things went the last time they fought.
Bee tee Dubs? Why is she referring to my highschool? Booker T Washington
Avatar?
Don’t be a Becky, Sal
Okay I’m just posting to see what Gravatar is associated with what email address
Okay the Autofox logo is associated with my Gmail account.