Plural Stories

"As she walked through the door, twin reflections of the firmset of her back moved closer together in the corner of the restaurant window. The images converged in the mirrored panes of glass and vanished inside each other like chips of colored crystal in a kaleidoscope."

Blurb: In a near-future where same-sex relationships are legally sanctioned but surveillance culture is on full-blast, a woman uses intense full-body tattooing to merge with her lover, so as to escape and overcome together.

Why is it worth your time?: This is a very nontraditional fusion story between two singlets who embrace each other and are strong at each other's weaknesses, choosing to become one being. Gomez is a good writer and worth checking out, though mostly well-known in the lesbian and black presses!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned (though high focus is the inevitable grinding effects of surviving in their society), cofronting, fusion/integration, identityblending, memory work, romantic relationships, setting-specific

Content Warnings: dealing with a surveillance society that accepts queerness... well, some of it... and foster care referenced in the past. This is DEFINITELY a story about your job grinding you down slowly to pieces over time, though!

Accessibility Notes: Available in Gomez's collection Don't Explain and MIT Press's re:Skin anthology. Much to my annoyance (and somewhat to my incredulity), both works are out of print (and the decade-older Don't Explain seems cheaper and easier to get!) and neither were officially digitized. If you want a screen-readable copy, you have to go to Anna's Archive.

Misc. Notes: Jewelle Gomez has some neat things to say about this work, but it contains SPOILERS so will be in the comments below!

Are you fiction, or nonfiction?

Blurb: A ten-year-old who is petrified of threat and danger finds himself turned into a book illustration and sucked into an animated world of fiction, where he must overcome his fears with the help of Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror.

Why is it worth your time?: This movie bombed and was considered a stinker, but we watched it recently and found it entertaining enough. The animation is pretty and the mix of animation and live-action to delineate the "real" world from the fictional one was neat!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, otherworld, fictioneers, friendship

Content Warnings: This is a movie for children. It has some minor children's movie adventure scares.

Access Notes: Available on VHS, DVD, and streaming (currently on Amazon and Apple TV). The DVD version is what I found, and it had subtitles in English and Spanish, plus dubbing in French. Someone has also put it on archive.org.

Misc Notes: Macauley Culkin got nominated for a Razzie for his performance, but honestly we didn't think it was bad!

Submitted by quailfence! Thank you, quailfence!

"No one can choose who they are in this world."

Blurb: You control Kris, the only human in a town full of monsters. One day, you and the local bully, Susie, are sent to get something from a supply closet, and end up falling into a mysterious other dimension called the Dark World. There they meet the Prince of Darkness, Ralsei, who tells them that the three of them are the "Delta Warriors" of an ancient prophecy and are destined to save the world. As they explore and fight through the dark world, however, they soon begin to question the prophecy and whether following it is the right decision. It also becomes increasingly apparent that Kris is their own person separate from you - and that they do not like what you're doing

Why is it worth your time?: The game explores questions about free will and destiny in a very interesting way, with the tension between Kris and the player being a big highlight of that theme. Also, engaging gameplay, fun and funny characters, lovely pixel art, and a banging soundtrack

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse:low-focus (unless you play the alternate/secret route, which is abuse:high-focus), 1+: otherworld, relationships:enmity, relationships:teamwork, type:possession

Content Warnings: non-lethal violence, minor blood, threatened apocalypse, past character death and resulting grief, you (the player) are controlling someone against their will, bullying, death threats, abuse is mostly implied/referenced but there is a brief scene of verbal/emotional child abuse, brief scene of a parent being drunk, trauma due to parental divorce, self-esteem issues, Christianity-esque religion

The alternate/secret route involves the player forcing two characters into a manipulative, abusive relationship and murder

Accessibility Notes: Available on Switch 1/2, PlayStation 4/5, and PC via Steam. The first two chapters are available as a free demo, the rest is paid. The demo is also available on Itch.io. A Japanese translation is available. All text is on screen but there is no dub; one miniboss fight in ch 4 involves audio and visual cues with the visual cues going away after a while, but the visual cues will stay if you die and retry more than once or tell one of your party members that you can't hear something in the scene prior to the miniboss. Let's Plays exist but I haven't seen any

Misc. Notes (if any): This game is a not-quite-sequel to Undertale, and Toby Fox recommends that you play that game first; however you will still be able to enjoy/understand Deltarune if you haven't played Undertale. Currently, only 4 of a planned 7 chapters are out - chapter 5 will release in 2026, and beyond that the release schedule is unknown

"Nicholas Paul is you, lad. This lovely lassie found you at once in her head, but she could not find you in person for a long time to come. So you became Nicholas."

Blurb: An adventure writer runs into her protagonist in real life... but how can this be? And what does it even mean to have life-or-death power over this poor bastard? Now they have to work together to figure out what happened.

Why is it worth your time?: This book is like a romance novel version of Stranger Than Fiction, and a lot of attention gets paid to the power dynamics of what it means to be author and character; it really, really sucks, turns out, and this is super relatable for anyone who's had similar concerns! This is a very traditional heterosexual romance, but the characters behave like decent, reasonable people and the idea is neat. If you're into Harlequin romances, this might be for you!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, fusion/integration, identityblending, fictioneers, romantic relationships

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: This book is available on paperback, and some generous soul has bootlegged an OCR PDF of it on piracy websites. It also got a translation in Italian, astonishingly, under the title Stregati dalla luna!

Misc Notes: In the About the Author section: "Regan Forest has, for a long time, fantasized about creating a character--and then meeting him in real life. That spark generated Moonspell."

Submitted by a kindly anonymous! Thank you, Anon!
 

Why would Teddy put his camera in my backpack? And when? Did he put it there on his way to--what? Meeting someone? But if the meeting was important, he would have wanted to take a picture.

 

He's but the one who put it there, Luke says.

I almost jump. I told him to go away, but he's come back.
I left it for you.
No! It's one thing for Luke to talk to me, but he can't just take off and do things. The very idea is terrifying. That's impossible, I try to tell him.
I told you--what happened to Teddy has changed everything.

Blurb: A gap in his memory the afternoon that his best friend disappears in a redwood forest has fifteen-year-old amateur photographer Ian Slater wondering about his own role in the mystery, and who he can turn to for help. To make things worse, his childhood imaginary friend, Luke, is back and very insistent that Ian needs to do something about his friend's disappearance.

Why is it worth your time?: This book is a young adult novel with a first-person perspective and plurality at its core. It's a relatively quick read and what caused us to realize that we are, in fact, a system. See content warning for more information.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse:intermediate-focus, cofronting, type: medical, type: switching

Content Warnings: Ian as the POV character describes both past and present emotional abuse and physical neglect from his father, which he downplays for the first half of the book. His mother is both a fellow victim and an enabler. At the end, it's revealed Ian's father tried to kill his friend Teddy (and at the end tries to attack Luke when he fronts and reveals everything). A major aspect of the novel is Ian experiencing blackouts ("zoning out"), which might be disconcerting. Ian also thinks Luke is an imaginary friend, but over the course of the novel "he" realizes that "Ian" is a subsystem in a DID system, and that Luke is an independent headmate (though those exact terms aren't used. The text also implies but doesn't state that Luke is a Luke Skywalker fictive.) A teacher who helps Ian and Teddy is a former psychologist who was accused of abusing an 11-year-old client, but Ian believes him when he says that he's innocent and he does seem to have good intentions in the story.

Accessibility Notes: Can be found in print at libraries. Multiple screenreadable versions are also available on archive.org.

Submitted by a generous Anonymous! Thanks, anon!

"Become the new #1 hit idol group, battle interdimensional music monsters, rebel against your corporate overlords, wield a mighty soul-devouring experimental weapon, and be unstoppably, unapologetically gay."

Blurb: Mobile Rhythm Game/Bullet Hell/Visual Novel hybrid about an idol group fighting monsters born from music. You play as their Producer, a wheelchair-bound accountant working for the Antiphon company who was suddenly promoted to their manager. She is tasked with developing the girls' bonds with each other to fight Noise Beasts by Beyond, a mysterious masked figure who hides much more then she lets on.

Why is it worth your time?: One of the members of STARLIVHT, Sumire, is plural. Her alter Hitori is written with nothing but sympathy and is treated as his own person despite his doubts. Both characters are playable, which I'd like to go into more but it's hard to really get into how well the gameplay functions with their plurality in a short blurb, so I'll just say it's very interesting. Their other alter, Firebird, is also treated sympathetically despite being a minor antagonist for part of one chapter. Firebird is not playable directly, but two of Sumire and Hitori's shared styles make several references to them.

Producer is also revealed to be plural, but I don't know how to summarize that here succinctly.

Plural/+1 Tags: abuse:intermediate-focus, identityblending(? regarding Firebird), relationships:family, relationships:teamwork, relationships:friendship, type:switching, type:setting-specific, type:on purpose, visions

Content Warnings: (contains spoilers) unreality, identity issues, abusive parenting, references to physical and emotional abuse, depictions of transphobia and mentions of transphobia directed at trans characters, some blood, major character death, minor/previous character death, forced outing by a shitty parent,

Accessibility Notes: Game is free on iOS and Android mobile devices with optional one-time in-app purchases. Game is also a sequel to NOISZ for PC, but can be played and enjoyed as a standalone title.

Misc. Notes: Game is just generally really good with it's representation, including a very canon major sapphic couple, major trans girl character, and several other minor queer characters.

Also the lead developer is plural.

"That was her true gift to them: she taught them how to keep hoping in the face of the world that told them their memories were delusions, their lived experiences were lies, and there dreams were never going to come true. Perhaps that was her secret for engendering loyalty in a student body that was otherwise disinclined to trust adults, listen to them, or answer when they called. She believed."

Blurb: Jack and Jill were twins sent to a Gothic mad science world, and when they got kicked out, they came to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children until they could return. Now Jack's back again, having been bodyjacked by Jill; can she get her own body back, save her twice-dead mentor, and keep her undead girlfriend going? Lucky for her, she has other wayward child heroes to help her...

Why is it worth your time?: The Wayward Children series is a weird edge case; many a gateway system, fictionkin, or walk-in can sympathize with the longing to return to a world very unlike this one, and McGuire expresses that longing and need beautifully. It also has one of the best depictions of body dissonance I've ever seen; Jack and Jill might be identical twins, but their bodies are NOT the same, and Jack KNOWS it. The whole series may be well worth a look, though even Come Tumbling Down doesn't exactly have bodySHARING, just bodyswapping and theft.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate focus, bodyhopping, otherworld, enmity, setting-specific

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in hardback, paperback, audiobook, and ebook.

Misc Notes: Though Come Tumbling Down is #5 in this series, if you only want the Jack and Jill books, you can read #1 (Every Heart a Doorway) and #2 (Down Among the Sticks and Bones). Honestly, I would've preferred to have read #2 first. If you want those books, #1 is available in Hebrew, Portuguese, and German, while #2 is available in German and Portuguese.

Submitted by matsushima! Thank you, matsushima!

Full title: Exploring the Aventine: An autoethnography on making sense of immersive daydreaming in the context of developmental trauma

"I summon my fantasy world characters and imagined others into dialogue and interaction. As we all converge at an intersection of immersive daydreaming and developmental trauma, ancestors whisper of intergenerational trauma and patriarchal psychiatric discourse."

Blurb: Immersive daydreaming is fantasy activity that is vivid, intricate and highly absorptive. Akin to an ongoing ‘movie-in-the-mind’, it often has the quality of feeling real and can continue over a period of months or years. The term ‘maladaptive’ daydreaming (MD) was introduced (Somer, 2002) to describe immersive daydreaming before researchers investigated it as a distinct psychiatric condition (e.g. Somer, Soffer-Dudek, Ross & Halpern, 2017) related to developmental trauma.

This thesis presents an autoethnographic journey into the Aventine, a term I use to refer to an elusive, liminal space. I ask readers to adopt and experiment with various lenses I use in my attempts to navigate immersive daydreaming from a critical, post-qualitative perspective. … The pathologization of creative responses to trauma is then countered to reveal fantasy as a site of liberation.

This creative-relational research is situated, experience-near and dialogical. Attending to the social/political, I challenge traditional forms of trauma-related fantasy representation and claim a space where the intuitive, imaginative and numinous are welcomed into therapeutic practice and scholarship. This thesis highlights the importance of process-driven research: from intrapsychic wars to synchronicities , and ultimately to a sense of homeness, I invite you as reader to accompany me on what became a reclamation of artistic and spiritual freedom.

Why is it worth your time?: It is a PhD dissertation on immersive daydreaming that includes transcripts of extensive inner dialogues between the researcher and real and imagined others from the researcher's life and immersive daydreaming story that spanned over a decade as well as real world historical figures.

Plural/1+ Tags: creator speaks from experience, people: copies, type: setting specific

Content Warnings: racist intergenerational trauma

Accessibility Notes: Full text PDF available on the University of West England (UWE) Bristol Research Repository

"ARTICLE III: The man going by the name Brother Francis is charged with claiming to have begun life miraculously, without father or mother, in the body of a boy about thirteen years of age."

Blurb: An epistolary short story about the fall and rise of Brother Francis/Leopold Graz, who in a post-nuclear apocalypse preached brotherhood and kindness: condemned, burned alive, and then beatified... at a cost.

Why is it worth your time?: Pangborn is a kind writer who tells the story of a boy, his invisible Companion who urges him to great things, and the major front switch that occurs when he is thirteen, which leads to his fall and rise under the pseudo-feudal fundamentalist church afterward. It's pretty good!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, switching, serially singlet, spiritual voices, visions

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Only officially available on paper, but anthologized multiple times; one of them, Still I Persist in Wondering, is screenreadable on archive.org. (Please ignore the pulpy cover.) Available in German and Italian.

"The ancestral visions persisted. One day I was flooded with grief and felt as if I was slipping from life. Frightened, I began calling out to my grandmother Lela--she was the one person who I believed could help me. The air filled with an electrical energy and a feeling of peace washed over me. My breathing calmed and I felt my grandmother's presence. My grandmother who had been deceased for eighteen years had rescued me.

"Yet, I still did not trust that my Ancestors really supported me. I believed that I had experienced a psychotic episode and feared that I would end up as one of the 'crazy' ones..."

Blurb: a group of writers "share short stories, poems, prayers, and personal accounts of Ancestor reverence--intimate glimpses of our experiences with the Ancestors, those descended from our bloodlines and some not related to us by blood, but whose lives continue to inspire us."

Why is it worth your time?: It covers a bunch of different writers of different backgrounds (though with a focus towards the Yoruba tradition of Ifá/Orisha), all interacting with their ancestors in different ways, through dreams, channeling, divination, and more! A very personal and interesting collection on the whole, but nonfictional stand-outs include "Erasing the Lines" by M'kali-Hashiki (about losing the ability to contact spirits, and struggling to regain it), "Responding to the Call of the Ancestors: Transforming Vinegar into Honey" by J. Phoenix Smith (about dealing with intense family trauma via ancestor veneration), and "License to Forgive," by Iyalorisa Ayokunle (about having to banish an ancestor from her altar). Also includes a 1990s short story by Nisi Shawl about the nuances ancestor worship when combined with the American legacy of slavery.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus (depends on the chapter), creator speaks from experience, the dead, family relationships, spiritual, voices, visions

Content Warnings: discussion of slavery's legacy, family trauma, complicated family relationships, fear of madness

Access Notes: This book looks to be out of print and a paper-only release. Though still obtainable, it's not easy to get, so I'm probably going to be feeding my copy through the library book-scanner for accessibility purposes. (This means, regrettably, that the obnoxious handwritten footnotes of the previous owner will be included.) Stay tuned!

Misc Notes: Full Table of Contents (with most spirited-relevant entries in bold, but the whole thing is worth a read):

• "Introduction" by Luisah Teish and Sauda Burch
• "Reaching Back To Reclaim Genius" by Awo Fanira
• "The Breaking" by Xochipala Maes Valdez
• "Remembrance: Mary 'Pula' Lucero" by Xochipala Maes Valdez
• "Sparkle and Sheen" by Sauda Burch
• "Erasing the Line" by M'kali-Hashiki
• "Mourner's Kaddish" by D'vorah J. Grenn
• "Remembrance: Douglas Johnson, Sr." by Jessical Johnson
• "The Old Folks Say" by Luisa Teish
• "Remembrance: Ralph P. Orduna" by Sauda Burch
• "Turning to Face the Ancestors: A learning journey recovering heart and memory" by Gail Williams
• "Remembrance: Samuel Williams, Jr." by Gail Williams
• "The Cosmic Eye" by Uzuri Amini
• "Remembrance: Aunt Emmalou" by Arnia Dobbins
• "Let the Dead Bury the Dead" by Sauda Burch
• "Remembrance: Family" by Gilbert Burch, Sr.
• "Remembrance: Donald L. Williams" by Gail Williams
• "Remembrance: Louise Merrill" by Amanda Bloom
• "My African Odyssey 20 Years Later: the Ancestors of Goree Island" by Uzuri Amini
• "Remembrance: Great-Aunt Nancy Collier" by Sauda Burch
• "Remembrance: Sarangerel Odigan (1963-2006)" by Daniel Foor
• "Ancestral Legacy: Excerpts from an interview with Andrea (Courage) Johnson" by Sauda Burch
• "Remembrance: Marsha King", by Andrea Johnson
• "Full Circle" by Iyanifa Fasina
• "Remembrance: Rose Maes" by Conrad Maes
• "Responding to the Call of the Ancestors: Transforming Vinegar into Honey" by J. Phoenix Smith
• "Remembrance: My Brother Charles" by Rashidah Tutashinda
• "Acnestral Spirits" by Uzuri Amini
• "License to Forgive" by Iyalora Ayokunle
• "Remembrance: Durinda 'Winta' Anderson" by Karinda Dobbins
• "Remembrance: Great-Grandpa Pablo Valdez," by Xochipala Maes Valdez
• "The Rainses'" by Nisi Shawl
• "Remembrance: Grandpa Pete" by Rebecca Rodriguez
• "Preservation" by Luisah Teish