Plural Stories

Submitted by erinptah! Thank you, erinptah!

“OK, Cathy,” she said, not in the least perturbed. “I’ll tell her.” Then she stood up, and started a conversation with herself, in which she told Jodie she wasn’t seeing Mummy or Daddy because she had to be safe.

Blurb: When seven-year-old Jodie was taken into foster care, her behavior was so difficult that she went through five carers in four months. Experienced carer Cathy Glass almost passed on her too, until her own (teenage) children insisted they wanted to see Jodie through. Eventually Jodie began to disclose details of the abuse, overlooked by Social Services for years, while Cathy struggled to get her the professional care and long-term support she deserved.

Why is it worth your time?: The rare outside view of a small child who appears to have DID, who ends up in the care of adults that are attentive and well-informed enough to recognize it.

You wouldn't know it from the promotional copy, and DID doesn't get invoked by name until nearly the end of the book, when a couple of alters firmly identify themselves as Not Jodie. But the dissociative traits are visible from day one, when Cathy reports Jodie having intense, distracted conversations with what she assumes are "imaginary friends." Among the kid's other issues, most of them Cathy never overtly connects with the alters, but there are a few that the reader might recognize as DID-related anyway (e.g. struggles with time perception). All of which suggests that Cathy's original real-time notes about her experience with Jodie were pretty solid.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse high-focus, cofronting, people: children, type: medical, how would you tag for "real system described from the outside POV of a singlet but not in a horrible way"?

Content Warnings: past child abuse (sexual and physical), past animal abuse, physical aggression and sexual acting-out. Others involve SPOILERS; see comments

Accessibility Notes: Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

Misc. Notes (if any): There's some awkward misinformation in the dialogue (e.g. describing the non-Jodie headmates Reg and Amy as "characters"). Thankfully, Cathy's actions stay refreshingly grounded in "managing the issues Jodie-and-company actually have," there's not much focus on her idea of what DID "should" be.

Submitted by packbat. Thank you, packbat!

There wasn’t much to do now, so Syrus jumped off the bed to do some simple exercises.

Syrus asked, [So what are we supposed to do besides that plan?]

[The best we can do is not cause any trouble and have the ceremony pass without any issues.] (Luna)

[Fair enough.] Replied Syrus, in the middle of her first push-up. At the peak of the second, she asked, [Want me to accidentally burn the priest?]

[...] (Luna)

[Hello, Earth to the Moon?]

Lilly sighed, [She needs to say no, but wants to say yes…]

“Hehe, I know.” Laughed Syrus.

Blurb: It began with an accident, or maybe a miracle is a better term.
Three souls dying by different strokes. One died in glory and blood; One died, betrayed but glad it was over; One died poor and alone.

Then on the child’s fifth birthday, the three sleeping souls awakened. Three souls, one body, two desires, and containing all the powers each had in their last life.

Were they destined for greatness? No. But when the past comes to haunt them, their home taken away, they have to make a decision… May it be as simple as a majority vote.

“Let’s squash them!”

“...can we just run away?

“Were you never taught to aim for the eyes?”

Why is it worth your time?: Okay, so you know the fantasy stories where someone gets reincarnated and ends up powerful because they still have the knowledge and abilities from their past life? It's one of those, except three people get reincarnated in the same body and they have the power of all three working together. It's not, like, a deep exploration of plurality, just a cool body-sharing fantasy adventure story.

And also the protagonists' new parents figure out that their kid is a plural system and are super supportive and loving. Which is really sweet and heartwarming.

Plural/1+ Tags: closeting, cofronting, otherworld, the dead, teamwork, spiritual, setting-specific.

Content Warnings: violence, injury, poisoning, and death; murder, kidnapping, arson, child endangerment, and animal death; grief and trauma.

Accessibility Notes: online, screenreadable, free. Scribblehub link.

Misc. Notes (if any): The way dialogue is formatted for completed sentences, with both periods inside the quote and commas outside, is unusual, if pretty clear and comprehensible. The first part of the story goes up to Chapter 63, but it's ongoing and it sounds like there's a lot of plot still to go. (Cataloger note: Holy crap there are well over a hundred chapters, I don't think I want to manually back all that up.)

"Please. I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please. [...] I wouldn't try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you'll let me, or I won't come in."

Blurb: Deep space captain Adam is on his first trip through deep space when a free-floating "matrix" personality escapes containment and takes residence in his body. She seems nice enough, but the rest of the ship is deeply afraid; how can they hide her?

Why is it worth your time?: It's a good, bittersweet tale of two different people finding and connecting with each other in space! Give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping, closeting, cofronting, teamwork, friendship, intimate relationships, setting-specific

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in audiobook, ebook, and still in print; also Italian, French, and German. Also on archive.org

Misc Notes: Nominated for Hugo, Locus, and Nebula.

Zhonos interjected "It'll take time to adjust to the fact that you are still out there, yet also in here. And the other Time Lords… they won't treat you like they do now, we're all… an aberration to them".

"But we'll be here for you" Nistri added "And you'll be with us for whoever comes next. For number six".'

Blurb (from AO3): After sacrificing themselves to save the Doctor from an elder god, Yanistriterquyzhonosorkyquiana, a Time Lord agent with regenerative dissonance, barely manages to escape, at the cost of their fifth incarnation's life. Crashing onto Cretaceous Era Earth, they regenerate into a form best fit for survival, a Velociraptor.

Five months later, Yanis VI, aka Skyfallen, has become closely connected with a local pack of Velociraptors who have helped her to survive in her new form. However when the Doctor returns for her help, they uncover a conspiracy that could shake Gallifrey to its core.

Why is it worth your time?: First — the author takes a badly-realised, stereotypical 'alien DID equivalent' from somewhere down in the depths of canon, and hollows out and rebuilds the ethics of it, 'till the story doesn't doubt for a second that being many-in-one is, in fact, fine and awesome… and that you don't trust an ableist fictional society to be just this once correct about the danger somebody must supposedly inherently pose, even if the society's what's handing out your plot hooks. It actually goes through with applying what people say the occasional best things about Doctor Who ethics are… that you trust difference, and that you listen to people's perspectives, over traditions and impersonal systems that would like them to stop existing being inconvenient.

The collective at the center of things are vibrant, distinct characters, and they have a great teamwork dynamic, it's fun to read them solve disagreements! The author's also put quite some thought into the mechanics of how this plurality-equivalent's dealt with, and how other things are, the edges of what's possible and what's 'acceptable' and how that affects people living in these contexts.

Speaking of, beautiful, beautiful nonhuman societies worldbuilding… the plot mechanics're dizzying, but I love, too, the moment when it finally clicks into place. (The ending's a happy one, I believe, and the cleverness is one bit of how.) Fair warning, you might need a lot of lore and context to get the most possible out of this fic — I think I caught less than half — but if you can roll with unintroduced elements, or you do know that lore and context, this is the worthwhilest thing…

1+ Tags: abuse:low-focus (not connected to the existence of the plurality-equivalent), nonhumans ('Time Lord', velociraptor), median (sort of, they consider themselves 'the same person' in a way), serially singlet (sort of, people can all act through the body, but their body is always of the latest arrival), setting-specific, cofronting, teamwork

Content warnings: Adventure-story-typical violence, predatory animal behaviour, war mentions, death; ableism/pluralphobia, a lot; some mentions of ~abuse — there's nothing that's called abuse, but you could very easily interpret it anyway.

Access notes: Read it on AO3, here!

Submitted by acorn_squash! Thank you, acorn_squash!

“Jay wants there to have been consequences, he thinks. It nags at him: the senselessness of it. That Poor Kid, he keeps thinking; he's thought it so often it needs capitals. A proper title. Twenty-something years and a grave so shallow he imagines Barnes can feel it when the wind comes through the cherry trees in Arlington. Or around that rock in the mountains, under that frozen river—or spread thinly between one and the other, a stretched-out restless haunting five thousand miles long. He doesn't know which is worse to contemplate. That Poor Kid. And then there's Jay, turning his back when it's convenient and plumbing memories when he feels like it, pawing over the corpse and checking its pockets for spare change. They'd wrestled, somehow, and he'd won.

“He knows it wasn't like that, not really. Wilson'd implied as much, when he'd suggested that Jay had been born from the remnants of Barnes's healing brain, like the muck in a chrysalis reforming into another creature. But one time Jakob told Jay the story of Ya'akov, his namesake, wrestling the angel in the desert and coming out with a different name, a different identity; as a people—and Jay hasn't been able to stop thinking of it as a battle ever since. Jay wonders what Ya'akov's family thought, when he came limping back and said: my name is Yisrael. Whether he'd felt new. Whether he'd felt that he'd left something, back there in the sands, in the place where his hip had been twisted.”

Blurb: A series of Captain America and the Winter Soldier fanfics exploring the Soldier’s time in HYDRA, his escape, and his recovery, as he slowly decides who he is and who he wants to be. Only the second CatWS fic ever to be nominated to this comm!

Why is it worth your time?: This is really, really good fanfiction. (I think the excerpt above speaks for itself.)

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse: high-focus, cofronting (very rarely), memory work, people: the dead, type: setting-specific, type: switching (exactly once and never again)

I chose the setting-specific tag because Jay was born (as far as we know) because of brain damage that was only survivable at all because of sci-fi tech.

Content Warnings: Extremely graphic torture and murder, including of children and animals. (You can safely assume that everything in these content warnings is extremely graphic, unless noted otherwise.) Auto-amputation. Abusive medical experimentation that borders on body horror. Suicide attempts and self-harm. Vomit. Starvation. Memory erasure. Drug addiction. Forced chemical castration (off-page, but it’s a plot point; Jay isn’t especially upset about it, but he didn’t choose it either). Mentions of death in childbirth. Mentions of rape, including rape of children.

There’s also consensual sex in some of the sequels. (You can skip them if that isn’t your thing.) “I know the afterglow” has rimming and penetrative anal sex. “open your houses and let in the night” has outdoor blowjobs and anal fingering.

Accessibility Notes: Free, online, screenreadable. The main fic has been translated into Russian; the sequels are only available in English. Whole thing has been backed up on Wayback Machine.

Submitted by erinptah! Thank you, erinptah!

"As B, I felt very grateful to you for treating me as if I were a "real" person and allowing me to express my own personality. With every one else I had to pretend to be A, and my feeling of gratitude and the fact that you asked for my co-operation -- put me on my honor as it were -- was the underlying motive in telling you so much."

Blurb: An account of the various phases of dissociated personality, written by the patient, after recovery and restoration of memory for all the different phases. Such an account could only be given by a person who has had the experience, and who has the introspective and literary capacity to describe them.

Why is it worth your time?: Possibly the earliest medical-multi memoir! Clear and engaging writing, it makes for a quick, fun read. A reader from the 2020s can regularly recognize "hey, if they were around today they'd call that [term that hadn't been coined in 1909]." The first half is written by an integrated "C" who can remember the experiences of both "A" and "B", though those two struggled with severe amnesia barriers for a long time. The second half is by B, who recounts her own experiences, including co-consciousness (in that word!) with both A and C.

The first half is formatted as a series of letters to their psychiatrist, who requested that they write it all up for a scientific journal. The psychiatrist contributes some prefaces and footnotes, but he largely gets out of the way and lets the system tell their story. When he brings in his own perspective, it's usually to say "this is how my observations corroborate the experience my patient has described."

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, creator speaks from experience, fusion/integration, relationships: teamwork, type: median, type: medical

Content Warnings: none. The authors talk about difficult experiences in very general terms (e.g. a "shock" of "an intensely emotional nature"), but say plainly that they aren't interested in going into detail.

Accessibility Notes: Digitized on archive.org. Text version was auto-generated from the scanned pages, so it has some errors, but is overall readable/searchable.

Misc. Notes (if any): Fusion/integration was a therapeutic goal for this system, and they were relieved and satisfied with the results. The "median" tag seems appropriate for both their early experiences (where they describe a "B complex", which was identifiably separate, but hadn't yet "flowered" into "a distinct personality"), and their post-integration ones (where B experiences herself as still existing, just fully co-conscious with C).

"I’m him, too, but then I do what he would,
And when he touches his chest, I know I’m not him."

Blurb: A poem about the subjective sensation of soulbonding.

Why is it worth your time?: It's short and sweet, a time capsule to the soulbonding subculture of twenty years ago. Give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, fictioneers, identityblending, intimate relationships, plural creator

Content Warnings: None

Access Notes: Read for free online here!

Misc Notes: Laura Gilkey identified herself as not multiple, but on the plural spectrum in her May 2002 blog entry ~Ramblings on Soulbonding~, thus the tag. Uncertain about the exact date; it could have been written in the late 90s, like the Trinity?

Laura Gilkey also made five comic strips about soulbonding, entitled 7 Wonders of My World, but it is sadly lost media.

Submitted by erinptah! Thank you, erinptah!

"You saved me. I survived because I knew I wasn't alone. You were always there, so alive, so full of hope...You are the only real superpower I ever had."

Blurb: Steven Grant is an ordinary London retail worker, with an interest in Egyptology and a problem with sleepwalking. Marc Spector is a mercenary-turned-superhero, fighting evil as the Avatar of the god Khonshu, on one last mission to stop a divine genocide. And they were headmates (oh my god, they were headmates).

Why is it worth your time?: Possibly the most mainstream DID rep to get a ton of positive reviews from IRL systems. The headmates start out disconnected, spend some time aggressively clashing over their different values/priorities (not to mention Steven's instant crush on Marc's wife Layla). Then they need to lean on each other's skills to survive a classic superhero world-saving quest, get dragged through some magical trauma-processing, and ultimately figure out how to understand and appreciate each other. Oscar Isaac plays both of them, and (with the help of an amazing crew + diligent FX team) has amazing chemistry with himself. Avoids the usual Marvel settings to bring us to London and Cairo; it's the rare Egypt-centric series driven by IRL Egyptian creatives, and it shows.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, cofronting, memory work, otherworld, people: imaginary friends, relationship: friendship, relationship: teamwork, type: medical, type: switching

Content Warnings: Genre-typical violence. Others contain SPOILERS, see comments.

Accessibility Notes: Streaming version has multiple translations, subtitles in multiple languages, and a couple of audio tracks with voiceover descriptions included. Also available on DVD.

Misc. Notes (if any): When the show's portrayal of DID gets criticized, it's mostly over aspects that have been simplified or dramatized to keep things clear for the audience. Example: at first, when we see Marc and Steven switch, it's physically exaggerated, like they're having a seizure...because new viewers need the visual cue that something disorienting and unusual is happening. The guys have more subtle and realistic switches later, when the audience has gotten the hang of how it works.

Meanwhile, the series takes care to get a lot of important dynamics right. Like "if one headmate is doing distressing things behind another headmate's back, it doesn't mean the first one's a horror-movie villain, it means they have different ideas about how to stay safe." And "friends/loved ones don't have to be perfect experts, or to disregard their own needs, to be a good supporter for a system." And "sometimes alters are based on fictional characters, it's fine." And "trauma holders deserve to be told the trauma wasn't their fault." And "healing with DID doesn't require keeping The Original and getting rid of everyone else, it's about everyone figuring out how to work together and support each other."

"He... I don't know how to say this either. He wore his face differently. The MacDonald he loosened into was changed, somehow older."

Blurb: A crew of free-rolling barflies assist a young telepathic man in trying to contact his comatose brother in the mental ward.

Why is it worth your time?: Spider Robinson at his compassionate, bad-puns best; he has a thing about group telepathy that reads very powerfully even after fifty years. Plus it's short.

Plural Tags: abuse low focus, cofronting, family relationships (brothers), setting-specific

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: You can find this story in the omnibuses Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Callahan and Company, and Callahan Chronicals [sic]. It was also in Analog magazine from May 1975. I know at least ONE of those has been digitized and been screenreadable, Callahan Chronicals I think, which is also available in audiobook. Available in the French collection Le bar du coin des temps, the German collection Die Zeitreisenden in "Callahan's Saloon" and the Italian collection I crocevia del tempo.

Misc Notes: Part of a series, but can be read stand-alone no problem; the early Callahan stories were episodic on purpose, since they were being serialized in magazines.

“...It’s complicated,” he said. “The thought of being someone’s girlfriend, or boyfriend, or whatever, it really creeped us out.”

“Is it because they saw you two as one person?”

“No. It’s… Like…” He sighed. “Subsa. What are we?”

The butterfly tilted his head. “You’re PJ.”

“No, like, you and us. What are we, together?”

Blurb: A butterfly, a boy, and a robot dog try to figure out what their relationship is to each other.

Why is it worth your time?: It's short, sweet, and loving. Give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, nonhumans [butterfly, robot dog], queerplatonic relationships

Content Warnings: None whatsoever.

Access Notes: Free, screenreadable, available in Spanish. Read it here! (EDIT 2024/10/6: deleted and the Wayback Machine can't play it.)

(EDIT 2025/02/12: contacted author, was asked not to rehost or back it up. This is now officially lost media.)