Seconded on the Nautica toy. I also want an Aileron. (The Transformer, not the aircraft part.) Aileron actually looks fairly easy to realize in plastic, so… Get on it, HasTak.
Oh gosh. I’m calling it now: Roz will call Leslie to tell her about getting Robin to show up at class, then zoom out and we see Leslie is actually in bed with Robin.
Come again? That’s one of the main reason for separation and smaller do-overs: getting rid of the personality you became stuck with in relation to a social circle and your role in it. Humans are obsessed with identity. I’m a male alto singer and I finally changed to doing performances in drag because it’s a real downer if the principal reaction you can expect from your audience is “why are you singing like that when you are obviously a male?” “Was there anything wrong or bad with it?” “No, but you must have a reason for that?” They can’t relax and enjoy. Perform in drag, and they can.
Yes, things are really that stupid. In my opinion, it’s more an identity disorder of society than of individuals.
Back when I had a system, there was a, er, a… system. in place. we couldn’t like pick at will, but it’s not like we didn’t have any influence over the situation either. My situation was a lot like Amber’s, which is to say, somewhat purposeful compartmentalisation rather than like, traumatic, sudden involuntary splitting, which is what DID usually is.
get your bullshit out of here.
The last thing the world needs is more of your self diagnosed tumbleritis bullshit. how do I know you’re full of shit ?
Simple. No one who actually has been diagnosed with disassociate identity disorder calls it “a system” I have friends who have fucking DIED because tumbleristas told them “oh this is normal you just need to xxx” encouraging them not to get professional help. Every time I see one of you special snowflakes it fills me with uncontrollable rage when i think about the damage you do to people who genuinely need help
I have been diagnosed with DID, and we do use the word “system”. It’s used in a different context than “collective”, but it IS used. We’ve been working on working together more, so there are fewer memory lapses and we can all (mostly) perform our various functions without too much chaos. There is a certain amount of cohesion that can be achieved when we all agree that we’re working for the same goal, but there will always be some disagreements on the best way to achieve that goal. I function as the “face” of the collective, sorting through the others’ various thoughts and desires and seeking out the best or most appropriate way to behave outwardly. Basically, I maintain the outer system and do what I can to keep it properly connected to the inner system in an attempt to allow the overall “person” we comprise to live relatively normally. When I fail to do my job properly, another can and will front and behave as they see fit, given the situation.
From what I can tell, AG takes control when she believes Amber isn’t capable of dealing with a given situation at hand in a manner that either of them finds acceptable, and Amber generally allows it because she agrees. I’d also take a stab in the dark and suggest maybe there’s a third in there who functions similarly to one of us, whom we call V. V has a horrible temper, but more than that, he learned from our father that hurting people makes us feel strong, feel like we’re in control of something. Like our father, he goes after those he CAN hurt, not necessarily those who set him off, so bystanders often reap the suffering he doles out just because they can’t or won’t stop him. My bet is that AG exists to take the violence their “V” wants to dish out and explicitly looks for people who she believes deserves it so it can’t be vented from their system without hurting innocents. Amber probably doesn’t even recognize that the third is there. I used to have issues with unwitting co-fronting where I saw what the body was doing and felt like I was the one doing it, but couldn’t make “myself” stop; Amber might experience something like that when she goes all red-background.
Or, y’know, I might be talking out of my arse and over-analyzing a comic. *shrug*
What’s your damage, sir? You can disagree with an opinion whiteout bringing out insults and (bizarrely) accusing the person of frequenting a popular blogging site that you seem to irrationally hate.
Your “special snowflake” wording makes you seem 100% more full of shot than the other poster
What is and is not normal in cases of any dissociation disorder are debatable at best. That said, Amber more resembles CPTSD, a relatively recently distinguished variant of PTSD that is so far rather under studied and lacking systemic diagnostic criteria, than DID or any other dissociation disorder with systemic diagnostic criteria.
Huh. Seems odd to call it a variant of PTSD when it has dissociative symptoms. Seems like it should be in the dissociative paradigm too, not just the anxiety paradigm.
Way too much of what happens works under the dissociation umbrella. Cerberus hasn’t been wrong about what she’s experiencing.
This makes me wonder if DID is also a prolonged stress disorder. Because, basically, Amber O’Malley just seems not as bad as full out DID.
trlkly, diagnoses are classified under the causes as often as they are under the similarity of symptoms. If it’s dissociation caused y depression, it’s found under the emotional disorders section. If it’s caused by acute stress, it’s found under the anxiety disorders section. Yes, many diagnoses have similarities to others, but the point of categorization is to make identification and treatment easier. If the dissociation is caused by anxiety, it would be important to treat the root causes of the anxiety and trauma in order to address the dissociative symptoms.
DID itself has many different potential causes from a traumatic experience to difficulties adjusting to new situations to conflicting beliefs and/or moralities.
Wouldn’t she still have PTSD? I feel like it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Also, people who grow up in dysfunctional and/or abusive environments can and have attested to the situation of being one person in the presence of their abuser, and being totally different in places where they feel safe.
Amber has DID, but I’m wondering if it might be a little bit like that. You stuff the “great/true” version of yourself inside yourself, it only comes out to people you trust, but when you get beaten down enough the version that your abuser claims you are (Blaine thinks Amber is a timid, worthless, dysfunctional powder keg. Notice how Amazigirl is the opposite.) is there all the time. Even after you’ve left the environment, hence the PTSD part as well.
But it results in many people having shaky identities, because often who they are with their abuser is a facade or simply a part of who they are, and they become insecure because they’re never truly allowed to be themselves or find out who they actually are. I honestly don’t think Amber has BPD like other people have said, even though one of the core parts of the diagnosis is the lack of or shaky identity.
This is just my layman’s ignorant thought about it, but living with someone who im pretty sure has it (BPD) I’ve always thought of it as an especially severe form of PTSD, even though it is a personality disorder due to the nature of the Self being shaky, feeling like everyone is against you, feeling like you constantly have to defend your existence by attacking others, trusting no one, explosive bottled up anger, inability to regulate emotions in situations that shouldn’t phase most people, etc to the point where it’s all you are most of the times, depending on the severity of course. And the correlation between BPD and severe abuse, although not all who have it were abused. Alot of these also happens to overlap with PTSD, but Amber does not seem to have that disorder.
Yup PTSD and DID can both be things a person has and frequently go hand-in-hand. Amber definitely exhibits many signs of PTSD surrounding her years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of Blaine as well as surrounding the Robbery Incident.
To answer Derek, conscious switching between alters can exist, even in somewhat disassociated individuals, especially if there are “firm rules” when specific alters can show up (which can make a nice compromise step towards integrating disassociated alters). Whether or not that’s “normal” is a much harder question to answer. I can at least say some measure of semi or fully conscious switching to alters having more or less control over the body is not uncommon and may be more common among integrated individuals.
Personally, I’ve been integrated for a long time, but I am able to consciously shift greater control to specific alters semi-reliably and have used that semi-reliably to, for instance, better be able to handle emotionally intense situations in my day job, like supporting a student with a physically abusive dad.
Classification of mental issues can be extremely difficult due to the prevalence of causal and corollary relationships between various conditions. DID, for example, has a list of myriad other issues it reasonably commonly coexists with in a given individual.
I’m personally suggesting CPTSD here because Amber and AG don’t exhibit the level of differentiation that one sees in case studies of DID (I don’t have direct experience with DID, mind, so have to rely on what I have learned from published material) and doesn’t quite fit any of the other recognized diagnoses in the dissociation spectrum while concurrently showing very strong PTSD triggers with elements more akin to CPTSD than the more recognized variant and some elements of one or more personality disorders as well.
It’s really hard to tell at this point exactly how dissociated Amber is. (That’s probably misphrased but I am tired as hell right now.) Whether AG is a full fledged alternate personality, or closer to just roleplay.
It’s not DI because she’s aware of everything going on in both lives.
This seems more like some kind of borderline personality disorder combined with psychosis. And she’s become incapable of seeing how unhealthy and destructive she really is.
I still don’t know why people are pulling up borderline personality disorder into the mix. It just doesn’t fit the presentation at all. Hell, she just got through telling Sal she didn’t like her but didn’t hate her–the exact opposite of devaluation.
Sure, there is a type of dissociation in BPD, but it involves becoming emotionally flat, detached from their emotions. Not having two separate identities that you channel different behaviors into.
The claim of C-PTSD actually fits really, really well. To the point that I wish I’d found it before. But Google doesn’t even let you type it in without saying “Did you mean PTSD?” And I was looking through dissociative disorders, while this would technically be an anxiety disorder.
I also think she’s not psychotic. She’s never lost contact with reality. She unfairly characterized some things, but she was completely in touch with what they were.
I am kinda confused about the claim of BPD??? Borderline mood swings don’t really look like the switch between the two maybe-seperate personalities. She’s wildly self destructive but that’s seen in a myriad of disorders.
Not sure about the psychosis either. The Amazi-girl persona looks more like a deliberate coping mechanism vs a detachment from reality. She gets carried away but isn’t convinced she actually has superpowers or anything.
People with actual experience with this shit have repeatedly pointed out in the comments that losing time is not a universal symptom. Just because pop culture zeroes in on a worst case scenario (losing time, hostile alters, no control over switching, etc) doesn’t mean that’s the only version that exists.
Politely, I am sorry to say that that is an inaccurate perception. DID does not require its most extreme symptoms in the same way that an Autism Spectrum Condition does not need to express its most extreme symptoms to be real.
At its most basic level that model directly erases the reality of integration and how that operates. A DID person who integrates is not magically “cured” and now one whole personality who is now just like any neurotypical individual.
There is still fragmentation. And an integrated mind simply means all of the alters are sharing memories and speaking to each other and are more or less working for common goals even if each may have their own emotional interpretation of events and thus their own conclusions about best current action.
In my conversations with other folks with DID, semi and full integration are not uncommon even if most of the media attention and psychological research are on folks with full disassociation because that’s a “sexier” subject in the eyes of many.
This last part has been further exacerbated by it being lazily applied as a “twist” in narratives, often with an assumption that a person with DID is physically dangerous and potentially a serial killer.
This negative societal assumptions about what DID people are like has at times negatively impacted my life and the lives of other DID people I know, leading to increases in us being mistreated or presumed to be dangerous. And it’s a major reason I am not as out in my daily life about my life-long experiences with the condition as I am about my asexuality and transgender identity.
I do not mean to call you out in specific on this, but I would greatly appreciate it if folks who do not have the condition were a little less assured their ideas about what DID “can or can’t be” and a little less adamant and insistive on erasing what are actually very common life experiences for DID individuals.
I know very little about DID, but I assume that, like many disorders, it exists on a spectrum with a variety of symptoms that do not all have to be present or that can vary in intensity. Generally, I am content to assume that whatever we have seen to be true of Amber/AG is true of her, whether or not it’s characteristic of any particular disorder. I appreciate you and others with experience with similar symptoms helping to fill in the blanks for me.
Yeah, especially since DID is near the top of the list of “scary” mental illnesses used for cheap plot twist. Because obviously us really not neurotypical people are dangerous to society and not more likely to be victims of ableist violence ourselves. No, no. We’re the bad ones. (So much sympathy. Gotta love fictional misinterpretation and psychology at large ignoring you because you the real person aren’t what it “should” look like.)
Imagine her going the rest of her life as only Amazigirl. Instead of just when she’s being a superhero, all the time. Like, in class, graduating and later, going to work in a pantsuit. Always in a mask, speaking in purple, but in general leading a normal life during the day, but as Amazigirl.
I have and it makes me really really worried for Amber/AG. Because despite Amber and AG’s beliefs, Amber is not some ball of messed-up junk to be thrown away and if she is treated that way, she will fight back like most anyone against the threat of being killed and Amber/AG will continue to get less and less integrated.
I could be wrong, but from what I’ve seen it seems less like she’s got separate identities and more like she’s doing some pretty extreme compartmentalization.
I’m honestly not sure there’s a difference, if that compartmentalization is to the point of asserting two different identities. And she does–she thinks of Amber as a separate person than Amazi-Girl.
The reason for arguing it’s not DID is just that she doesn’t seem to have any separated memories. But even that is a bit of a debatable subject. Plus, as someone pointed out above, C-PTSD makes a lot of sense for her.
A man with fabulous hair, keen powers of observation, and a knack for cons is gonna do some private detecting with his logical, geeky friend who knows many useful facts?
They’re not cut up, they’re scraped up. Punch something hard enough (like, say, Gashface’s cheekbone) and the delicate skin over your knuckles tends to break open.
Looks more like bruising to me, but it can do that.
Basically, you’re smashing the meat on your hand between the bones of your hand and the bones in somebody’s face. Do that hard enough or enough times and the skin will break as a result
Skulls and jaws are pretty hard things to punch, hence why boxing gloves are a thing. Actually if sports like boxing were serious about reducing the incidences of brain-damage AKA punch-drunkenness, they would ban boxing gloves as boxing gloves encourages you to repeatedly aim for the head.
The actual solution is to ban boxing, but we can’t do that, oh no.
(A good case can be made that we literally can’t – or rather, we can make it illegal, but it’ll still happen, and just be even more brutal. Because humans fighting other humans – for money, fame, personal animosity, “mating rights”, or whatever – is something humans do.)
…but if she’s saying “which I think means…” that would imply Amber hasn’t actually come back, Amazi-girl is just pretending to be her… unless Willis would have kept the tag as Amazi-girl if that were the case?
I would hazard that it doesn’t have to be so binary. Many actors will go through similar things when transitioning into and out of roles: do something that the person you are wanting to be (character or self) would do so that you can meld better into the role. She may have a few rituals to help her to transition when she wants to. For instance, shadow boxing to get into the “Amazi-girl” mindframe and looking at fanart to feel more like “Amber”
I don’t there’s anybody in the room to get worried. Considering how late she was out, Dina probably woke up and left hours ago.
Though if she is trying to avoid giving Amber control, that would be a very troubling development. She’s never seemed to resist giving control back before.
I guess the theory is that if AG has decided to “act like Amber” she might choose to do this to “get in character,” so to speak. She may recognize that she has to spend some of her time not superhero-ing and this could be a part of that.
I don’t particularly agree with that line of thinking. I believe this actually is Amber, but I suppose I could see the alternative.
I definitely don’t know enough to speak intelligently about “alters” and related subject material here. I’m speaking from a “Can I imagine myself or a me who is not myself in this situation or a similar one and what possible realities can I imagine associated with or tangentially related to that.” It’s really late, I was low on sleep to begin with and this probably doesn’t make sense…which sometimes (generally, I suppose) means “don’t post it you’ll regret it,” but what can I say it’s one of those “bad decision days.”
I think that’s all Amber. It’s just a kind of self-mocking punchline. She said “do some Amber time” sat down at the computer to study and a few minutes later found herself searching tumblr. She’s just commenting on what she’s doing.
Man, I was Amber. (not in other ways, like vigilantism obvi, but in this). But this type of shit also made me fail out of not one, but two degrees, so I can’t recommend this lifestyle. Tbh.
I meant pretending to study while actually being consumed by fictional characters and worlds and not actually studying, btw, not this whole multiple personalities thing. For the record.
Skids? Nautica?
Oh … more Transformer stuff.
«yawn» And I sat up for this update? Good thing TNT is in the middle of a “Star Wars” marathon and is showing ‘Episode 3’ tonight; the evening is not a total waste.
Maybe Amber is growing disillusioned with the role assigned to the Amber identity, who is someone with few connections who is entirely wrapped up in escapist fantasy and mind numbing gaming. Like, Amazi Girl can only work if Amber has no commitments or relationships to maintain. The cracks that may start developing in the Amazi Girl persona now that her black and white mentality has been directly challenged and grudgingly defeated by the latest Sal encounter could maybe start spurring growth in Amber as she stops finding solace and sublimation in Amazi Girl.
It’s also possible I’m reading way to much into one strip and being too optimistic.
Like, I’m reading her dialogue less as confusion and more as boredom. “Oh, yes, I’m Amber now. The person who ignores her commitments to accomplish nothing, which is actually just a mask designed to prevent forming attachments.”
Someone as purpose driven as Amazi Girl, who is a valid part of Amber, would not enjoy this. It’s a waste of all the good that compromises Amber and combine that with Amazi Girl losing her purpose because Sal is not the monster she created in her head and she keeps failing at getting Justice for Joyce.
Amber’s social life isn’t an act. Socialization is an effort for her. Even with Danny, she liked texting even though he was standing right next to her. She might be less awkward than when she was younger, but she pretty clearly would be a bit reclusive even if she weren’t out all night fighting crime.
I had a long reply typed up, but my browser ate it. It had links and everything.
I get why you think that, but I think that if you read through all of Amber’s strips you’ll find that’s not really supported by the text. How Amber describes herself and what Amber actually does do not match up.
A person who finds being social as something draining probably wouldn’t have gone to the college party with the Ryan incident. Especially not by herself. She would have already been in costume if she was there to patrol and the tags call her Amber.
She also wouldn’t improvise a lie about being Danny’s girlfriend to his parents and then maintain said lie for several hours over the afternoon. She impressed his parents by being personable and outgoing.
More importantly we never see evidence of her being drained by social interactions. And I mean, half the cast comes across as being more socially awkward than Amber does except in conversations involving Amazi Girl.
Almost every one of Amber and Danny’s conversation are vocal. The only time they text from in the same room is when they are in public and referencing Amazi Girl. Not out of discomfort, but out of necessity to keeping up with masquerade.
It seems more likely that Amber is using people’s perceptions of how people that look and act like she does in order to obfuscate who she really is. “The quiet girl on her DS who never comes out of her room must be shy, she couldn’t be Amazi Girl” “Bruce Wayne is an asshole with too much money. no way he’s Batman.” “Clark Kent is so inept. How could you possibly think he’s Superman?”
It also has the dual purpose of avoiding entanglements with people, so they can’t interfere with Amazi-Girl’s work.
A person who finds being social as something draining probably wouldn’t have gone to the college party with the Ryan incident. Especially not by herself. She would have already been in costume if she was there to patrol and the tags call her Amber.
Uh, that “Amber at the college party” remains a noodle-incidentmystery, because she actually went there as Amazi-Girl!
Someone can find socialization draining even if it doesn’t lead to them shutting down and needing to recharge the way Dina does. It can also vary based on the nature of the interaction. I know this, because that’s been my own experience.
Like Amber, over time I’ve gotten less socially awkward and less stressed out by socialization, though I don’t think it initially was quite as difficult for me as it was for her. Some of my more recent friends were actually surprised to learn I’m not naturally extroverted, not just because they didn’t meet me when it was more obvious, but because they met me in social situations where I was completely inside my comfort zone. Outside of it, I’m not obviously (as far as I can tell) terribly awkward, but I’m much quieter, less talkative and more self-conscious. Its only certain types of situations that seriously stress me out.
Talking to new people, or people I just don’t know well isn’t really a problem for me on its own. If two cooworkers are having a loud conversation (or better yet, a debate) near my desk about something I’m interested in, I can jump right into that easily. If I’m talking to someone I know, and other people I don’t know join in, that’s also pretty easy. I end up coming across as friendly, talkative, funny (sometimes) and even a bit loud. I like people and I love attention, so at times I can even be difficult to shut up.
It’s initiating conversations — especially, but not exclusively with strangers — that stresses me out the most. Unless I have a specific reason to be talking to that person, a specific subject to talk to them about, or the situation specifically requires that I talk to that specific person, it tends to be very draining for me. Even with people I know well, I still find one-on-one conversations a bit stressful. In groups, I don’t have to make eye contact as much, or for as long, and there’s less pressure on me to have a response to the person talking, so its easier for me to actually listen. Thankfully, for some reason it isn’t as bad when I’m on a date with someone as it would be normally.
As a result of this, I prefer small gatherings to big crowds, and being forced to interact with people for long periods is exhausting. Dancing is basically impossible. To this day, just standing near the dance floor trying to work up the nerve is enough to make my head start feeling fuzzy. I’m just too self-conscious. Not many people see me shut down like this though, because I avoid the those sorts of situations if at all possible.
My point is that — as with many things — there isn’t just one way that being introverted / shy / socially awkward can manifest in a person. Especially when it comes to what is outwardly noticable. People are really complicated.
Given the fact that we know that when she was little, Amber was so shy she barely talked out loud, it seems really unlikely to me that Amber is now pretending to be more introverted than she is. Certainly not to the extent you seem to be suggesting. None of the behaviors you point out as things she “wouldn’t do” if socialization were still stressful for her actually feel out of place, based on my own experience. She’s learned social behaviors and expanded her comfort zone with experience and practice, and found work-arounds for some of her other issues, but they’re not gone completely.
I could, however see her using reasons like “avoiding entanglements” to justify backsliding into self-imposed isolation, and no longer making the effort. That feels much more likely, especially considering the concerns others have raised about how Amber and AG seem to think Amber is even more worthless than before. She might no longer feel its worth the energy required for Amber to have a social life, which would be a very bad sign.
I think I agree with you.
She is Amber because it is time to be Amber. Daytime, study, games, classes, no social life.
AG comes out at night or in vigilante situations. And yeah, Ambers life would bore her.
Yeah, I’m glad we cut to morning, because I really wasn’t looking forward to what might happen with the black girl with a record standing around at midnight looking roughed up after an assault.
Not super new, but even then Amber at strip’s beginning still had HOBBIES – the constant video games and Transformers fandom might have been introverted and sometimes relatively low-energy-using hobbies, but she had a comics pull list, she played Mario Kart as Amazi-Girl indicating it was something she did genuinely enjoy (as a potential date activity if nothing else,) she used her computer knowledge for more than just class as the app would indicate, and she did things that weren’t beating people up and stalking Sal.
Whereas since at least the last week in strip-time, we haven’t seen her do much more than claim she “stayed up all night reading fanfic” in an attempt to cover her tiredness and go through the motions of college studentdom. Now with that indication she’s forgetting what Amber usually does during weekdays where she can’t stalk Sal for hours on end? That’s a pretty serious warning sign.
I’m thinking it might be a side-effect of trying to make AG the “golden alter” so Amber has to be the “bad alter”. Like to build up the mythology that AG is everything that is good and pure and ideal in her, she’s been robbing from Amber and the richness of her life and connections in order to make her seem more worthless and thus justify giving AG more and more control.
Especially given she is trying to blame her bad traits as Amber sneaking in. That might mean things she usually considers primarily Amber stuff (like video games and comics, which we know mean a lot to Amazi-Girl because she literally made herself a superhero and named herself accordingly) are being cut out.
Which cannot be healthy, especially with how her superheroing is going lately.
The incidents with Joyce then leading up to her encounter with her father: her conversation with Walky on the roof, things she said about herself as if speaking of another person – all these made me think that she was heading for a major split. I’m not a dr., but she was not acting normal, no way.
Sal confronted her to stand on her own two feet and quit living in the past, because she herself had been there and done that and found there is no percentage in blaming others forever for what they did to you. Get over it.
This last encounter has made her review her chief protagonist not as symbol that is a concrete base of her fear- but rather as a human being. She apologized to Sal. Sal doesn’t know for what, but I think soon will.
I think waking up and ‘switching’ to Amber, is not to much diff. from waking up hungover and ‘switching’ to faking your way thru the day anyway. Sort of. She’s aware of being Amber and its time to do the day thing.
Hope that the past few days will make a real diff. in her and that she continues to reach out to Sal. Sal already said that shes ‘making new friends.
Good things may be happening for both of them. But then, we do have Willis and his plans for escaped asshole Ryan, and what of Dorothy with Ryan’s photo? Hope all is going to go well, but I think I know better….
Ana C. likes using future comic as Gravatars. Her current one is a crop of what I’d call panel 5 (counting the all black one as panel 1). She’ll most likely have a new one tomorrow. I wonder if I’ll notice.
I’m a bit curious about something, and apologizes if it’s been discussed before, or if it’s just invalid. What if Amber is the ‘alter’? Like who she was meant to be was Amazi-Girl (sans costume), and the trauma of her youth buried that under who we know as the primary personality.
Personally, I’ve fallen out of favor of worrying about which alter may be the “original” viewing it sort of like speciation. But some DID people find strength in identifying one of their alters as an “original” alter the others split off from.
Hmm… This might be interesting. Does have Amber have a sort of ‘hangover morning’ after Amazi-Girl has been active? It will be interesting to see how much memory she has of last night and how aware she is of what has happened.
I’m so far 0 for 0 on successful predictions of what happens in the comic, but I thought this was amusing and in keeping with DoA, plot- and character-wise:
SAL: *knocks on Amber’s door*
SAL: Hey, sorry ta bug ya… I guess you’re Amazi-Girl’s techie friend?
SAL: Amazi-Girl put this app on my phone to track her phone, and there’s somethin’ wrong with it. It keeps sendin’ up alerts about where her phone is. I can’t figure out how to get rid of ’em. Makes me feel like a creepy stalker, too. Think you can turn it off or get rid of it?
*Amber is staring in dumbfounded shock*
*Amber silently takes the phone, and starts working on it*
*Sal looks around the room*
SAL: Hey, someone really likes dinosaurs.
*Sal peers at one picture in particular*
SAL: Huh, this is a T-Rex eatin’ the Calc TA. That’s pretty funny.
*Amber silently returns Sal’s phone.*
SAL: Thanks. Later, kid. *leaves*
SAL: *thinking to herself in the hall* That probably explains why Amazi-Girl keeps hanging around here.
SAL: *still thinking to herself*: Amazi-Girl and that kid back there have similar looks. I wonder if they’re maybe distant relatives? *shrugs*
Incidentally, I thought at first that Sal would recognize her brother’s name on the T-Rex picture — but in checking the archives, I saw that we don’t see the bottom of the picture when it is handed in or returned (to Dina in error) so we don’t know if he put his name on it or not.
Thinking on it, though, I suspected not.
OTOH, she might have recognized the art, since she was sitting right next to Walky when he drew it — but on the other other hand, she might well have been too busy feeling flummoxed by the math to pay attention to her dorky brother’s scribbling.
*shrug*
I see that Mike utterly unashamedly did sign his “Your mom + a nickel = prostitute” note.
Hey, it’s bisexuality awareness week, and since I came out to two people yesterday* I thought I could come out to this comment section too. Also Danny figuring his sexuality a couple years ago was a big reason I found out I was bi ( big reason N# 2 was Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo+Juliet)
So hey I’m bi
*Actually for one person I was outed against my will via lack of respect for my privacy for which I’m still royally pissed off and very worried about
This whole thing is a tangent to this actual strip
It really sucks you were outed against your will, but I wish you nothing but the best. The most important thing is you’re happy and hopefully everyone around you will be as supportive. If not, I think I speak for everyone when I say you have the support of the entire DoA community!
It wasn’t a horrible person, it was a mistake. But things that came after it weren’t really so good, so yeah I’m really angry about it. Really hard not to tell the person to just fuck off from my life for a while
Noooo, Amber definitely is not exclusively full of rage. Notice here that it’s Amber doing nonchalant enjoyable Amber things – engaging in non-superhero hobbies, which I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s fallen behind on in the last week or so. (Like, is it just me or have we not seen Amber playing video games for a LONG time? And since I’ve posited that provided a violence and competition outlet before Amazi-Girl’s fulltime vigilantism, that is potentially a VERY bad thing.)
And despite what Amazi-Girl was claiming in the last round of strips, Amber’s *NOT* the alter who was nursing the constant obsessive hate-on for Sal. Amber would trigger, panic and black out. Amazi-Girl’s the one who’s been stalking her, the one who broke up with Danny on the grounds Sal was “poisoning him”, the one who spent hours fighting crime by beating up people under spurious logic to vent afterwards, the one who thought saving her life was a bad thing, the one who initiated the parking lot fight for the sake of fighting Sal, and the one who was entirely willing to have a knockdown drag-out fight with her until the crowd made her realize the racialized component and the fact that, that evening, /Sal had done nothing wrong./ That was all on Amazi-Girl.
(Amber was the one to beat up Blaine, but he’s HER supervillain, not Amazi-Girl’s. As to the original stabbing, the tag says Amber and I’m inclined to believe it, but due to it being literally the origin moment of them starting to split and me not knowing too much about how DID works but guessing based on how much overlapping interest they have, I don’t think there was really a distinct difference between the two alters until either the months after the robbery – when Blaine’s ‘I’m not paying for therapy let’s just teach her how to beat people up protect herself’ self defense classes started enforcing the whole violence as an outlet and presumably the fighting in rage = bad thing* – or over the summer when the stress over Ethan’s coming out and the opportunity presented by college made her start seriously gathering equipment for real life vigilantism.)
* Not that we know that’s where she internalized it, but since a lot of self defense disciplines talk about that because they don’t want people going out and getting sued, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Blaine managed to pitch it to the adults as a healthy alternative to therapy.
Uuuuhhhhh… I’m not so sure. When you’re going to do stuff you usually do, do you often say “I guess I better do some Regalli time” like you were punching some clock? When you do it, do you think “welp, I think that means doing this thing, maybe, I guess?”
The tags and the blush seem to support your side, and I certainly don’t know near enough about DID to have any certainty on this, but is it possible this is integration and that AG is getting the upper hand on what characteristics of what personality are left in the end?
Not really much, which is why I find this worrying. But there’s definitely a significant “what should I do, I guess this makes me happy, why isn’t this making me happy” Tumblr scroll thing I’ll do during particularly brain fogged days – particularly during depressive episodes, I’ll do something like pull up a Word doc trying to write or wander into a bookstore hoping to strike interest and then stare flatly at it for hours and then get more depressed it isn’t working. (Also, I don’t delineate my online/offline personas THAT much but there is a degree of third personing I do in my head and there are definitely things I associate more with my IRL name and things that are more Regalli. Pretty sure that’s an autistic thing and I don’t really dissociate as I understand that works, both names are me and it’s more what circumstances talk about what, but like. I am distinctly not even remotely neurotypical so maybe not the best person to ask about this.)
Also, regardless of who’s in control right now, the fact remains that Amazi-Girl is not in fact the golden alter she thinks she is and Amber the useless bad one with no redeeming qualities, like Willoughby was asserting. Amazi-Girl’s just as full of rage as she is when she’s Amber, they just handle it differently.
(And you’d have to ask Cerberus about that but guessing based on the way she talks about it and what little I know of other systems, I don’t think that’s how it works when dealt with healthily? But psychology’s a particularly bad crap shoot in this regard and again, I don’t have firsthand experience.)
I dunno, in my experience, it’s really hard to full on dump aspects of one alter’s personality on another. Like, as far as the alters are concerned, they are people with people desires and wants and thought processes, just with different forms of emotional process, resonance and goals or even responses to PTSD (i.e. you can have an alter “stuck in time” in a traumatic moment who doesn’t see what’s happened sense as fully real or important).
So, alters can grow and adapt traits, but it’s unlikely, or at least unlikely in the experiences of DID people I’ve heard from for AG to have actually handed off her negative traits to Amber.
What seems more likely is AG has dumped off the blame for said actions on Amber and both Amber and AG believe that Amber is just “the dumping ground for the unwanted traits”.
FWIW, I think that there is a distinct ‘Dark Amber’ where she stores all her Blane-induced anger and hate that is quite distinct from the quiet, quirky but generally friendly Amber Prime (whom we see in this strip).
Yeah, Amber and AG’s characterization of Amber don’t fit what Amber is actually like and it definitely feels like AG is somewhat embarrassed being caught out being awful and has decided to internalize it so as to protect the illusion that AG is flawless and wonderful and Amber is a hot mess of garbage.
By that I mean, assigning her bad behavior (stalking and obsessing about Sal, inflexibility, yelling at Danny) to Amber. Which is such a two steps forward, one step back situation as it seems like AG has basically just replaced Sal as the villain incarnate in her mind with Amber, viewing Amber as some dead weight that “makes her” do bad things and distracts from “the glorious mission”.
And that makes me hyper worried given my own experiences of believing one alter was the “golden alter” and another was the “awful one I needed to protect everyone from”.
Seriously, even if that last line was a joke, the fact that we haven’t seen her definitely and genuinely investing in any of her hobbies in so long is WORRYING to me. Even if I’m wrong about video games having served as an outlet for Amazi-Girl that didn’t require ACTUAL punching people, even if her pull list has dramatically dropped in the last couple weeks because of Weird Big Two Shit and she’s only reading the Transformers comics at the moment, or she only fell behind because of the glasses thing, or WHATEVER, it is not a good sign that she appears to have spent so much of the weekend as Amazi-Girl.
If for no other reason than the fact she needs SLEEP. Those midnight stalking sessions are not good for the health.
I have been there and that is not a fun place to be. I don’t think I’ve ever quite had full-on hallucinations, although one time I kept thinking I saw my cat in places it wasn’t and not in places it was… but, they’re kind of like that sometimes even when I’m not sleep-deprived.
Ohhh, yeah, that’ll start screwing her over in her superheroing too.
(Hopefully she’ll get enough sleep to keep the full on hallucinations at bay but muddled thinking is pretty much the last thing she needs right now as it stands.)
As far as we can tell, Amber has been checked out for Amazi-Girl for most of the last two days. She was Amber before running into Danny the day they broke up and the day after before hearing Sal outside her door, but otherwise it’s been Amazi-Girl in the driver’s seat.
OR you could warn Joyce that the guy you were chasing may have gotten her name and phone number from when he briefly had your phone the other night! You know, since most phones sort most recent messages first! Am I the only one concerned here?!
(although of course if Amber actually went missing it wouldn’t be an AMBER Alert because she’s not a minor… but on the other hand, AmaziGirl is technically only five years old so that layer of the joke isn’t ENTIRELY inaccurate)
Panel 3: This is the most concerning panel to me. Like Panels 1 and 2 she’s waking up and settling back into her Amber alter, but Panel 3, she looks at the bruises on her hand and for a second, doesn’t even recognize them or seems surprised that they are there.
Which makes me really worried that AG might no longer be sharing all her memories with Amber (especially ones she feels would “worry her” or “set her off” (like say a big team up with Sal)). And that’s a bad road, especially when combined with how much extra control AG has seized this weekend. Amber/AG could be very well setting off on becoming more disassociated and uncommunicative and that would make it harder to reintegrate from that.
And this bit also concerns me with the very minimalistic way she’s responded to the breakup, letting AG take the main lead and just supporting her decision without question. It really seems like Amber’s low self-esteem and AG’s lack of regard for her worth are convincing her that she’s worthless and unimportant compared to the “golden alter” AG.
Panel 6: This seems reinforced in panel 6 where she seems annoyed and perturbed by her hobbies and interests as if viewing herself as trash for her interests.
I’m also deeply concerned by the “I think” in this panel…
Panel 4: And the “i guess i should do some Amber time” in panel 4. It really feels like Amber is letting her own lack of self-esteem and AG’s lack of regard convince her that she doesn’t have any worth and is just a chain around the neck of AG and that is setting up a line of thinking where Amber will feel it is “best” for her to “vountarily” give more and more control and time to AG and minimize her own value and interests.
This is especially concerning for me because back in middle school (I’ve had DID since at least when I was 5), I believed one of my alters was a “golden alter” and another was an awful horrible monster I needed to protect everyone. And so I gave more and more power and regard to the “golden alter”, caged and mistreated my “monster alter” and ignored the real massive negative sides to my golden alter up until the point where that alter took full control to drive forward one of my suicide attempts.
That was an awful wake-up experience for me and so I’m really hoping that Amber/AG can figure out what’s wrong with this road before it gets that bad.
You’ve mentioned your story of the “golden alter” who ended up being anything but several times in these comments and I must say I’m very curious to hear the whole story.
Granted, this is a deeply personal story (not least because it involves your suicide attempt) so if you’d rather speak of it in snippets like you’ve done so far rather than the whole thing that’s 100% a healthy boundary to have with strangers on the internet
My take. Amber sees the bruises and knows full well where they came from, it was just a reminder of last night. I don’t think she seemed confused or surprised, she was just slowly waking up.
The Amber Time thing is an acknowledgment that she finds her normal life dull and boring. or at worst, she is depressed. Depression aggravates anti-social tendencies.
I don’t believe Amber has any type of Split personality. AG is one part defense mechanism, one part need fulfillment, and one part stress reliever.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s been any indication that Amber doesn’t remember what Amazi-Girl has been up to, or vice versa.
I’ve been doing armored combat as a hobby for a good many years. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up the next morning with bruises and contusions that I didn’t notice in the heat of battle, or that are way more spectacular the morning after.
In regards for her breakup, I’m wondering if she feels that she’s not “supposed” to have any say on that matter, since it was Amazi-Girl who was dating Danny.
The eye change is, to say the least, disturbing. I worked in psychiatry for a few years and was invited to CME training sessions with the medical staff. One of the lectures was on dissociative identity disorders and a video was shown of a session where a murderer was questioned using a drug to break down the barriers and allow the other personality to emerge. The physical change in posture, voice, and eyes was spooky at best. Let’s hope A/AG’s treatment is a little (Actually a lot) more gentle.
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oh here we go
now kiss
Not sure if you intended your picture to match your comment so well or not…
I always intend everything I ever say, ever.
So we can take everything you say as “straight from the horse’s …” ummm…
I love that pic was Pinned by the man once known as _gerald on the old It’s Walky! Nightstar forums.
Poor Skids.
(Spoilers for MTMTE, if you intend to read it, and you should.)
Oops, my link didn’t work.
Why’d you have to remind me. Dammit ;_;
Skids ;_;
Nautica toy when?
Seriously. I need a Nautica like yesterday.
But last week I finally got a Chromedome to go with my Rewind, yaaaaay.
Seconded on the Nautica toy. I also want an Aileron. (The Transformer, not the aircraft part.) Aileron actually looks fairly easy to realize in plastic, so… Get on it, HasTak.
That’s not Tumblr!
I legit don’t know how to Tumbl. I only view two (sets of) Tumblrs: Willis’s and mine.
damn it iPad logged in the wrong acct
I’m just waiting for “Ann Aside” to show up.
…or perhaps your brother, Reg
Herb Aside is pretty dull. He’s really anti-marijuana. Whenever he finds any, he incinerates it in the fireplace while yelling, “WEED, BEGONE!”
That made me chortle like some kind of huge dork. Well done.
I’m really not sure that’s the best idea when it comes to disposing marijuana…assuming you’re actually anti-marijuana.
y’all keep forgetting these are actual characters of mine (Reg is the dad)
To forget, I would have to have known in the first place. I just thought you liked punny names
And twin brother Fratr.
Damn it amber! no more sneak peeks a the Amazi-girl movie it’ll be out soon
I guess nothing exciting happened at the rally or between Marcie and Sal
It probably went like this between Sal and Marcie: “Why are you so angry? I took you advice and tried to befriend AG.”
And more importantly, Leslie did not try to make a move on her favorite congresswoman.
We don’t know that yet.
Oh gosh. I’m calling it now: Roz will call Leslie to tell her about getting Robin to show up at class, then zoom out and we see Leslie is actually in bed with Robin.
Aaannd still holding the sign over her face…
“How can my brain be so ashamed, and my body so happy?”
LESLIE maybe didn’t…
JESSICA on the other hand
Go Jess.
Considering the sun was coming up, Sal probably went to bed, not back to the rally. Avoiding the fight with Marcie, for now…
Nothing that Willis wants to tell us about immediately, no.
Amblr
Ambering of Age
Glad she grew out of her 4Chamb phase.
You never really outgrow it.
The ride never stops.
lol this legit made me chucke, a++
9/10, would comment again.
And now we welcome back Amber
Not like this Amber
FLASH! AH-AH-AH!
… Savior of the Universe?
I fel like Amber needs help.
It’d probably be safer to get her to stop fighting crime as AG than get her to stop with the fanfics.
You meant the first part, didn’t you?
Yeah, it’s so hard to find a good shipping tumblr.
…I assume. I don’t actually use tumblr much.
It’s Amber time!
She’s the best at what she does.
In more ways than one. I think she is about to find some pics of herself, posted by Ryan, online.
So Amber can actually decide to switch between alters? Is that normal for dissociative identity disorder?
I don’t think she actually has DID does she? I can see some symptoms but I don’t think it would get a full blown diagnosis.
Also I’ve heard of cases of people being able to switch between personalities but I think it’s rare.
Come again? That’s one of the main reason for separation and smaller do-overs: getting rid of the personality you became stuck with in relation to a social circle and your role in it. Humans are obsessed with identity. I’m a male alto singer and I finally changed to doing performances in drag because it’s a real downer if the principal reaction you can expect from your audience is “why are you singing like that when you are obviously a male?” “Was there anything wrong or bad with it?” “No, but you must have a reason for that?” They can’t relax and enjoy. Perform in drag, and they can.
Yes, things are really that stupid. In my opinion, it’s more an identity disorder of society than of individuals.
I don’t think she did, I think she woke up as Amber and, as it were, “took the hint” from AG (that is, she needed a rest).
Back when I had a system, there was a, er, a… system. in place. we couldn’t like pick at will, but it’s not like we didn’t have any influence over the situation either. My situation was a lot like Amber’s, which is to say, somewhat purposeful compartmentalisation rather than like, traumatic, sudden involuntary splitting, which is what DID usually is.
get your bullshit out of here.
The last thing the world needs is more of your self diagnosed tumbleritis bullshit. how do I know you’re full of shit ?
Simple. No one who actually has been diagnosed with disassociate identity disorder calls it “a system” I have friends who have fucking DIED because tumbleristas told them “oh this is normal you just need to xxx” encouraging them not to get professional help. Every time I see one of you special snowflakes it fills me with uncontrollable rage when i think about the damage you do to people who genuinely need help
I have been diagnosed with DID, and we do use the word “system”. It’s used in a different context than “collective”, but it IS used. We’ve been working on working together more, so there are fewer memory lapses and we can all (mostly) perform our various functions without too much chaos. There is a certain amount of cohesion that can be achieved when we all agree that we’re working for the same goal, but there will always be some disagreements on the best way to achieve that goal. I function as the “face” of the collective, sorting through the others’ various thoughts and desires and seeking out the best or most appropriate way to behave outwardly. Basically, I maintain the outer system and do what I can to keep it properly connected to the inner system in an attempt to allow the overall “person” we comprise to live relatively normally. When I fail to do my job properly, another can and will front and behave as they see fit, given the situation.
From what I can tell, AG takes control when she believes Amber isn’t capable of dealing with a given situation at hand in a manner that either of them finds acceptable, and Amber generally allows it because she agrees. I’d also take a stab in the dark and suggest maybe there’s a third in there who functions similarly to one of us, whom we call V. V has a horrible temper, but more than that, he learned from our father that hurting people makes us feel strong, feel like we’re in control of something. Like our father, he goes after those he CAN hurt, not necessarily those who set him off, so bystanders often reap the suffering he doles out just because they can’t or won’t stop him. My bet is that AG exists to take the violence their “V” wants to dish out and explicitly looks for people who she believes deserves it so it can’t be vented from their system without hurting innocents. Amber probably doesn’t even recognize that the third is there. I used to have issues with unwitting co-fronting where I saw what the body was doing and felt like I was the one doing it, but couldn’t make “myself” stop; Amber might experience something like that when she goes all red-background.
Or, y’know, I might be talking out of my arse and over-analyzing a comic. *shrug*
*can be vented without hurting innocents
What’s your damage, sir? You can disagree with an opinion whiteout bringing out insults and (bizarrely) accusing the person of frequenting a popular blogging site that you seem to irrationally hate.
Your “special snowflake” wording makes you seem 100% more full of shot than the other poster
*without
*shit
damn autocorrect
What is and is not normal in cases of any dissociation disorder are debatable at best. That said, Amber more resembles CPTSD, a relatively recently distinguished variant of PTSD that is so far rather under studied and lacking systemic diagnostic criteria, than DID or any other dissociation disorder with systemic diagnostic criteria.
This I like reading about. General, common-man rare, psychological discussion.
Huh. Seems odd to call it a variant of PTSD when it has dissociative symptoms. Seems like it should be in the dissociative paradigm too, not just the anxiety paradigm.
Way too much of what happens works under the dissociation umbrella. Cerberus hasn’t been wrong about what she’s experiencing.
This makes me wonder if DID is also a prolonged stress disorder. Because, basically, Amber O’Malley just seems not as bad as full out DID.
trlkly, diagnoses are classified under the causes as often as they are under the similarity of symptoms. If it’s dissociation caused y depression, it’s found under the emotional disorders section. If it’s caused by acute stress, it’s found under the anxiety disorders section. Yes, many diagnoses have similarities to others, but the point of categorization is to make identification and treatment easier. If the dissociation is caused by anxiety, it would be important to treat the root causes of the anxiety and trauma in order to address the dissociative symptoms.
DID itself has many different potential causes from a traumatic experience to difficulties adjusting to new situations to conflicting beliefs and/or moralities.
Wouldn’t she still have PTSD? I feel like it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Also, people who grow up in dysfunctional and/or abusive environments can and have attested to the situation of being one person in the presence of their abuser, and being totally different in places where they feel safe.
Amber has DID, but I’m wondering if it might be a little bit like that. You stuff the “great/true” version of yourself inside yourself, it only comes out to people you trust, but when you get beaten down enough the version that your abuser claims you are (Blaine thinks Amber is a timid, worthless, dysfunctional powder keg. Notice how Amazigirl is the opposite.) is there all the time. Even after you’ve left the environment, hence the PTSD part as well.
But it results in many people having shaky identities, because often who they are with their abuser is a facade or simply a part of who they are, and they become insecure because they’re never truly allowed to be themselves or find out who they actually are. I honestly don’t think Amber has BPD like other people have said, even though one of the core parts of the diagnosis is the lack of or shaky identity.
This is just my layman’s ignorant thought about it, but living with someone who im pretty sure has it (BPD) I’ve always thought of it as an especially severe form of PTSD, even though it is a personality disorder due to the nature of the Self being shaky, feeling like everyone is against you, feeling like you constantly have to defend your existence by attacking others, trusting no one, explosive bottled up anger, inability to regulate emotions in situations that shouldn’t phase most people, etc to the point where it’s all you are most of the times, depending on the severity of course. And the correlation between BPD and severe abuse, although not all who have it were abused. Alot of these also happens to overlap with PTSD, but Amber does not seem to have that disorder.
Yup PTSD and DID can both be things a person has and frequently go hand-in-hand. Amber definitely exhibits many signs of PTSD surrounding her years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of Blaine as well as surrounding the Robbery Incident.
To answer Derek, conscious switching between alters can exist, even in somewhat disassociated individuals, especially if there are “firm rules” when specific alters can show up (which can make a nice compromise step towards integrating disassociated alters). Whether or not that’s “normal” is a much harder question to answer. I can at least say some measure of semi or fully conscious switching to alters having more or less control over the body is not uncommon and may be more common among integrated individuals.
Personally, I’ve been integrated for a long time, but I am able to consciously shift greater control to specific alters semi-reliably and have used that semi-reliably to, for instance, better be able to handle emotionally intense situations in my day job, like supporting a student with a physically abusive dad.
Classification of mental issues can be extremely difficult due to the prevalence of causal and corollary relationships between various conditions. DID, for example, has a list of myriad other issues it reasonably commonly coexists with in a given individual.
I’m personally suggesting CPTSD here because Amber and AG don’t exhibit the level of differentiation that one sees in case studies of DID (I don’t have direct experience with DID, mind, so have to rely on what I have learned from published material) and doesn’t quite fit any of the other recognized diagnoses in the dissociation spectrum while concurrently showing very strong PTSD triggers with elements more akin to CPTSD than the more recognized variant and some elements of one or more personality disorders as well.
Thanks for all the answers! this comment section is fantastic with random information like this
Important question: Will Amber then write a little something-something to accompany that fanart?
It currently dwarfs War & Peace, and features 16 new uses for energon.
………who?
you know, Amber, mild mannered college student
No, I mean Skids and Nautica.
Transformers characters from the MTMTE comic.
Meh, disappointed. I thought Amber was more into SEXY pairings.
Spoken like someone who CLEARLY has never encountered Transformers fandom before.
(I’m only TF-fandom-adjacent, secondhand through friends.)
Another reason why I probably avoid it online. Just get the odd toy and call it a day.
Suuuuure you are.
Nautica is only the BEST fembot not to have a toy, and Skids the most kickass theoritician around.
That.
Now, someone direct me to said fanfare.
*Fan art. Bloody autocorrect.
Starlord.
freezeframe
Ok then.
freeze frame?
Why are you dragging J. Geils into the conversation?
A challenge?
“It was all a dream..”
STOP
Amber time
Amber is good for stopping time. Just ask all those prehistoric insects.
Beat me to it!
Starting to forget how Amber works, eh?
Yeah, Amber doesn’t search for fanart, she makes her own.
Can one not do both?
It’s really hard to tell at this point exactly how dissociated Amber is. (That’s probably misphrased but I am tired as hell right now.) Whether AG is a full fledged alternate personality, or closer to just roleplay.
It’s not DI because she’s aware of everything going on in both lives.
This seems more like some kind of borderline personality disorder combined with psychosis. And she’s become incapable of seeing how unhealthy and destructive she really is.
I still don’t know why people are pulling up borderline personality disorder into the mix. It just doesn’t fit the presentation at all. Hell, she just got through telling Sal she didn’t like her but didn’t hate her–the exact opposite of devaluation.
Sure, there is a type of dissociation in BPD, but it involves becoming emotionally flat, detached from their emotions. Not having two separate identities that you channel different behaviors into.
The claim of C-PTSD actually fits really, really well. To the point that I wish I’d found it before. But Google doesn’t even let you type it in without saying “Did you mean PTSD?” And I was looking through dissociative disorders, while this would technically be an anxiety disorder.
I also think she’s not psychotic. She’s never lost contact with reality. She unfairly characterized some things, but she was completely in touch with what they were.
I am kinda confused about the claim of BPD??? Borderline mood swings don’t really look like the switch between the two maybe-seperate personalities. She’s wildly self destructive but that’s seen in a myriad of disorders.
Not sure about the psychosis either. The Amazi-girl persona looks more like a deliberate coping mechanism vs a detachment from reality. She gets carried away but isn’t convinced she actually has superpowers or anything.
People with actual experience with this shit have repeatedly pointed out in the comments that losing time is not a universal symptom. Just because pop culture zeroes in on a worst case scenario (losing time, hostile alters, no control over switching, etc) doesn’t mean that’s the only version that exists.
*hugs* Thanks.
Politely, I am sorry to say that that is an inaccurate perception. DID does not require its most extreme symptoms in the same way that an Autism Spectrum Condition does not need to express its most extreme symptoms to be real.
At its most basic level that model directly erases the reality of integration and how that operates. A DID person who integrates is not magically “cured” and now one whole personality who is now just like any neurotypical individual.
There is still fragmentation. And an integrated mind simply means all of the alters are sharing memories and speaking to each other and are more or less working for common goals even if each may have their own emotional interpretation of events and thus their own conclusions about best current action.
In my conversations with other folks with DID, semi and full integration are not uncommon even if most of the media attention and psychological research are on folks with full disassociation because that’s a “sexier” subject in the eyes of many.
This last part has been further exacerbated by it being lazily applied as a “twist” in narratives, often with an assumption that a person with DID is physically dangerous and potentially a serial killer.
This negative societal assumptions about what DID people are like has at times negatively impacted my life and the lives of other DID people I know, leading to increases in us being mistreated or presumed to be dangerous. And it’s a major reason I am not as out in my daily life about my life-long experiences with the condition as I am about my asexuality and transgender identity.
I do not mean to call you out in specific on this, but I would greatly appreciate it if folks who do not have the condition were a little less assured their ideas about what DID “can or can’t be” and a little less adamant and insistive on erasing what are actually very common life experiences for DID individuals.
Thank you.
Thank you, Cerberus.
I know very little about DID, but I assume that, like many disorders, it exists on a spectrum with a variety of symptoms that do not all have to be present or that can vary in intensity. Generally, I am content to assume that whatever we have seen to be true of Amber/AG is true of her, whether or not it’s characteristic of any particular disorder. I appreciate you and others with experience with similar symptoms helping to fill in the blanks for me.
Yeah, especially since DID is near the top of the list of “scary” mental illnesses used for cheap plot twist. Because obviously us really not neurotypical people are dangerous to society and not more likely to be victims of ableist violence ourselves. No, no. We’re the bad ones. (So much sympathy. Gotta love fictional misinterpretation and psychology at large ignoring you because you the real person aren’t what it “should” look like.)
Well, at least there still *is* an Amber. That’s something…
THERE IS NO AMBER ONLY ZUUL
I find her interesting because she’s an alter ego and because she sleeps above her covers… *four feet* above her covers…
Define interesting.
“oh god oh god we’re all going to die”
Amber may experience some turbulence and then … explode?
We’re gonna explode? I don’t wanna explode!
Okay…. she’s a dog.
Hey, be nice, girl can’t be wearing makeup 24/7.
Imagine her going the rest of her life as only Amazigirl. Instead of just when she’s being a superhero, all the time. Like, in class, graduating and later, going to work in a pantsuit. Always in a mask, speaking in purple, but in general leading a normal life during the day, but as Amazigirl.
She could be an ace attorney!
Nah, that’s Carla after an in-depth and life-changing conversation with Sarah.
It took me way too long to pick up your pun. Well played. ^_^
Works for She-Hulk.
Yeah, because She-Hulk knows how to have fun! ^_^
I have and it makes me really really worried for Amber/AG. Because despite Amber and AG’s beliefs, Amber is not some ball of messed-up junk to be thrown away and if she is treated that way, she will fight back like most anyone against the threat of being killed and Amber/AG will continue to get less and less integrated.
If Amber and Amazigirl integrate…does that mean she starts talking in mauve?
Between those hand scars and the broken glasses, Sal might figure out who Amber’s secret identity is.
Pretty sure they’re scrapes, not scars yet. She’s probably had worse heal okay.
Her glasses aren’t broken, it’s just her hair behind the lenses. Amber doesn’t wear her glasses as Amazi-Girl.
And you’re talking about her old glasses, of course. No more after-midnight commenting for me.
It’s okay, I’d forgotten it was Carla who knew about the glasses anyways.
Is Amber unsure of what “Amber-time” consists of? One would think that if anyone was an expert on that, it would be her.
I could be wrong, but from what I’ve seen it seems less like she’s got separate identities and more like she’s doing some pretty extreme compartmentalization.
This sounds a little more spot on.
I’m honestly not sure there’s a difference, if that compartmentalization is to the point of asserting two different identities. And she does–she thinks of Amber as a separate person than Amazi-Girl.
The reason for arguing it’s not DID is just that she doesn’t seem to have any separated memories. But even that is a bit of a debatable subject. Plus, as someone pointed out above, C-PTSD makes a lot of sense for her.
Amber is going to have a hard time explaining those skinned knuckles away. I suggest adding sap gloves to her costume. http://www.sportsmansguide.com/product/index/rapid-dominance-t10-hard-knuckle-pro-tactical-gloves?a=868461&pm2d=CSE-SPG-15-PLA&utm_medium=PLA&utm_source=Google&utm_campaign=CI&gclid=CJP9sqzPpM8CFQyRaQodu4YHZQ
Huh, I assumed she’d instead be writing more Stucky slashfic instead of looking up SkidsxNautica fanart.
Inspiration?
It’s been so long I forgot what Amber looked like with glasses on. The lenses look different somehow, right?
She got Mew classes. Er, new glasses.
(What are Mew classes?)
Right, she broke her old pair. The lenses appear more transparent, too.
I’d pay extra to enroll in a Mew class.
Maybe I’d not have failed out of college if my classes would have been taught by a cat-like Pokemon.
A cute, playful one, no less.
“Alright class, time for a pop quiz!”
*Class Groans
“Let’s go outside and pop bubbles!”
Speech Therapy for cats, of course.
I’m betting we’re gonna get psyched tomorrow in some way.
A man with fabulous hair, keen powers of observation, and a knack for cons is gonna do some private detecting with his logical, geeky friend who knows many useful facts?
Why does punching people cut up your knuckles?
Punch someone and find out.
Elbows, handedges, feet and knees.
They’re not cut up, they’re scraped up. Punch something hard enough (like, say, Gashface’s cheekbone) and the delicate skin over your knuckles tends to break open.
Looks more like bruising to me, but it can do that.
Basically, you’re smashing the meat on your hand between the bones of your hand and the bones in somebody’s face. Do that hard enough or enough times and the skin will break as a result
and the meat over your knuckles tends to be thinner than other parts, too.
Skulls and jaws are pretty hard things to punch, hence why boxing gloves are a thing. Actually if sports like boxing were serious about reducing the incidences of brain-damage AKA punch-drunkenness, they would ban boxing gloves as boxing gloves encourages you to repeatedly aim for the head.
Funny thing bout that, if I remember correctly, boxing gloves were invented because bare-knuckle boxing was banned.
So if they were to ban boxing gloves, the art of boxing would have come full circle.
The actual solution is to ban boxing, but we can’t do that, oh no.
(A good case can be made that we literally can’t – or rather, we can make it illegal, but it’ll still happen, and just be even more brutal. Because humans fighting other humans – for money, fame, personal animosity, “mating rights”, or whatever – is something humans do.)
Ever heard of a “fight bite”?
Bones iz hard.
…but if she’s saying “which I think means…” that would imply Amber hasn’t actually come back, Amazi-girl is just pretending to be her… unless Willis would have kept the tag as Amazi-girl if that were the case?
I mean, I know the eyes change and everything and she looked at her hand confusedly, but it just seems like it’s still Amazi-girl there. :-\
She’s not. Aside from the tags, Amber has blushing cheeks and Amazi-girl does not.
I would hazard that it doesn’t have to be so binary. Many actors will go through similar things when transitioning into and out of roles: do something that the person you are wanting to be (character or self) would do so that you can meld better into the role. She may have a few rituals to help her to transition when she wants to. For instance, shadow boxing to get into the “Amazi-girl” mindframe and looking at fanart to feel more like “Amber”
I don’t know if it has to be, but the cheeks and tags have always agreed so far. Willis is the one who pointed that out.
I think it just means Amber doesn’t have a handle on what the dual-identity thing means anymore.
Dunno why AG would pretend to be Amber, though. There’s nobody to see it unless she’s become aware of us somehow.
Something something Amazi-pool
Beat me to it. And possibly Sarge.
Yep.
Welp, Amber hasn’t started talking through the fourth wall, yet, so I’d say that’s premature.
Well she might pretend to be Amber so that she doesn’t have to let Amber back in control but no one will get worried right away.
I don’t there’s anybody in the room to get worried. Considering how late she was out, Dina probably woke up and left hours ago.
Though if she is trying to avoid giving Amber control, that would be a very troubling development. She’s never seemed to resist giving control back before.
I guess the theory is that if AG has decided to “act like Amber” she might choose to do this to “get in character,” so to speak. She may recognize that she has to spend some of her time not superhero-ing and this could be a part of that.
I don’t particularly agree with that line of thinking. I believe this actually is Amber, but I suppose I could see the alternative.
I definitely don’t know enough to speak intelligently about “alters” and related subject material here. I’m speaking from a “Can I imagine myself or a me who is not myself in this situation or a similar one and what possible realities can I imagine associated with or tangentially related to that.” It’s really late, I was low on sleep to begin with and this probably doesn’t make sense…which sometimes (generally, I suppose) means “don’t post it you’ll regret it,” but what can I say it’s one of those “bad decision days.”
I think that’s all Amber. It’s just a kind of self-mocking punchline. She said “do some Amber time” sat down at the computer to study and a few minutes later found herself searching tumblr. She’s just commenting on what she’s doing.
This.
That seems likely.
If you only looked at her silhouette, Amber would look like an astronaut.
I’m more of a Nautica/Brainstorm fan myself… but Nautica/Skids gets tragedy points.
I know Amber needs help, but I think she can at least still function so long as she’s still waking up as Amber.
Man, I was Amber. (not in other ways, like vigilantism obvi, but in this). But this type of shit also made me fail out of not one, but two degrees, so I can’t recommend this lifestyle. Tbh.
I meant pretending to study while actually being consumed by fictional characters and worlds and not actually studying, btw, not this whole multiple personalities thing. For the record.
“-think- means”?
Oh dear…
Skids? Nautica?
Oh … more Transformer stuff.
«yawn» And I sat up for this update? Good thing TNT is in the middle of a “Star Wars” marathon and is showing ‘Episode 3’ tonight; the evening is not a total waste.
So you have the high ground then?
Episode III: The prequel that was just good enough to make you mad about how its the best of the three
I… I don’t want to agree with this, but it’s far too true.
Amber is living the dream
We need a week of “OK, this time you really have woken up” strips.
Let me just say that your gravatar is perfection.
“Jessica”
Do you even Amber?
I mean, really? Like it’s so hard to Amber. All you do is just write up a slashfic of Longarm and Shockwave and oh no I’ve gone crosseyed.
fics of who and… who ?
Perhaps this is good sign?
Maybe Amber is growing disillusioned with the role assigned to the Amber identity, who is someone with few connections who is entirely wrapped up in escapist fantasy and mind numbing gaming. Like, Amazi Girl can only work if Amber has no commitments or relationships to maintain. The cracks that may start developing in the Amazi Girl persona now that her black and white mentality has been directly challenged and grudgingly defeated by the latest Sal encounter could maybe start spurring growth in Amber as she stops finding solace and sublimation in Amazi Girl.
It’s also possible I’m reading way to much into one strip and being too optimistic.
Like, I’m reading her dialogue less as confusion and more as boredom. “Oh, yes, I’m Amber now. The person who ignores her commitments to accomplish nothing, which is actually just a mask designed to prevent forming attachments.”
Someone as purpose driven as Amazi Girl, who is a valid part of Amber, would not enjoy this. It’s a waste of all the good that compromises Amber and combine that with Amazi Girl losing her purpose because Sal is not the monster she created in her head and she keeps failing at getting Justice for Joyce.
Amber’s social life isn’t an act. Socialization is an effort for her. Even with Danny, she liked texting even though he was standing right next to her. She might be less awkward than when she was younger, but she pretty clearly would be a bit reclusive even if she weren’t out all night fighting crime.
I had a long reply typed up, but my browser ate it. It had links and everything.
I get why you think that, but I think that if you read through all of Amber’s strips you’ll find that’s not really supported by the text. How Amber describes herself and what Amber actually does do not match up.
A person who finds being social as something draining probably wouldn’t have gone to the college party with the Ryan incident. Especially not by herself. She would have already been in costume if she was there to patrol and the tags call her Amber.
She also wouldn’t improvise a lie about being Danny’s girlfriend to his parents and then maintain said lie for several hours over the afternoon. She impressed his parents by being personable and outgoing.
More importantly we never see evidence of her being drained by social interactions. And I mean, half the cast comes across as being more socially awkward than Amber does except in conversations involving Amazi Girl.
Almost every one of Amber and Danny’s conversation are vocal. The only time they text from in the same room is when they are in public and referencing Amazi Girl. Not out of discomfort, but out of necessity to keeping up with masquerade.
It seems more likely that Amber is using people’s perceptions of how people that look and act like she does in order to obfuscate who she really is. “The quiet girl on her DS who never comes out of her room must be shy, she couldn’t be Amazi Girl” “Bruce Wayne is an asshole with too much money. no way he’s Batman.” “Clark Kent is so inept. How could you possibly think he’s Superman?”
It also has the dual purpose of avoiding entanglements with people, so they can’t interfere with Amazi-Girl’s work.
Heh. look at that. it was a long reply any way.
A person who finds being social as something draining probably wouldn’t have gone to the college party with the Ryan incident. Especially not by herself. She would have already been in costume if she was there to patrol and the tags call her Amber.
Uh, that “Amber at the college party” remains a
noodle-incidentmystery, because she actually went there as Amazi-Girl!Someone can find socialization draining even if it doesn’t lead to them shutting down and needing to recharge the way Dina does. It can also vary based on the nature of the interaction. I know this, because that’s been my own experience.
Like Amber, over time I’ve gotten less socially awkward and less stressed out by socialization, though I don’t think it initially was quite as difficult for me as it was for her. Some of my more recent friends were actually surprised to learn I’m not naturally extroverted, not just because they didn’t meet me when it was more obvious, but because they met me in social situations where I was completely inside my comfort zone. Outside of it, I’m not obviously (as far as I can tell) terribly awkward, but I’m much quieter, less talkative and more self-conscious. Its only certain types of situations that seriously stress me out.
Talking to new people, or people I just don’t know well isn’t really a problem for me on its own. If two cooworkers are having a loud conversation (or better yet, a debate) near my desk about something I’m interested in, I can jump right into that easily. If I’m talking to someone I know, and other people I don’t know join in, that’s also pretty easy. I end up coming across as friendly, talkative, funny (sometimes) and even a bit loud. I like people and I love attention, so at times I can even be difficult to shut up.
It’s initiating conversations — especially, but not exclusively with strangers — that stresses me out the most. Unless I have a specific reason to be talking to that person, a specific subject to talk to them about, or the situation specifically requires that I talk to that specific person, it tends to be very draining for me. Even with people I know well, I still find one-on-one conversations a bit stressful. In groups, I don’t have to make eye contact as much, or for as long, and there’s less pressure on me to have a response to the person talking, so its easier for me to actually listen. Thankfully, for some reason it isn’t as bad when I’m on a date with someone as it would be normally.
As a result of this, I prefer small gatherings to big crowds, and being forced to interact with people for long periods is exhausting. Dancing is basically impossible. To this day, just standing near the dance floor trying to work up the nerve is enough to make my head start feeling fuzzy. I’m just too self-conscious. Not many people see me shut down like this though, because I avoid the those sorts of situations if at all possible.
My point is that — as with many things — there isn’t just one way that being introverted / shy / socially awkward can manifest in a person. Especially when it comes to what is outwardly noticable. People are really complicated.
Given the fact that we know that when she was little, Amber was so shy she barely talked out loud, it seems really unlikely to me that Amber is now pretending to be more introverted than she is. Certainly not to the extent you seem to be suggesting. None of the behaviors you point out as things she “wouldn’t do” if socialization were still stressful for her actually feel out of place, based on my own experience. She’s learned social behaviors and expanded her comfort zone with experience and practice, and found work-arounds for some of her other issues, but they’re not gone completely.
I could, however see her using reasons like “avoiding entanglements” to justify backsliding into self-imposed isolation, and no longer making the effort. That feels much more likely, especially considering the concerns others have raised about how Amber and AG seem to think Amber is even more worthless than before. She might no longer feel its worth the energy required for Amber to have a social life, which would be a very bad sign.
I think I agree with you.
She is Amber because it is time to be Amber. Daytime, study, games, classes, no social life.
AG comes out at night or in vigilante situations. And yeah, Ambers life would bore her.
Yeah, I’m glad we cut to morning, because I really wasn’t looking forward to what might happen with the black girl with a record standing around at midnight looking roughed up after an assault.
It seems like the blue stripes on her pillow are runes that seal her so she can sleep. You can see the last glowing ember fade away
The last glowing Amber will only fade away when Amazi-Girl saves everybody from her.
(Sarcasm? I hope…)
Woa-oh. Amber is the color of your energy.
Well this isn’t good. Amber increasingly doesn’t have a life outside of AG, does she?
Not sure that’s really a new development.
Not super new, but even then Amber at strip’s beginning still had HOBBIES – the constant video games and Transformers fandom might have been introverted and sometimes relatively low-energy-using hobbies, but she had a comics pull list, she played Mario Kart as Amazi-Girl indicating it was something she did genuinely enjoy (as a potential date activity if nothing else,) she used her computer knowledge for more than just class as the app would indicate, and she did things that weren’t beating people up and stalking Sal.
Whereas since at least the last week in strip-time, we haven’t seen her do much more than claim she “stayed up all night reading fanfic” in an attempt to cover her tiredness and go through the motions of college studentdom. Now with that indication she’s forgetting what Amber usually does during weekdays where she can’t stalk Sal for hours on end? That’s a pretty serious warning sign.
That’s a good point. I was only thinking about her social life
I’m thinking it might be a side-effect of trying to make AG the “golden alter” so Amber has to be the “bad alter”. Like to build up the mythology that AG is everything that is good and pure and ideal in her, she’s been robbing from Amber and the richness of her life and connections in order to make her seem more worthless and thus justify giving AG more and more control.
Especially given she is trying to blame her bad traits as Amber sneaking in. That might mean things she usually considers primarily Amber stuff (like video games and comics, which we know mean a lot to Amazi-Girl because she literally made herself a superhero and named herself accordingly) are being cut out.
Which cannot be healthy, especially with how her superheroing is going lately.
The incidents with Joyce then leading up to her encounter with her father: her conversation with Walky on the roof, things she said about herself as if speaking of another person – all these made me think that she was heading for a major split. I’m not a dr., but she was not acting normal, no way.
Sal confronted her to stand on her own two feet and quit living in the past, because she herself had been there and done that and found there is no percentage in blaming others forever for what they did to you. Get over it.
This last encounter has made her review her chief protagonist not as symbol that is a concrete base of her fear- but rather as a human being. She apologized to Sal. Sal doesn’t know for what, but I think soon will.
I think waking up and ‘switching’ to Amber, is not to much diff. from waking up hungover and ‘switching’ to faking your way thru the day anyway. Sort of. She’s aware of being Amber and its time to do the day thing.
Hope that the past few days will make a real diff. in her and that she continues to reach out to Sal. Sal already said that shes ‘making new friends.
Good things may be happening for both of them. But then, we do have Willis and his plans for escaped asshole Ryan, and what of Dorothy with Ryan’s photo? Hope all is going to go well, but I think I know better….
That last panel is disturbingly relatable
Unless I’m mistaken, the Gravatar image of Panel 4 has been around for a really long time before this strip came out.
Ana C. likes using future comic as Gravatars. Her current one is a crop of what I’d call panel 5 (counting the all black one as panel 1). She’ll most likely have a new one tomorrow. I wonder if I’ll notice.
I’m a bit curious about something, and apologizes if it’s been discussed before, or if it’s just invalid. What if Amber is the ‘alter’? Like who she was meant to be was Amazi-Girl (sans costume), and the trauma of her youth buried that under who we know as the primary personality.
If she’s got full-blown DID, then — as I understand it — they’re both alters, and will have to learn to cooperate in some fashion.
If not, I think the vengeance-driven one is more likely to become unnecessary at some point.
Yup, they’d both be alters.
Personally, I’ve fallen out of favor of worrying about which alter may be the “original” viewing it sort of like speciation. But some DID people find strength in identifying one of their alters as an “original” alter the others split off from.
Interesting.
So now the question is whether Amber will be able to process that Amazi-Girl acquired in regards to Sal.
Hmm… This might be interesting. Does have Amber have a sort of ‘hangover morning’ after Amazi-Girl has been active? It will be interesting to see how much memory she has of last night and how aware she is of what has happened.
I’m so far 0 for 0 on successful predictions of what happens in the comic, but I thought this was amusing and in keeping with DoA, plot- and character-wise:
SAL: *knocks on Amber’s door*
SAL: Hey, sorry ta bug ya… I guess you’re Amazi-Girl’s techie friend?
SAL: Amazi-Girl put this app on my phone to track her phone, and there’s somethin’ wrong with it. It keeps sendin’ up alerts about where her phone is. I can’t figure out how to get rid of ’em. Makes me feel like a creepy stalker, too. Think you can turn it off or get rid of it?
*Amber is staring in dumbfounded shock*
*Amber silently takes the phone, and starts working on it*
*Sal looks around the room*
SAL: Hey, someone really likes dinosaurs.
*Sal peers at one picture in particular*
SAL: Huh, this is a T-Rex eatin’ the Calc TA. That’s pretty funny.
*Amber silently returns Sal’s phone.*
SAL: Thanks. Later, kid. *leaves*
SAL: *thinking to herself in the hall* That probably explains why Amazi-Girl keeps hanging around here.
SAL: *still thinking to herself*: Amazi-Girl and that kid back there have similar looks. I wonder if they’re maybe distant relatives? *shrugs*
SAL: *still thinking*: I wonder why that kid’s knuckles were raw? Almost like she’d been hitting someone. Oh well, no way to know.
I guess Danny`”Wonderbread” would be Sal’s point of contact to Amazi-Girl.
I just realized I left off a line of exposition…
After “techie friend”:
SAL: Ah guess she left her phone with you, so you could maybe undelete the picture of that rapist douchbag?
Incidentally, I thought at first that Sal would recognize her brother’s name on the T-Rex picture — but in checking the archives, I saw that we don’t see the bottom of the picture when it is handed in or returned (to Dina in error) so we don’t know if he put his name on it or not.
Thinking on it, though, I suspected not.
OTOH, she might have recognized the art, since she was sitting right next to Walky when he drew it — but on the other other hand, she might well have been too busy feeling flummoxed by the math to pay attention to her dorky brother’s scribbling.
*shrug*
I see that Mike utterly unashamedly did sign his “Your mom + a nickel = prostitute” note.
It’s the color of her energy.
I thought Amber time involved killing spiders.
Hey, it’s bisexuality awareness week, and since I came out to two people yesterday* I thought I could come out to this comment section too. Also Danny figuring his sexuality a couple years ago was a big reason I found out I was bi ( big reason N# 2 was Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo+Juliet)
So hey I’m bi
*Actually for one person I was outed against my will via lack of respect for my privacy for which I’m still royally pissed off and very worried about
This whole thing is a tangent to this actual strip
It really sucks you were outed against your will, but I wish you nothing but the best. The most important thing is you’re happy and hopefully everyone around you will be as supportive. If not, I think I speak for everyone when I say you have the support of the entire DoA community!
*full support and all that jazz*
I wish you well in all regards.
High five!!!
Everyone here is really cool!
Congrats on feeling ready to do it! Hope everything turns out ok!
(“Outing against will” and “no respect for privacy” are horrible things done by horrible people – sorry there are people that suck)
It wasn’t a horrible person, it was a mistake. But things that came after it weren’t really so good, so yeah I’m really angry about it. Really hard not to tell the person to just fuck off from my life for a while
Congrats!
Eigh, other people outing you. But as to the rest, happy Bisexual Awareness Week! Hope it goes swell.
Yay! Happy coming out!
Thank you Cerberus! I’m super your fan!
Congrats!
(Too ironic, given my new hidden face Gravatar?)
Seriously, thanks everybody. You’re all great!
Congrats on that, takes serious bravery on your part, good for you. Hope you find a situation that works for you.
Congrats, and best of luck in the future!
The implication is that she doesn’t really know anymore who ‘Amber’ is and what her life independent of Amazi-Girl should be. Worrying.
It may be good, as Amber was the one full of rage.
Noooo, Amber definitely is not exclusively full of rage. Notice here that it’s Amber doing nonchalant enjoyable Amber things – engaging in non-superhero hobbies, which I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s fallen behind on in the last week or so. (Like, is it just me or have we not seen Amber playing video games for a LONG time? And since I’ve posited that provided a violence and competition outlet before Amazi-Girl’s fulltime vigilantism, that is potentially a VERY bad thing.)
And despite what Amazi-Girl was claiming in the last round of strips, Amber’s *NOT* the alter who was nursing the constant obsessive hate-on for Sal. Amber would trigger, panic and black out. Amazi-Girl’s the one who’s been stalking her, the one who broke up with Danny on the grounds Sal was “poisoning him”, the one who spent hours fighting crime by beating up people under spurious logic to vent afterwards, the one who thought saving her life was a bad thing, the one who initiated the parking lot fight for the sake of fighting Sal, and the one who was entirely willing to have a knockdown drag-out fight with her until the crowd made her realize the racialized component and the fact that, that evening, /Sal had done nothing wrong./ That was all on Amazi-Girl.
(Amber was the one to beat up Blaine, but he’s HER supervillain, not Amazi-Girl’s. As to the original stabbing, the tag says Amber and I’m inclined to believe it, but due to it being literally the origin moment of them starting to split and me not knowing too much about how DID works but guessing based on how much overlapping interest they have, I don’t think there was really a distinct difference between the two alters until either the months after the robbery – when Blaine’s ‘I’m not paying for therapy let’s just teach her how to
beat people upprotect herself’ self defense classes started enforcing the whole violence as an outlet and presumably the fighting in rage = bad thing* – or over the summer when the stress over Ethan’s coming out and the opportunity presented by college made her start seriously gathering equipment for real life vigilantism.)* Not that we know that’s where she internalized it, but since a lot of self defense disciplines talk about that because they don’t want people going out and getting sued, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Blaine managed to pitch it to the adults as a healthy alternative to therapy.
Uuuuhhhhh… I’m not so sure. When you’re going to do stuff you usually do, do you often say “I guess I better do some Regalli time” like you were punching some clock? When you do it, do you think “welp, I think that means doing this thing, maybe, I guess?”
The tags and the blush seem to support your side, and I certainly don’t know near enough about DID to have any certainty on this, but is it possible this is integration and that AG is getting the upper hand on what characteristics of what personality are left in the end?
Not really much, which is why I find this worrying. But there’s definitely a significant “what should I do, I guess this makes me happy, why isn’t this making me happy” Tumblr scroll thing I’ll do during particularly brain fogged days – particularly during depressive episodes, I’ll do something like pull up a Word doc trying to write or wander into a bookstore hoping to strike interest and then stare flatly at it for hours and then get more depressed it isn’t working. (Also, I don’t delineate my online/offline personas THAT much but there is a degree of third personing I do in my head and there are definitely things I associate more with my IRL name and things that are more Regalli. Pretty sure that’s an autistic thing and I don’t really dissociate as I understand that works, both names are me and it’s more what circumstances talk about what, but like. I am distinctly not even remotely neurotypical so maybe not the best person to ask about this.)
Also, regardless of who’s in control right now, the fact remains that Amazi-Girl is not in fact the golden alter she thinks she is and Amber the useless bad one with no redeeming qualities, like Willoughby was asserting. Amazi-Girl’s just as full of rage as she is when she’s Amber, they just handle it differently.
(And you’d have to ask Cerberus about that but guessing based on the way she talks about it and what little I know of other systems, I don’t think that’s how it works when dealt with healthily? But psychology’s a particularly bad crap shoot in this regard and again, I don’t have firsthand experience.)
I dunno, in my experience, it’s really hard to full on dump aspects of one alter’s personality on another. Like, as far as the alters are concerned, they are people with people desires and wants and thought processes, just with different forms of emotional process, resonance and goals or even responses to PTSD (i.e. you can have an alter “stuck in time” in a traumatic moment who doesn’t see what’s happened sense as fully real or important).
So, alters can grow and adapt traits, but it’s unlikely, or at least unlikely in the experiences of DID people I’ve heard from for AG to have actually handed off her negative traits to Amber.
What seems more likely is AG has dumped off the blame for said actions on Amber and both Amber and AG believe that Amber is just “the dumping ground for the unwanted traits”.
FWIW, I think that there is a distinct ‘Dark Amber’ where she stores all her Blane-induced anger and hate that is quite distinct from the quiet, quirky but generally friendly Amber Prime (whom we see in this strip).
But whom neither AmaziGirl nor Amber Prime can distinguish from Amber Prime.
Which is very very bad.
Regali-
Yeah, Amber and AG’s characterization of Amber don’t fit what Amber is actually like and it definitely feels like AG is somewhat embarrassed being caught out being awful and has decided to internalize it so as to protect the illusion that AG is flawless and wonderful and Amber is a hot mess of garbage.
By that I mean, assigning her bad behavior (stalking and obsessing about Sal, inflexibility, yelling at Danny) to Amber. Which is such a two steps forward, one step back situation as it seems like AG has basically just replaced Sal as the villain incarnate in her mind with Amber, viewing Amber as some dead weight that “makes her” do bad things and distracts from “the glorious mission”.
And that makes me hyper worried given my own experiences of believing one alter was the “golden alter” and another was the “awful one I needed to protect everyone from”.
This. It’s the Batman issue all over again, where Bruce Wayne isn’t an actual person, serving only as a cover for Batman.
Aim for Spider-Man, kids. Except being the universe’s punching bag – that’s not something you want to be.
“Holding hands….” Yes, I’m sure that’s the only fanart Amber will look for.
*gasp* Certainly, you are not suggesting that people on the internet have put up images of characters doing something… naughty!
*fans himself*
Could someone lend me some pearls for me to clutch?
Oh, of course! Here you are.
http://orig15.deviantart.net/52dd/f/2016/005/9/b/blue_pearl_by_lvcillustrations-d9mwoid.png
Well all in all..things could have been worse I guess..actually its not that bad..
…is it bad that I have no idea who Skids and Nautica are?
…it’s bad, isn’t it.
Nah, a lot of people don’t know transformers.like me
Amber, shipping a straight pairing? What kind of a fangirl is she?
Her knuckles are that skinned up even with the reinforced gloves she wears… wonder what their faces look like?
Also wondering if she took a shower before going to bed.
Seriously, even if that last line was a joke, the fact that we haven’t seen her definitely and genuinely investing in any of her hobbies in so long is WORRYING to me. Even if I’m wrong about video games having served as an outlet for Amazi-Girl that didn’t require ACTUAL punching people, even if her pull list has dramatically dropped in the last couple weeks because of Weird Big Two Shit and she’s only reading the Transformers comics at the moment, or she only fell behind because of the glasses thing, or WHATEVER, it is not a good sign that she appears to have spent so much of the weekend as Amazi-Girl.
If for no other reason than the fact she needs SLEEP. Those midnight stalking sessions are not good for the health.
Especially since lack of sleep leads to more sluggish movement and motion, muddled thinking, and after long enough hallucinations.
I have been there and that is not a fun place to be. I don’t think I’ve ever quite had full-on hallucinations, although one time I kept thinking I saw my cat in places it wasn’t and not in places it was… but, they’re kind of like that sometimes even when I’m not sleep-deprived.
Ohhh, yeah, that’ll start screwing her over in her superheroing too.
(Hopefully she’ll get enough sleep to keep the full on hallucinations at bay but muddled thinking is pretty much the last thing she needs right now as it stands.)
As far as we can tell, Amber has been checked out for Amazi-Girl for most of the last two days. She was Amber before running into Danny the day they broke up and the day after before hearing Sal outside her door, but otherwise it’s been Amazi-Girl in the driver’s seat.
OR you could warn Joyce that the guy you were chasing may have gotten her name and phone number from when he briefly had your phone the other night! You know, since most phones sort most recent messages first! Am I the only one concerned here?!
Amber, if you find any of that fan art, let me know.
Amber alert!
(although of course if Amber actually went missing it wouldn’t be an AMBER Alert because she’s not a minor… but on the other hand, AmaziGirl is technically only five years old so that layer of the joke isn’t ENTIRELY inaccurate)
Someone was asking for a Jessica Gravatar the other day. Voilà!
Side note: I initially rated it PG because cleavage and it didn’t seem to work. So I guess this a a family-friendly site.
She’s even pointing it out.
Comic Reactions:
Panel 3: This is the most concerning panel to me. Like Panels 1 and 2 she’s waking up and settling back into her Amber alter, but Panel 3, she looks at the bruises on her hand and for a second, doesn’t even recognize them or seems surprised that they are there.
Which makes me really worried that AG might no longer be sharing all her memories with Amber (especially ones she feels would “worry her” or “set her off” (like say a big team up with Sal)). And that’s a bad road, especially when combined with how much extra control AG has seized this weekend. Amber/AG could be very well setting off on becoming more disassociated and uncommunicative and that would make it harder to reintegrate from that.
And this bit also concerns me with the very minimalistic way she’s responded to the breakup, letting AG take the main lead and just supporting her decision without question. It really seems like Amber’s low self-esteem and AG’s lack of regard for her worth are convincing her that she’s worthless and unimportant compared to the “golden alter” AG.
Panel 6: This seems reinforced in panel 6 where she seems annoyed and perturbed by her hobbies and interests as if viewing herself as trash for her interests.
I’m also deeply concerned by the “I think” in this panel…
Panel 4: And the “i guess i should do some Amber time” in panel 4. It really feels like Amber is letting her own lack of self-esteem and AG’s lack of regard convince her that she doesn’t have any worth and is just a chain around the neck of AG and that is setting up a line of thinking where Amber will feel it is “best” for her to “vountarily” give more and more control and time to AG and minimize her own value and interests.
This is especially concerning for me because back in middle school (I’ve had DID since at least when I was 5), I believed one of my alters was a “golden alter” and another was an awful horrible monster I needed to protect everyone. And so I gave more and more power and regard to the “golden alter”, caged and mistreated my “monster alter” and ignored the real massive negative sides to my golden alter up until the point where that alter took full control to drive forward one of my suicide attempts.
That was an awful wake-up experience for me and so I’m really hoping that Amber/AG can figure out what’s wrong with this road before it gets that bad.
You’ve mentioned your story of the “golden alter” who ended up being anything but several times in these comments and I must say I’m very curious to hear the whole story.
Granted, this is a deeply personal story (not least because it involves your suicide attempt) so if you’d rather speak of it in snippets like you’ve done so far rather than the whole thing that’s 100% a healthy boundary to have with strangers on the internet
My take. Amber sees the bruises and knows full well where they came from, it was just a reminder of last night. I don’t think she seemed confused or surprised, she was just slowly waking up.
The Amber Time thing is an acknowledgment that she finds her normal life dull and boring. or at worst, she is depressed. Depression aggravates anti-social tendencies.
I don’t believe Amber has any type of Split personality. AG is one part defense mechanism, one part need fulfillment, and one part stress reliever.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s been any indication that Amber doesn’t remember what Amazi-Girl has been up to, or vice versa.
I’ve been doing armored combat as a hobby for a good many years. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up the next morning with bruises and contusions that I didn’t notice in the heat of battle, or that are way more spectacular the morning after.
In regards for her breakup, I’m wondering if she feels that she’s not “supposed” to have any say on that matter, since it was Amazi-Girl who was dating Danny.
The eye change is, to say the least, disturbing. I worked in psychiatry for a few years and was invited to CME training sessions with the medical staff. One of the lectures was on dissociative identity disorders and a video was shown of a session where a murderer was questioned using a drug to break down the barriers and allow the other personality to emerge. The physical change in posture, voice, and eyes was spooky at best. Let’s hope A/AG’s treatment is a little (Actually a lot) more gentle.
The skinned-up knuckles are a nice touch. Amber looks imminently cuddleable in this strip. Poor dear deserves a nice rest after all that last night.
But how did she scrape up her knuckles? She wears gloves as Amazi-Girl.
They’re not scraped, just bruised. Though when skin breaks due to compression / impact injuries, the pattern looks a lot like road burn