I think the light just dawned on Danny (panel 4) that Amber has something a lot more important going on than a secret. She isn’t playing a game like you are Danny boy.
dailybrad
His isn’t a game, either. His orientation is very important, both for his own sake and in regards to their relationship.
HeySo
Orrrrr MAYBE he just had empathy for what she went through, and loving her, he felt a sympathetic love that overwhelmed him until he felt forced to express comfort and acceptance toward her, for both their sakes.
But y’know, your emotional immaturity angle works as well, I guess he might NOT have been pressuring her initially out of concern for her well-being.
I can see why egalitarianists would prefer the butt, because it’s not restricted to one sex – a guy’s butt can be just as hot as a girl’s. Boobs, while quantitatively better, I would argue, are only better on a woman.
Amber can remember things Amazi-Girl did. The inability to remember that actions of other alters is diagnostic for DID (multiple personality disorder).
I don’t know how it develops. I especially don’t know how it develops in the Dumbiverse. But Amber does not have it at this point.
StClair
That said, what she’s saying is disassociative as hell, IMO.
Tacos
I always felt like Amber is trying so hard to make AG a real personality to try and replace Amber because she has such low self esteem. Like she hopes that if she pretends hard enough, Amber will disappear and be replaced by AG who she thinks is super-awesome.
Agemegos
To me it comes across that she is still trying to dis-associate the things she does and feels as Amber from the things she does and feels as Amazi-Girl, and sometimes failing to do so. Not an expert, but I have the impression that in DID it doesn’t take effort to keep alters separate.
Ambers effort to create the Amazi-Girl identity do seem psychologically dangerous. But so far I think they are [still] conscious, which I don’t think the creation, maintenance, and adoption of alters in DID are.
StClair
for what it’s worth, I agree.
TrueVCU
Yeah I’m not saying she has DID now, but she desperately needs to talk to a professional therapist.
DID is generally associated with severe childhood trauma and/or longterm abuse, which definitely fits Amber’s backstory. But the lack of memory between alters is not universal. Some of my alters, yeah, I completely check out of life while they’re out, but for others… It’s more like I’m watching myself do things but can’t affect what’s being said or done. Some of my alters will talk at me when I’m in control, telling me their opinions on the situation at hand when they differ from my own. Some of my alters never take control of the body; they exist purely to keep order within the collective.
At the moment, I’d say Amber’s personality is fractured but not completely shattered. The part are still connected. She is on a very precarious ledge, though…
That part’s not 100% required. That usually comes up when things are not integrated and she’s actively pushing for her alters to be less and less integrated, sooooo…. yeah. What Viktoria and St. Clair said about the ship sailing and her being dissociated to all hell.
LastDawnOfMan
Last I heard, no one has ever managed to prove whether multiple personality disorder even actually exists, so understanding anything about it is really problematic. Literally everything people are posting about it, so knowledgeably here, lacks scientific consensus. Not to criticize, it is kind of shocking to find that out, with it being so widely accepted as a thing particularly in the U.S. But there is a large chance it’s simply a figment of our cultural imagination.
NelC
It being a figment of our consensual reality doesn’t make it less real. Gay, straight, bi, male, female, boss, worker, parent, child, army, navy, air force: these are all inventions of our society, doesn’t stop us treating them as though they were god-given categories.
Slinx
Personality disorders are difficult to “prove” with certainty, but there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for DID, so saying there is a “large chance” it is imagined is really a stretch. Particularly when people are talking about their personal experiences with it.
Yup, you got me, I just make it all up for the sweet social benefits. Being ace and trans too. Just, so many social benefits. I mean, sure there are some small things I could have had if I had just been a neurotypical straight cis man, but nah, inventing a complicated life-long struggle with painful internal realities is just the hip, cool, thing the kids today are into.
/sarcasm
But to be serious, I’m mostly just speaking from my own experiences and the experiences of other DID people I have known and the thing is that I’m somewhat used to having to do that. Asexual, trans, DID, romantic orientations, and so on. For a good chunk of my life, the information for all of these just wasn’t great or downright harmful and wrong and it took community communicating with each other, building a foundation of knowledge because there just wasn’t the interest or the ability to do so in higher academia. Some of it is closer to the beginning of that process (I’ve got several of the earlier scientific articles critically examining asexuality from various disciplines), some of it is considerably further on and has largely succeeded in removing very toxic misinformation clinically and socially (trans issues).
My reality is what it is and it’s been that way for a long time and I’ve spent time trying to pretend away one reality or another only to have it bite me in the ass later. And my internal life has been defined for a long time by not only the others, but DID as well. Things have happened and internal realities have been such that it would be rather unlikely to be something other than DID and similar methods that have helped others have helped me.
As a scientist, I cannot really ignore the reality and evidence of my own life experiences and the stated life experiences of those I know, especially when I know that academia tends to be slow to build genuine scholarship on marginalized communities.
actually in a system
Ahahahaha if you really think it’s so widely! accepted!!! then I…
Well. I can tell you’re a singlet.
Just look at these comments. You already have people joking about how Amber and/or Amazi-Girl are going to end up going on a killing spree because they’re SOOoooOOoOO CRAZY GUYS AMIRITE?! And while it’s true Amazi-Girl does have issues with being too violent, that’s a common narrative for anyone who doesn’t fit the norm of a culture (espespecially in regards to mental health, think of how often shootings are blamed on people perceived to be mentally unhealthy), and these assumptions are kind of a sign that the thing were talking about? It’s not accepted. It’s not accepted at all.
Plus there’s loads of different opinions between psychologists on how to treat multiplicity, with many outright denying it exists? I mentioned I was in a system to one psychologist (with the request that we not try to “fix” it since it wasn’t causing me any problems) and they were chill about it. But when I had to switch therapists, I was FUCKING TERRIFIED and had the worst panic attack beforehand, just because I know how unpredictable professionals are about dealing with this stuff. Would they mock me for being delusional? Would they try to make me bring back the long-dead “original” person, despite the fact that would definitely make my mental health worse…? In the end, we didn’t even talk about it, but the fear was there and very real, just as bad if not more so than my day-to-day fears of homophobia and transphobia.
It’s “accepted” in the US inasmuch as it’s a fun narrative for the general public to write about cRAzY PEoPle, but it’s nowhere near accepted for real. Not even close. And in the scientific community, the name was literally changed from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder as way to blame it all on people dissociating. The old name at least gave it some credibility by acknowledging there were other people. The new one makes it sound like it’s just one person dissociating, which… confuses me because dissociating feels nothing like switching lol. But clearly the scientists who have never lived like this know best. Clear…ly. 😐
And anyway, we can’t even prove ONE person exists in a brain, much less more than one. All you can really do is take people’s word for it when they say that, yes, they’re a separate person and, no, they’re not delusional. And there’s definitely not an abundance of Americans claiming to be in multiple systems/have DID. As Cerberus said, there are no social benefits and hell of a lot of drawbacks, which means the majority of systems aren’t just saying this for the hell of it. So scientific evidence or not, it’s probably a real thing. (Even the healthy multiplicity crowd doesn’t treat it as flippantly as to assume everyone will be okay and there’s no stigma lmao I’ve seen post after post of people terrified to come out about this.)
thejeff
Staying out of the DID debate, but I’d like to point out one comic related thing: Amazi-Girl doesn’t have issues with being too violent, Amber does.
Amber loses control. Amazi-Girl doesn’t. That’s a lot of the point of Amazi-Girl. She’s channeling Amber’s rage, but doing so constructively.
Agemegos
Right. Amazi-Girl is all the controlled and pro-social use of violence. It was Amber who lost her temper and beat piss and pickhandles out of Blaine.
Spencer
The way Amber seems to put it, Amazi-Girl is how she deals with her aggression, and she thinks that if she didn’t use that as an outlet, she would take it out on the people around her.
Lou
I had a friend who has definite multiple personalities in his head. He’s entirely capable of remembering what’s going on with them, though, and they talk to each other in his head.
I’m not gonna say anything for Willis’ comic per se, but… psychologically that can’t happen, really. Dissociative Identity Disorder isn’t really a psychosis or something that you develop. It’s a result of trauma experienced when you’re very young, before you properly develop a personality. You create things in your mind to protect yourself from damage.
I’m not a psychologist, but my psych teacher at least always said that it really can’t happen to anyone over the age of like five-ish. Our personalities are too set and they can’t fracture like that.
There are a lot of opinions and not much consensus about DID. There are still psychologists who maintain that it is iatrogenic, i.e. induced by inappropriate therapy.
342 thoughts on “Brunt”
Ana Chronistic
“ohhh DannyWAITAMINUTE if this is your ‘secret’ I’m gonna pound you so hard”
…
“IN MULTIPLE WAYS”
Ana Chronistic
(awww, Danny’s reverse-Dannying it up… Nadding it up?)
Inkblot
Kiss the girl
Bob
Shalalalalalah!
L33tmaster
My oh my, look like the boy too shy
Ain’t gonna kiss the girl
Sha la la la la la
Ain’t that sad? Ain’t it a shame?
Too bad, he gonna miss the girl
HeySo
Aaaaand now that’s in my head, thanks. x_x
Roborat
Why is there an annoying seagull squawking now?
IDontcarenomore
I think the light just dawned on Danny (panel 4) that Amber has something a lot more important going on than a secret. She isn’t playing a game like you are Danny boy.
dailybrad
His isn’t a game, either. His orientation is very important, both for his own sake and in regards to their relationship.
HeySo
Orrrrr MAYBE he just had empathy for what she went through, and loving her, he felt a sympathetic love that overwhelmed him until he felt forced to express comfort and acceptance toward her, for both their sakes.
But y’know, your emotional immaturity angle works as well, I guess he might NOT have been pressuring her initially out of concern for her well-being.
I mean, that’s silly.
batman
Just wait…
rj
WHAT ABOUT THE SECRET, THOUGH
inqntrol
Forget it, let them enjoy their time.
DarkoNeko
They won’t, Amber refuse to go out with him directly, after all.
John
Or Danny uses boy chemistry to change her mind long enough that she’s able to feel good enough to realize she needs to be with Danny as Amber.
Ana Chronistic
[The Monarch]You know what that “secret” is? Your ex-boyfriend is a loser.[/The Monarch]
Vivvav
Once again the butt proves itself to be the greatest part of the body.
Imperator
They combine both form and function in the best of ways.
Yotomoe
Woah woah woah. Are you forgetting BOOBS? They’re the breast!
Inkblot
See this guy? He says what I’m thinking. He is brave.
Reltzik
I fully support this comment.
TheNinthShader
The IRS fully endorses all boob comments on this site
TheNinthShader
OTP INTENIFIES
MichaelHaneline
Is your OTP boobs + butt? Can we ship those two things together?
Opus the Poet
IC wut U did there.
Deanatay
I can see why egalitarianists would prefer the butt, because it’s not restricted to one sex – a guy’s butt can be just as hot as a girl’s. Boobs, while quantitatively better, I would argue, are only better on a woman.
Arianod
The butt is love; the butt is life.
Azarafel
links to “the booty is you” (song) only I don’t know how to do those so you are gonna have to look it up on youtube
Znayx
Yeah, I don’t know why people pick on it so much, and always make it the butt of their jokes.
Deimir
Now now, there’s no need for crASS jokes.
Arawn
You two are cracking me up by being so cheeky.
Cephalo the Pod
UUUUUUHHHHHHHH
TrueVCU
Yes Danny good you have done the right thing here.
Second right thing is recommending a therapist before full MPD sets in.
Doctor_Who
I can’t wait for her to develop a third personality. Wonder who it will be.
6Qubed
A mild-mannered reporter, I reckon.
Needfuldoer
She’ll have a third personality growing within her if they’re not careful.
DarkoNeko
That’s called a baby.
Needfuldoer
Yes, it is.
Charlie Spencer
“Amazi-girl is always prepared for ANYTHING”
Amber may (or may not) be another matter.
Emperor Norton
Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that…
Emperor Norton
Dammit, I meant to do this link.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/broad/
Viktoria
The ship may have already sailed on that one.
Agemegos
Amber can remember things Amazi-Girl did. The inability to remember that actions of other alters is diagnostic for DID (multiple personality disorder).
I don’t know how it develops. I especially don’t know how it develops in the Dumbiverse. But Amber does not have it at this point.
StClair
That said, what she’s saying is disassociative as hell, IMO.
Tacos
I always felt like Amber is trying so hard to make AG a real personality to try and replace Amber because she has such low self esteem. Like she hopes that if she pretends hard enough, Amber will disappear and be replaced by AG who she thinks is super-awesome.
Agemegos
To me it comes across that she is still trying to dis-associate the things she does and feels as Amber from the things she does and feels as Amazi-Girl, and sometimes failing to do so. Not an expert, but I have the impression that in DID it doesn’t take effort to keep alters separate.
Ambers effort to create the Amazi-Girl identity do seem psychologically dangerous. But so far I think they are [still] conscious, which I don’t think the creation, maintenance, and adoption of alters in DID are.
StClair
for what it’s worth, I agree.
TrueVCU
Yeah I’m not saying she has DID now, but she desperately needs to talk to a professional therapist.
ObiKemnebi
DID is generally associated with severe childhood trauma and/or longterm abuse, which definitely fits Amber’s backstory. But the lack of memory between alters is not universal. Some of my alters, yeah, I completely check out of life while they’re out, but for others… It’s more like I’m watching myself do things but can’t affect what’s being said or done. Some of my alters will talk at me when I’m in control, telling me their opinions on the situation at hand when they differ from my own. Some of my alters never take control of the body; they exist purely to keep order within the collective.
At the moment, I’d say Amber’s personality is fractured but not completely shattered. The part are still connected. She is on a very precarious ledge, though…
Cerberus
*DID Commiseration hug
ObiKemnebi
*accepts and returns commiseration hug*
desolation0
What is it with superheroes finding precarious ledges to perch on?
Liliet
they’re comfortable
Cerberus
That part’s not 100% required. That usually comes up when things are not integrated and she’s actively pushing for her alters to be less and less integrated, sooooo…. yeah. What Viktoria and St. Clair said about the ship sailing and her being dissociated to all hell.
LastDawnOfMan
Last I heard, no one has ever managed to prove whether multiple personality disorder even actually exists, so understanding anything about it is really problematic. Literally everything people are posting about it, so knowledgeably here, lacks scientific consensus. Not to criticize, it is kind of shocking to find that out, with it being so widely accepted as a thing particularly in the U.S. But there is a large chance it’s simply a figment of our cultural imagination.
NelC
It being a figment of our consensual reality doesn’t make it less real. Gay, straight, bi, male, female, boss, worker, parent, child, army, navy, air force: these are all inventions of our society, doesn’t stop us treating them as though they were god-given categories.
Slinx
Personality disorders are difficult to “prove” with certainty, but there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for DID, so saying there is a “large chance” it is imagined is really a stretch. Particularly when people are talking about their personal experiences with it.
Cerberus
Yup, you got me, I just make it all up for the sweet social benefits. Being ace and trans too. Just, so many social benefits. I mean, sure there are some small things I could have had if I had just been a neurotypical straight cis man, but nah, inventing a complicated life-long struggle with painful internal realities is just the hip, cool, thing the kids today are into.
/sarcasm
But to be serious, I’m mostly just speaking from my own experiences and the experiences of other DID people I have known and the thing is that I’m somewhat used to having to do that. Asexual, trans, DID, romantic orientations, and so on. For a good chunk of my life, the information for all of these just wasn’t great or downright harmful and wrong and it took community communicating with each other, building a foundation of knowledge because there just wasn’t the interest or the ability to do so in higher academia. Some of it is closer to the beginning of that process (I’ve got several of the earlier scientific articles critically examining asexuality from various disciplines), some of it is considerably further on and has largely succeeded in removing very toxic misinformation clinically and socially (trans issues).
My reality is what it is and it’s been that way for a long time and I’ve spent time trying to pretend away one reality or another only to have it bite me in the ass later. And my internal life has been defined for a long time by not only the others, but DID as well. Things have happened and internal realities have been such that it would be rather unlikely to be something other than DID and similar methods that have helped others have helped me.
As a scientist, I cannot really ignore the reality and evidence of my own life experiences and the stated life experiences of those I know, especially when I know that academia tends to be slow to build genuine scholarship on marginalized communities.
actually in a system
Ahahahaha if you really think it’s so widely! accepted!!! then I…
Well. I can tell you’re a singlet.
Just look at these comments. You already have people joking about how Amber and/or Amazi-Girl are going to end up going on a killing spree because they’re SOOoooOOoOO CRAZY GUYS AMIRITE?! And while it’s true Amazi-Girl does have issues with being too violent, that’s a common narrative for anyone who doesn’t fit the norm of a culture (espespecially in regards to mental health, think of how often shootings are blamed on people perceived to be mentally unhealthy), and these assumptions are kind of a sign that the thing were talking about? It’s not accepted. It’s not accepted at all.
Plus there’s loads of different opinions between psychologists on how to treat multiplicity, with many outright denying it exists? I mentioned I was in a system to one psychologist (with the request that we not try to “fix” it since it wasn’t causing me any problems) and they were chill about it. But when I had to switch therapists, I was FUCKING TERRIFIED and had the worst panic attack beforehand, just because I know how unpredictable professionals are about dealing with this stuff. Would they mock me for being delusional? Would they try to make me bring back the long-dead “original” person, despite the fact that would definitely make my mental health worse…? In the end, we didn’t even talk about it, but the fear was there and very real, just as bad if not more so than my day-to-day fears of homophobia and transphobia.
It’s “accepted” in the US inasmuch as it’s a fun narrative for the general public to write about cRAzY PEoPle, but it’s nowhere near accepted for real. Not even close. And in the scientific community, the name was literally changed from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder as way to blame it all on people dissociating. The old name at least gave it some credibility by acknowledging there were other people. The new one makes it sound like it’s just one person dissociating, which… confuses me because dissociating feels nothing like switching lol. But clearly the scientists who have never lived like this know best. Clear…ly. 😐
And anyway, we can’t even prove ONE person exists in a brain, much less more than one. All you can really do is take people’s word for it when they say that, yes, they’re a separate person and, no, they’re not delusional. And there’s definitely not an abundance of Americans claiming to be in multiple systems/have DID. As Cerberus said, there are no social benefits and hell of a lot of drawbacks, which means the majority of systems aren’t just saying this for the hell of it. So scientific evidence or not, it’s probably a real thing. (Even the healthy multiplicity crowd doesn’t treat it as flippantly as to assume everyone will be okay and there’s no stigma lmao I’ve seen post after post of people terrified to come out about this.)
thejeff
Staying out of the DID debate, but I’d like to point out one comic related thing: Amazi-Girl doesn’t have issues with being too violent, Amber does.
Amber loses control. Amazi-Girl doesn’t. That’s a lot of the point of Amazi-Girl. She’s channeling Amber’s rage, but doing so constructively.
Agemegos
Right. Amazi-Girl is all the controlled and pro-social use of violence. It was Amber who lost her temper and beat piss and pickhandles out of Blaine.
Spencer
The way Amber seems to put it, Amazi-Girl is how she deals with her aggression, and she thinks that if she didn’t use that as an outlet, she would take it out on the people around her.
Lou
I had a friend who has definite multiple personalities in his head. He’s entirely capable of remembering what’s going on with them, though, and they talk to each other in his head.
Someone
At the end of the strip Amber and Amazi-girl split completely, causing Amazi-Girl to go into full knight templer mode and try to kill Sal.
Danny is forced to kill her, doing the whole “cradling your kill” thing.
Everyone cries.
Or someone could just knock her out, but thats not nearly so fun.
Doctor_Who
Maybe it’ll work like with Fred Flintstone and every time she hits her head she gets a new persona.
Dean
Or like on Happy Days, and each time she getas hit on the head, she’ll start playing music.
Agemegos
Another knockout blow while Amber has not yet had time to recover from the last would not be a good thing at all. A woman needs her brain.
JetstreamGW
I’m not gonna say anything for Willis’ comic per se, but… psychologically that can’t happen, really. Dissociative Identity Disorder isn’t really a psychosis or something that you develop. It’s a result of trauma experienced when you’re very young, before you properly develop a personality. You create things in your mind to protect yourself from damage.
I’m not a psychologist, but my psych teacher at least always said that it really can’t happen to anyone over the age of like five-ish. Our personalities are too set and they can’t fracture like that.
Rabid Rabbit
Doesn’t mean she can’t try really hard to develop it.
Agemegos
There are a lot of opinions and not much consensus about DID. There are still psychologists who maintain that it is iatrogenic, i.e. induced by inappropriate therapy.
Noclevername
I really doubt Willis is trying to portray true DID. Amber is just in deep, deep denial.
Agemegos
Don’t go in there! Crocodiles!
Cerberus
I dunno, there’s some definite bits that resonate, so intention or not, the DID parallel can be drawn.