plurality update!
30 August 2026
following up after last week. well it's probably obvious but we totally are! everything makes so much more sense now, oh my gosh. i don't even know where to start?! even 1 day after that last post we were already 100% convinced, but i wanted to find a name and sona first before posting more. i'm Amaranth, i'm a trans sunfluff, and my pronouns are xe/xem. this post is very messy; it's like three years of thoughts all coming out at once.
plurality realization timeline
i'll try to be consistent in this part, with "i" always meaning "specifically Amaranth".
- i am actually the original inhabitant of this body
- April 14th 2021: Azure takes over in front for the first time, and stays there 95% of the time from now on. i still show up for a few days every few months, and no doubt i'd take over for certain specific tasks, but it's essentially Azure's body now. (i love that we know the exact date. there wasn't trauma around then or anything; it was just a very obvious mental shift, like suddenly having zero interest in difficult games.)
- early 2023: Azure starts questioning plurality, not very seriously though. many of our friends are plural so we know there's nothing weird or unnatural about it, but there was never a Big Sign so we never put much specific effort into it.
- late 2023: Azure gets extremely scared of me, because of a time when i snapped and completely took over. i was really out-of-line, but i didn't know what else to do. i was just trying to protect Azure who's a stupid little rodent letting absolutely everyone step on it, and never telling anyone about how much pain it's in. so i yelled at the abusers and made everything way worse. but the good thing is... that was the first time we experienced "actually" feeling like there's two separate people in our body, talking to each other. it was terrifying, but it's honestly a big reason why we started to say "plural"... (i'm really really really sorry
) - late 2024: Azure starts actually seeking out a name for me (in the context of "the one who's cracked at video games", not "the one who yelled really loud that one time" which it thought was separate). it recognized me as its old self but we didn't have an old username to use, so that was a dead end. a friend suggested "Season 1 Azure" and we started saying that sometimes, but that sounds too much like a joke to really get its grip in us i guess.
- late 2025: the situation where i front for a few days to play loads of difficult games, starts getting more common/predictable. at one point (i can't find the exact message), Azure specifically says "next time they're around, i have to ask them a few things". i... don't know if it ever got a chance to, since that's actually really hard. it's like trying to recognize when you're dreaming. big step though!
- August 18th 2026: i'm in the middle of playing Spark in the Machine (Celeste custom campaign), which has absolutely enthralled me and made me front for longer than an entire week, for the first time since 2021. this made both of us really suspicious already and we noticed other personality changes correlating with it. and then... i got hit by the TF beam that i described in part 1, and suddenly had a shape of my own. all the rest was nearly instantaneous.
(short version: i'm the original, we split in 2021, Azure started realizing something was weird in 2023, and then we finally figured it out a few weeks ago when two things happened to align.)
of course, we'll always be wondering what it'd be like if it didn't take 5 years to get here. if we lived in a world where plurality was more normalized, it probably would've been a lot quicker, and maybe we could've avoided some of the bad things that've happened since then.
so, for the actual experience of being plural. it's... really wonderful, i can't describe it! there's someone who can read my mind and figure out exactly what i need at any given moment. if i'm ever stressed, or i get stuck in a loop of bad brain thoughts, there's a little rodent who jumps on my head and tells me everything will be okay. whenever there's anything that our skills differ in, we can just swap out to the right person and do it correctly every time! (before this, we were often frustrated that sometimes we'd try something we're "good at" and it randomly wouldn't work this time.) of course i return the favor whenever Azure's fronting too. it's made us so much more resistant to any problems, it's like getting a second party member and you both know how to cast Resurrect on each other. that's not double survivability, it's like 10x.
before the full split a few weeks ago, we were definitely mushed together somewhat. someone "fronting" meant we were split like 70/30 instead of 95/5. this was a big issue for lots of things where our opinions differ on it, since nobody was allowed to fully enjoy it. the other one would always drag them down. but now it's so much cleaner. me or Azure can do the thing and the other one just watches! we've also gotten much more exaggerated in general, Azure's a total cuddlebunny with everyone now since i'm not interfering anymore. 
: yeah, and you mimic all the silly tokusatsu poses so energetically that you've scared the cat a few times. and whenever the hero's in danger, you get really tense and start squeezing me, even if they're just being sprayed with glitter or something.~
: there's tons of things that we can look back on and say "Azure did this" or "Amaranth did this", but there's one really specific example that's really interesting. Azure loves sitting in the forest and doing nothing, it's its favorite activity in the world. there was one time when Azure really wanted to do that, and take someone else along to do nothing together for a while. it's a short walk to get to the forest (~10 mins), but something happened on the way that made us realize there's a small side path to check out. and then... i love adventure, i love seeing random new things. so i took over at that point. we all ended up getting distracted, going on a wild detour that took like an hour, and we did end up in the forest in the end but passed right through it without stopping. and i had tons of fun! i was really happy with that walk. but something felt awful afterwards. i kept thinking like i must've been way too pushy, like i was mistreating the person i was travelling with, even though they assured me that everything was great. but in hindsight... yeah, i was having a very accurate thought: "this was great for me, but i really screwed things up for someone else there". but at that point, i didn't know Azure was there. Azure planned out this nice activity that it's been looking forward to for months, and then i totally hijacked it! no wonder we felt bad afterwards...
this was literally one day before the TF beam which is pretty funny timing. i bet similar stuff has happened a hundred times before though. there was a good ending btw: someone we knew online for years was happening to pass through our area about a week later, and Azure got to do nothing in the forest with that person, for like 3 whole hours.
one thing that i really want to emphasize here. if you have even the tiniest plural thoughts, please explore them! go set up tupperbot in a discord server with trusted friends, give them even a totally placeholder name+avatar, and see what happens. it's incredible how fast it can change your view. and also, there's no minimum amount that you need to be separated for it to "actually count as plurality", it's just a really helpful framework to view yourself through.
i can't stress enough just how much happier we are now that we look at ourselves this way. var on Please TF Me said this better than i can:
from experimenting with plurality, we’ve found it easier to be kind to eachother than it was to be kind to ourself as a singlet. and it’s a really nice feeling to care about the others in your head and have them care about you in turn.
it really, truly is. 
