[BIG SELF-HARM TW] folie a dupe: transition of power

i've claimed a lot of my folie a dupe strips depict psychological events that are important to me; this one is arguably the most important exchange i could depict. it was the last time i harmed myself physically, on purpose. soon after that, i started to write drop-out.
there was really no going back from it, even if the desire were there; to hurts, it had never occurred to actually challenge dupe, and the last exchange in this comic changed the power dynamic between them.

in the pinwheels comic, some of the issues dupe has with the body are lightly hinted at, but a huge underpinning to the issue at hand. she has continuously, adamantly rejected the body she's in as hers -- which wasn't much of a problem until a different part of her brain decided to step up and claim it. prior to this, dupe often marked the body as her territory by cutting it, starving it, piercing it, etc.
unfortunately, the intense hatred for the body that dupe has, and the subsequent self-harm and suicide attempts to retaliate against it for the pain it caused her, brought hurts, a part built from the ground up to protectively shield the body from pain and harm, to the surface frequently.

these states of consciousness tend to not really develop substantial, nuanced identities unless they're conscious for enough time TO develop more complex thoughts. repeatedly bringing hurts into consciousness gave them enough time to develop an opinion about the body. if she had stuck to more passive, socially acceptable forms of self-harm, there's a chance the change in dynamics never would have taken place.
by being willing to adopt the body as "close enough" to be theirs, no matter how it changed, they acquired a vital ground in reality, and a death grip on decisions about actions the body takes. the main drawback has been that the most valuable ability to shut off pain became less and less available with more awareness of the body. connecting to the body (and the desire to protect it) ultimately made the delusion about already being dead collapse under its own weight, as well.

as the body's grown more and more associated with a specific identity, it's become more intolerable to dupe to exist inside of it; without self-harm to maintain her grip on consciousness, she hasn't found many ways to react to it besides withdrawing completely.
the boiling point was probably the split with blue, who sports the sort of morbid open-mindedness that allowed hurts to adopt the body in the first place -- the result was that blue looks almost exactly like the body does (but with blue hair because FML i suppose). her voice and body no longer SORT OF look like gray, and there's no wiggle room for interpretation.

it's really interesting to see which delusions and identities did and didn't change. dupe is a chameleon, and tends to also be pretty open to new information, but her delusion about being a different species underneath the human skin is pleasure- and comfort-based; hurts' delusion about being dead was merely a coping mechanism to reconcile with incoherent realities, and could (or, would) be discarded when it was no longer useful.
i hadn't thought that much about the body and my feelings about it until rereading it a few times, when i noticed how much dupe actually mentions the body -- the problem is, most of her thoughts literally aren't verbal; they're abstract, and have to be translated into words. i didn't really "translate" them until i had to put them in a comic and make them comprehensible.

anyway, a couple little things:
-the first two segments are a blend of different experiences while trying to make it most like a vague memory of one specific experience. they're from a long time ago, and it's almost impossible to remember more precise interactions at this point. the interactions themselves were really vague and just beginning to make contact with each other at that point. the last segment is more precise. i had been working on figuring myself out with art, and both parties were now more aware of each other visually.
-i tried to draw dupe the way i drew her in the respective years the events take place. it was definitely challenging to try to copy my old styles...
-the thing dupe's smoking in the first segment is a blu e-cigarette. it glows blue when you suck on it, but blinks red when the battery dies and you try to inhale.
-in the first segment, i removed dupe calling hurts "stupid voice." she's called them a voice in her head in another strip, but in this time frame dupe's head voices were LITERALLY interpreted as hallucinations and intrusive thoughts by professionals, and she was very much under the impression that hurts was just a particularly annoying hallucination.
-dupe initially said "it's my property" instead of "it's my toy" -- before realizing that property didn't always mean something owned by a specific entity, but could also mean an innate, defining quality possessed by something, and changing to another word. i didn't want to draw an extra panel. i tried to compensate for the hesitation in thought with the comma.
-in the second segment, initially hurts was supposed to drink soured milk and it would be ambiguous whether they threw up from that or all of the pills. pouring a glass of milk, dissociating, and "waking up" when it was super far gone was such a thing for me back then. anyway, here are the funny faces.
-in the panel where hurts is interrupted, a sentence or so was removed about hurts speculating that it's their body at some point before they died, so it might change to look more like them over time.
-the dose of testosterone is 0.1-0.2 mL
-please don't inject testosterone with your drawing needle lmfao. i used to use the same needle but i have problems. the needle necessary to draw is much thicker and more painful to inject with, but piercing the vial also blunts the freshly sharpened edge of the needle.
-this was the same room from the "fasting for inspiration" comic and the couch is the same room as the "who will read wikipedia until 3 am for me"
-because dupe is good at playing pretend, and her lizard body is a dear fantasy to her, she will back down to physical threats that are solely internal. in the last segment, she had already beefed with liron and forced him into dormancy. she was very sure she had killed him and was under the impression that it was possible for her to die in a similar fashion.
-the scars on the top of hurts's right arm are the scars they're asking about in the "dupe will remember that" comic. they are gibberish half-letters. technically, they should be visible in the second segment, but i was going for a reveal thing and obviously hurts would show their dominant arm in more shots as it moves more.
-fuck you z-track method

that's all i have to say about this one i think.