welcome to the domain of tempest heaven! you can call us crescent or tempest. we use they/them pronouns, we're a lesbian, we have autism and DID, and we're 23 years old. known across the internet for writing ridiculously long stories and for getting retweeted by the director of ave mujica that one time.
our main interests are fire emblem and octopath traveler. other things we like include digimon, pokémon (especially horizons), ace attorney, professor layton, triangle strategy, bandori, and revue starlight. we can and will be extremely autistic about any and all of these things when you least expect it. watch out (i'm joking i swear)
we're an author both on ao3 and with a self-published book series. you can find our archive of our own here to read the seventeen million words we've posted there in the last eight years or so. we have a disease called fanfic writer. we also write an original action fantasy adventure series under the pen name of @crescentzephyr, and you can click there to find our tumblr or click here to check out our author website. new ao3 content comes on a weekly basis, and new chapters of our book series come out monthly on the eighth of the month.
we take writing commissions also! if you have something you would like us to write, feel free to DM us. our rate is $1 USD per 100 words written. we take payment upfront and promise a turnaround in under six weeks. we can write for any fandom we are familiar with or for original characters. our commissions are always open, so if you're interested, go on and reach out for more details.
as we mentioned before, we have DID. our system name is tempest heaven, hence our collective name of tempest. alters may or may not sign off their posts on this account, most likely with some tag like [alter] talks. we won't do this on every post though since we are extremely polyfragmented and fairly private. it'll come up when we feel like doing it. speaking of our DID, those from other parts of the internet might recognize us for making analyses about mutsumi and mortis from ave mujica when the anime was airing. if you do: yes, that was us. you found us. yay!
we're not on twitter anymore, but if you want to see our account for what we've posted before, it's here. we're most active on bluesky out of all social media. we've got a side blog here on tumblr for talking about DID/PTSD stuff under the username tempesthellhole, but followers there need to be 18+ for safety and comfort reasons.
that should cover it. welcome to our tumblr! enjoy!
🩷 lovebug 💚 lovebird 💙
(miscellaneous info and project progress under the cut)
more about this page
we're open about having DID and are more than welcome to receiving and answering questions about it. we won't answer anything we're uncomfortable with, of course, but if you want to ask, go right ahead. you can ask us questions about anything else you want too
with that said, we definitively won't answer anything related to online discourse since it's just not something we want to engage with for our mental health
not sure of how much we're going to use tumblr since we've been pretty bad at keeping up with it in the past, so sorry in advance if it takes us a while to get back to anyone
feel free to share or reblog anything we post here. we don't mind at all
we don't give out our discord freely anymore. if we want to contact someone there, we'll reach out first and ask for theirs. please do not ask for our discord account!
notable tags
we'll tag any DID related discussion with "did talk"
tag for pokémon horizons au free fall: "pokemon horizons free fall"
tag for digimon frontier rewrite: "frontiers unexplored"
tag for self-published book series: "a road never walked alone" and "arnwa"
current story info
update schedule:
updated tuesdays: alitia: reflections of truth (ao3)
updated thursdays: morix: chains of justice past (ao3)
sometimes i remember mutsumi and mortis exist and i feel like im going to start crying because they're so important to me... what am i going to do... my little green things who i adore from the bottom of my heart... waaaaaaaah
Your guy's inbox being open is so exciting!!! We just wanted to give you all a personal thanks for your analysis on mutsumortis, and for your fanfics about the two. We've struggled with major imposter syndrome pretty much our whole life, and reading your work helped us overcome it and officially get our DID diagnosis. On top of that, your "goodnight, my beloved" fic has been our favorite for such a long time, it's so good that I can't even describe it. We plan on buying your book soon!
omg thank you so much for the kind message!! we're so glad to hear you enjoy our stuff!! and we hope you enjoy our book when you pick it up!!
same question we asked celeste: for those comfortable with answering, what's their favorite pokemon?
this will not be every alter in our system by any means since we are too polyfragmented for that. a lot of us honestly hadn't thought about it before this post and quite a few alters are still indecisive about it, so we might come back to edit this later on with more? i'm not sure. but for now, here are the ones who are confident about their favorites and willing to share. putting this under a read more because it's probably going to get long
yep! i talked about it a little bit here, but tldr: i am working on a magical girl series about someone with DID! a seemingly normal young woman finds out that she has alters and not only that but her main alter is actually a magical girl who has been saving the city from an unknown danger. so the story is about them developing their relationship with one another and then working together to save the world and each other. it's still a work in progress, but i have been working on it on the down low for a while. current title for the series is "Help! My Alter is a Magical Girl!" and i'm hoping to release the first part of the trilogy in the back half of 2027 (though this is subject to change, and i am still working on it obviously). when it does come out, it'll be over on my page for my self-published author stuff @crescentzephyr, and i'll also obviously announce it here. so yeah! details pending, but hopefully that'll be a thing before the end of next year!
Ok, this is just a silly question but if you were to write a magical girl with D.I.D how would you do it, would the powers be tied to the body or each alter, since your gf told me you are working on a relevant story?
i am in fact working on a relevant story! i'm a self-published author, and i'm currently planning out and developing a trilogy about this exact concept. current working title is "Help! My Alter is a Magical Girl!" and i'm hoping to release the first book at some point in the back half of 2027, though this is of course subject to change. you're never going to believe this, but it is about... well, someone with a magical girl alter. the way it works in this specific universe is that every magical girl has a "theme" for their powers. so for example, let's say someone had gemstone theming. all of her abilities would be focused around jewels, and all of her alters would be named after various gemstones (ruby, sapphire, emerald, etc). and while they might all have various individual abilities, they're all presented through the overall theme of these jewels. one alter might be able to create fire, another can another make plants grow, or another could another cast strong winds, and so on, but it all comes back to various gems they have or can summon as part of their magical girl abilities. i hope this makes sense? the alters have individual abilities but are united by a common theme and a common way these abilities present. more information about this series is coming as i develop it more, and when i finally publish it, i will be posting about it. so keep your eyes out for that within the next year and a half or so if that sounds interesting to you!
since my girlfriend was also doing this, i am saying fuck it and inviting people to leave me asks about DID stuff. or anything else. follow your heart. ill answer stuff later because i am so sleepy right now but fire away
picking just one is tough so let me give top three. in no particular order, luna for confessing her love to us, sakiko for the everything she has going on with mumo in our system, and eruna for being so easily flustered when we flirt with her. im inclined to say eruna number one though
what it says on the tin. except it's actually not just "because i said so," i have evidence and analysis to back it up. tw for talk of abuse, torture, and OEA in this post. full spoilers for three houses and three hopes also. proceed with caution, and let's get down to business.
what is DID?
DID stands for dissociative identity disorder, a dissociative disorder caused by trauma in childhood. the theory behind it is that all people start off with different pieces of their mind to handle different matters necessary to early survival (eating, playing, etc). most of the time, people's different pieces come together to form a single identity at some point before the age of 12 (there are debates about when this happens specifically but i'm keeping it loose for the purposes of this post). however, trauma can disrupt this process, causing the pieces to stay separate because of dissociation. the child will dissociate to escape overwhelming trauma, keeping the pieces apart from one another through this developmental period. in the end, the parts do not come together and instead develop separate but parallel to one another with memory barriers keeping them apart. these parts of the mind go on to become alters who live within a system (the collective of all alters in a body). and that's DID. i had to simplify a lot in order to explain this succinctly, so if you don't know much about DID, i highly suggest doing more research into it on your own.
DID is marked by identity alterations (switches between which alter is in control) and memory gaps beyond ordinary forgetting. it also comes with dissociation since it is a well. dissociative disorder. other common symptoms include losing time, hearing voices, detachment from reality, detachment from oneself, and PTSD because of the trauma the people with it went through. DID tends to be comorbid with a lot of other disorders because of the trauma too.
this probably sounds familiar to people who have played three houses. isn't that just jeritza? well, yes, but... as someone who has DID, i do not think he is particularly good representation in canon. he leans into the serial killer alter stereotype which is a very harmful source of stigma against people with DID, and it honestly always left a bad taste in my mouth. (i'm not getting into it too much here, but you can ask me about it later if you're curious.) however, i have come to you all with a new headcanon: giving edelgard DID. this isn't just me throwing things at the wall either; i think there's a decent amount of evidence to back it up, and i'm going to go through it all here. i have normal feelings about the red woman, and now, you have to have normal feelings about her too.
disorganized attachment
one of the biggest indicators for DID is disorganized attachment with caregivers. disorganized attachment in this context means that a parent or guardian was not a reliable source of safety during a time of trauma or stress. the guardian could be the source of trauma, creating a two-sided relationship on the child's end. the child needs the guardian for safety, but the guardian is also a sign of danger. reconciling these two sides of a parent can be difficult for a child, and it can contribute to dissociation, the fuel behind DID. disorganized attachment can also stand for a guardian not being there to support the child during trauma unrelated to them. if a child cannot rely on a guardian while they are facing trauma, then they will struggle a lot more to cope with it than if they had a protective figure to support them, and once again, this can contribute to dissociation. nothing feels safe in reality, so the child has to retreat into their mind to find safety there.
and i think this is very applicable to edelgard. let's look at her parents first. her mother was exiled from the capital before she could remember, so any contact edelgard had with her was limited and based on her leaving the capital to visit her directly. anselma could only do so much to protect edelgard from a distance, especially since edelgard was largely raised in the castle based on what we know in canon. edelgard's father, ionius, was busy with ruling over the empire and had ten other children, so he presumably wasn't very involved with edelgard's life either. the parents who should have been taking care of her could not for some reason or another, and that would lead to disorganized attachment. that doesn't even get into the fact that no adult helped her when she was going through the torturous blood reconstruction surgeries, something that worsens this issue even more.
and it gets worse when you consider her uncle! we don't see much of the original volkhard in canon since he was replaced by thales, but if you ask me, he probably wasn't that great of a guy given the circumstances. he was one of the leaders of the insurrection of the seven and uprooted edelgard's life shortly after starting it. unlike anselma, he was presumably not in exile from the capital, meaning he would have been a caretaker figure for her and probably wouldn't have been the best for the job either. he would have also been pretty busy with his political career and not done much to look after his niece before thales took over. it all comes together to make a recipe for pretty notable disorganized attachment issues, and given how much of an indicator that can be for DID, it bears mentioning here.
trauma history
going on from that, we have known trauma in edelgard's history too. upon returning to the empire from her brief stint in faerghus, she was kidnapped and tortured by those who slither in the dark. this is obviously extremely traumatic, especially given the fact that she watched the rest of her siblings either be driven to madness or die because of what they had to endure. this trauma set edelgard down the current path she is on as of the time of three hopes and three houses. edelgard has notable PTSD from what she went through here, having a particularly bad reaction to rats since they send her into flashbacks instantly. i think this trauma more than qualifies as the sort that would cause someone to develop DID, or at the very least, PTSD.
edelgard also canonically has nightmares about what she went through, something that shows up as early as her C support with byleth. beyond her panic attacks about rats, the nightmares are proof of severe PTSD. nightmares are a very common symptom of trauma, especially prolonged trauma like what she went through. nightmares are also extremely common in DID, and flashback dreams for people with DID can be very vivid and distressing.
one argument i could see people making against this point is that her trauma happened too late in her life to cause DID. i personally disagree with this because of everything i listed previously. if her home life was already unstable (which i believe it was given her parents' emotional and literal distance), then she would probably already have an inclination toward dissociation before all of this happened. the torture at the hands of TWSITD would make the existing issues worse, exacerbating her dissociation and causing the formation of more alters.
dissociation issues
one common symptom of DID is known as emotional amnesia. emotional amnesia involves knowing something traumatic happened to you but having no emotional attachment to it. the best way to recognize this is by summarizing something awful that happened almost clinically with an odd sense of distance from it. to me this, is something you can say of her C support with byleth where she recalls what happened to her siblings and says it all very bluntly. there is some emotional connection, yes, but it is not as much as one might expect given the horrific things she is talking about here. emotional amnesia comes from someone detaching themself from their trauma and pain, and i can't think of a better description for what we see here in this conversation. i also think it applies to her conversations with lysithea where she refuses to admit to her trauma, keeping as much distance from the truth as possible even when lysithea is aware of what she has been through and is trying to press her into opening up about it. emotional amnesia often comes part and parcel with depersonalization and derealization, or the detachment from yourself and reality. it is easy to pull away from the traumas of the past when you barely feel like a person or barely have a connection to reality, marking this as a notable dissociation issue for edelgard.
memory gaps
a lot of portrayals of DID in media are very dramatized, and that includes what we see in three houses. jeritza has black and white memory gaps, and when the death knight is in control, jeritza remembers nothing. this is called blackout amnesia, but it's pretty uncommon in reality. this isn't to say that no one experiences it, of course, since people with DID absolutely can have blackouts. it isn't as common as media makes it out to be though, and a lot of systems instead experience other types of amnesia. instead of having instant blackouts, their memories may fade away with time. this has come to be known as grayout amnesia where someone is aware of what is happening in the moment, but the recollection leaves them as time goes by.
and this happens to edelgard at one point. when she is in the kingdom, she becomes close with dimitri, and the two spend a decent amount of time together. however, she has entirely forgotten about this by the time of her enrollment in the officers academy. the amnesia criteria for DID states that it needs to be memory loss inconsistent with ordinary forgetting, and i can think of no better way to describe this situation. amnesia in DID is a protective mechanism so the system can keep functioning even with their trauma since the constant awareness of it would break them down completely. sometimes, memories of things other than trauma can end up lost in this too, and other life events that coincide with the trauma can fit in this category. say, for example, edelgard made a friend and then immediately went through severe trauma, causing her memories to cave in on one another and make her forget that friend. dimitri has no issues with remembering her, but edelgard has forgotten almost everything about him. this cannot be ordinary forgetting to me, raising red flags that imply DID, or at the very least, dissociative amnesia.
identity alteration
edelgard talks a few times about wishing she could be an ordinary person instead of an emperor. she acts starkly differently when she is at work as a leader opposed to when she is spending time with those she cares about and seeks to relax. this on its own is not a symptom of DID since everyone has different sides that come out depending on their surroundings. a person doesn't act identically at work to how they do with friends. still, i felt the need to mention it before getting into the big piece of evidence here. after all, this could still be an indicator given the other evidence.
okay. we have to talk about three hopes here. more specifically, i have to bring up everything that happens in azure gleam. for the uninformed, azure gleam made some... controversial writing choices with edelgard. in essence, edelgard is forcibly turned into her hegemon form, and when she reverts back again, she is essentially an entirely different person. she acts far younger, staring at the ground and dissociating almost constantly. she only does as others ask of her and has very little autonomy on her own. she is also entirely compliant to thales who she views as her uncle despite volkhard being dead for a long time, something she knows in the present.
edelgard's memories of her life since childhood have entirely melted away, replaced instead with extreme loyalty to thales and notable skill regression. skill regression between alters is very common in DID, and the same is true of having alters who are younger than the body. alters can present as children because of the trauma they endured, and they can act a lot like it too. if you ask me, this is exactly what happened in azure gleam.
the thing that's really damning here is the fact that if you get the arval interlude near the end of three hopes, edelgard... goes back to normal. she describes feeling imprisoned in her mind in the other world, out of control of her actions for a time. she has also lost a lot of her memories of what has happened since she was taken over by this other self of hers. that is how a lot of systems describe switching when they're not the one in control of their body. they're watching themselves from the outside and dissociating through it with minimal access to their memories. edelgard regresses again upon leaving the arval interlude chapters, proof that she can go back and forth between states. what is that but an alter? it's an alter. it absolutely is. (side note: if anyone wants to ask me for a more in-depth analysis of this part and my criticisms of this plot point, feel free to shoot me an ask. i'm not going into it here since it's outside of the scope of this post, but i did talk about it a little bit in this emblemcon presentation a little under 45 minutes in if you want to check that out.)
OEA implications
and i can't talk about all of this without addressing the relation to OEA, or organized extreme abuse. sometimes, this is also known as RAMCOA, but i prefer OEA as a term, so that's what i'm using. OEA refers to organized abuse perpetuated by a group of perpetrators against a victim with the purpose of making them entirely loyal to the group in question. this is often seen in cults or extremist groups. children who are subjected to OEA very commonly develop DID because the dissociation involved with the formation of DID makes them easy to manipulate. if you want to do more research into this, please be careful, and take care of yourself. it's a very heavy topic and one that needs to be addressed with care.
why bring all of that up? i think OEA describes what edelgard went through extremely well. TWSITD forced her to go through torture with the express purpose of creating a weapon who could destroy the gods. part of making a weapon to work for them would be forcibly establishing loyalty to the group, something that comes up when edelgard is regressed in three hopes. she loses all sense of self in favor of being controlled by thales, one of her abusers. OEA victims are victims of torture, and they can end up with certain types of systems because of their trauma. OEA victims with DID can have particularly strong amnesiac barriers as well, and given how edelgard forgot literal years of her life in azure gleam, i think that applies here. this is more than just a child alter in control; this is an entirely compliant child alter in control who lacks any autonomy. she is dissociative, out of touch with reality, and only does as she is told because that is all she has ever been taught in this state. this presentation hits very close to home for me personally because of the OEA undertones, and i really can't talk about all of this without bringing it up. so not only do i think edelgard could have DID, but i think she specifically has a system presentation brought on by OEA.
conclusion
i'm sure one question at least some of you have after reading all of this is "why doesn't she know about it if this is the case?" well, DID is a very covert disorder, and most people who have it don't know about it. DID is a protective mechanism meant to defend the mind from trauma, and that means leaving the alters in the system largely unaware of what is happening within their mind. it takes a very long time for DID to be properly identified in the modern day medical system (over six years on average), and it wasn't any easier to pick out back then since there is no DSM in fódlan. so i think it's a case of her having DID but just not knowing about it, especially since more covert presentations fly under the radar of those who expect florid presentations like what we see with jeritza. even so, i think this interpretation has a lot more backing than one would expect at a glance.
to go back over all of the major points:
edelgard has disorganized attachment issues with her parents due to them not being fully present to raise her (exile and leadership)
she has a prominent trauma history both leading up to and involving the torture she went through at the hands of TWSITD
she is detached from her trauma and speaks of horrible events without the emotional connection one would expect
she has memory issues and completely forgot someone who was dear to her heart even though they left an impact on her
she completely switches in the azure gleam route of three hopes into an alternate state who acts like a child (with child alters being very common in DID)
she is easily manipulated in this state and is entirely loyal to her abusers, something found in victims of extreme organized abuse
yeah. i hope my analysis makes a little bit more sense after reading all of this. i wrote this up for fire emblem disability week since i wrote a fic about edelgard through this lens and wanted to have an example to point people to for why i felt that way. if you have any questions about this analysis or about other DID stuff, feel free to shoot me something in my ask box. thank you for reading, and happy DID to edelgard. she's just like me for real
im leaving for the airport in about two hours to say goodbye to my girlfriend in about three hours... im going to be so normal about it. we definitely did not cry on each other about it last night. absolutely not. why would you say that
my partner was homeschooled and my girlfriend had a very nontraditional high school experience so when i tell them about my time in public school it always scares them. i say shit like "yeah the boys' bathroom was closed for two weeks because a kid did a backflip off the sink, dislodging it from the wall and flooding the bathroom" and they look at me in what can only be described as dumbfounded horror and i smile about it which scares them more. im sorry you don't rock it with the backflip bathroom flooding. do you still love me
currently trying to not be extremely emo about the fact that i will be back at home and not with my girlfriend anymore in less than 60 hours. i am failing at this
i know the passage of time is like that and it goes by etc etc but also. idk sometimes i feel emotionally fragile about it and i don't want to leave the people i love. i don't want this to be the third to last night we're curled up in bed together for god only knows how many months. we're working to make this just our ordinary lives where the two of us and my partner all live together but. god it is hard to not be there yet and i have so many complicated feelings about it that i can and will get emo about. fucked up and evil world we live in where i don't get to hug girlfriend and partner at all hours of the day
