So I've seen you reblogging a lot of The Power Fantasy posts lately- welcome to the fandom! You're the first plural system I know of in TPF fandom, so I wanted to ask- what's your opinion on interpreting Valentina as a two-member median system? I'm not plural, but I'm in alterhuman spaces and sometimes read essays by members of different kinds of plural systems. I know it's a personal topic, so no need to answer this either publicly or privately if it's not something you want to talk about, but if you do, I'm curious what you have to say. This idea came up for me because Valentina shifts suddenly and dramatically between speech patterns, goals in life, access to knowledge about Heaven, and so on. And to me it seems like she's trying to fit every moment of her life into a single coherent person, but the narrative of "all these thoughts and feelings are just me" isn't working for her. In particular, she seems to be struggling to reconcile the duty she feels to protect humanity with her need to find joy and human connection, as if she has very different priorities in different situations and doesn't realize there's not continuity between them. I know she's different from systems in this world, in that her spiritual nature is evident to everyone around her and she does physically transform, but other than that she reminds me of how members of certain systems describe their experiences before realizing they were plural. Still, nothing I've read gives me firsthand experience of plurality so I've been wondering for a while what an actual plural system who's read TPF would think of this idea. If you have thoughts you want to share I'd love to hear them!
Hestia: So we've been mulling over this ask all day and, well. We hadn't quite realized just how much she swaps between gentle, almost enabling love and "I'll fucking kill you if you cross this line". How she'll shift speech patterns and appearance and literal artstyles based on unspecified criteria... we may have to reread the entire series to get some deeper thoughts on this, but suffice to say you've given us some very interesting things to think about.
Diana: In particular, I'm wondering if maybe the reason Valentina lost against Queen was because usually the more combative, ruthless Valentina would take over in fights, but because the more loving, gentle Valentina couldn't or wouldn't unfront because of the differing emotional context... she's not the one who fights. She's not the one who's good at it, she's not the one who can pull the lever in the trolley problem. And so she's not the one who could defeat Queen. Not because her power was insufficient. Not even because she didn't want to. But because in this particular crisis, with the emotional turmoil the Valentinas were in, the Valentina who could harden her heart and throw the punch simply couldn't front.
