Blaaah. Trying to get better at media analysis by analyzing my own media. This is just a little essay exploring Don's sisters and their connection to her gender dysphoria and feelings of social isolation. One could call them her alters/headmates, but I don't think they accurately represent plurality so I refrain from using those words.
Probably sounds awkward sometimes, but I don't talk to people often enough to convey my ideas better.
Dawn and Donovan
The Lindstrom sisters. Dawn the light-based shapeshifter, and Donovan the fire witch. A dynamic duo of one cheerful sibling and one dour one.
Don spends most the story moping around because Dawn is having so much fun living her best life. Dawn spends the story trying to push Don into being more independent because she can see she's wasting her own life.
Why do they butt heads over this? Because not even a year ago, the two siblings considered themselves the same person.
Dawn's Dawn
Donovan's natural power is creation. She can create things. Not very strongly, and you need a good few years to make something like Dawn, but she is a creator. Her power is so weak that Dawn wasn't even sure she was a person until the day she woke up and had a distinct thought outside of Donovan's head.
And distinct she is. She's everything Donovan is not. Dawn is confident. She's proactive. She draws crowds in ways that Donovan just can't.
She's also Donovan's biggest source of stress. Because she's everything Don wants to be.
Don wants to be have friends. Don wants to act without avoiding every problem of hers. Don really, really wants to be a girl. And her heart aches seeing her sister outdo her in every aspect of life.
And Dawn has no idea how to handle this, so she runs. Dawn has just as much avoidance issues as her sister, she just masks it better. She spends the entire chapter flipping between wanting to shelter Donovan and avoiding interaction with her.
She thinks that her existence is Don's source of gender dysphoria. And who could blame her? She feels so happy and confident being herself. And she knows on some level that Don is trans even if neither know the right words to describe it. The awkwardness between these two is because they aren't in sync with each other anymore. They're distinct identities.
In fact, given what little of Chapter 1 I released, it might not be immediately apparent that Dawn and Donovan were even the same person at one point. I think the biggest hint I give is the fact that they actually have the same base haircolor. Dawn just changes it to look different from her sister (also colorism got me bad back then).
But you can easily come to this conclusion because of one other character: Dean.
Dean (Also pronounced Dawn)
The third Lindstrom sister, Dean. She's the fire sprite that Donovan keeps summoning, and her existence is just fact to Donovan. Once Dawn "became real," Donovan needed someone new to talk to herself with. And, as such, Dean came to life.
Dean's existence gives us a little insight into Dawn and Don's life beforehand. Donovan uses Dean as a source of comfort in her isolation. If Dean is the logic to her irrationality, then Dawn is the optimism to her cynicism. Donovan doesn't shy away from seeing Dean as a more logical person, even though she knows that that logic is coming from her own mouth. In fact, I think Don is actually more open with Dean than even Dawn.
It's almost kind of funny how much of a personality Dean has. She's the one there to play the straight man to Donovan's antics because Don can't be the straight man for herself. And in this case, that means being sassy when her sister is being overly negative. She's almost already her own personality.
On a subconscious level, Donovan knows this. She knows that Dean is already starting to diverge from herself. On the page that shows Don blurred out in the background to emphasize her own feelings of inhumanity, Dean is allowed to shortly enter the foreground. Don sees Dean as a seperate person.
I think the best example is here. That's not Donovan trying to snap her sister back into consciousness, it's Dean berating her sister's dumb ass for getting knocked out. Dean's first appearance in the story shows that Don subconsiously uses her voice even during the heat of the moment. If you'd asked her, she'd probably say it's "just respectful."
To Don, Dean is more of a person than she'll ever be.
Because she knows Dawn.
And that is fucking tragic.
TL;DR DONOVAN SHOULD'VE BEEN ON ESTROGEN YEARS AGO.
