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sophieinwonderland · 7 months

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The Plurality of... The Hybrid Chronicles: What's Left of Me

Over the past couple weeks, I've been listening to book one of The Hybrid Chronicles, What's Left of Me.

And it is AMAZING. Fantastic story with a fantastic narrator!

As always, expect huge spoilers ahead!

A World of Twin Souls

The Hybrid Chronicles takes place in an alternate reality where every person is born as two people. Each has their own name. Each has motor control of the body at different times and can switch who is in control. And they communicated with each other internally with mindvoices just like most systems.

This is how it is in the beginning, at least.

There's a recessive soul that usually fades away naturally though childhood. Usually around 4 or 5. Some take longer. If the recessive soul doesn't fade away, if they don't "settle", then the two become a Hybrid.

If a child reaches 10 and hasn't settled yet, they're sent away to nightmarish institutions.

The history the government gives explains that Hybrids are all terrible and chaotic. At some point in the history of The Americas (The whole supercontinent appears to have one centralized government in this universe) people rebelled against the Hybrid leadership, massacred the Hybrids, and took control of their new Hybrid-free nation.

The Americas became intensely xenophobic and trade was cutoff from the rest of the world.

The government of The Americas pushes constant anti-hybrid propaganda, showing the other nations as violent and destructive because of their hybrid leadership.

A weird note on names: One of the least believable things about this story to me is that parents give their children two names. It seems like it would make much more sense for them to just call each soul by the same name. Maybe with a number attached. For example, you might just have Addie 1 and Addie 2 instead of Eva and Addie. Then when the recessive soul fades away, it will feel less like your child just died. Because it seems really messed up that there's just a world where you're expected to name two children, knowing that one would be guaranteed death. (In real life, it's common for places with high infant mortality rates to not name their babies immediately.)

But then again, maybe some people tried that, and it just resulted in one of the souls choosing a different name for themselves anyway. And then if that soul with a different name settled as the dominant, then the parents get a child with a name they didn't choose. I suppose I could accept that headcanon. 🤷‍♀️

Eva and Addie

That brings us to the main characters. Our viewpoint character is Eva, a recessive soul who has lost motor control of the body. But she didn't fade away completely. She shares a head with Addie.

The two have to constantly hide who and what they are from the world, lying to everyone and saying that only Addie survived.

At the same time, Eva longs for nothing more than to be able to move her fingers again. To talk to people outside of their body.

The relationship between these two characters is the heart of What's Left of Me. The two are like sisters. They comfort each other when they're hurt or scared. They fight with each other. They fight for each other. And they are both willing to sacrifice for the other.

Addie has to wrestle between her desires to remain "normal," and to support Eva and let Eva be herself.

As a system, something I often hear come up from singlets is a question of why you would let someone take control of your body.

And I think this amazing bit of dialog when Addie and Eva find a way for Eva to regain her mobility encapsulates it perfectly.

When you care about someone, of course you would be willing to give up time for them. Even if it's hard sometimes to step away from the reins.

At its core, this book is about pluralphobia. In part, from a society that is openly hostile to plurals. But it's also about internalized pluralphobia. It's about Addie and Eva's self-hatred instilled into them by a world that refuses to accept them.

It's about their own struggle to be able to accept themselves.

This is such a poignant quote and it stuck with me more than anything else in the book.

So far, most of the excerpts from this are focused on the general premise of the book and the relationship of the protagonists. What I'm going to say next is more spoilery as it's from near the end of the book. If what I've mentioned already as enticed you to read it for yourself, this is a good place to stop...

...

Acceptance

Through the story, Eva gradually regains motor controls and the two start to accept themselves more.

And I must say that it's an amazing journey. I love seeing Eva so excited to talk to people and even just move her fingers for the first time in years.

Every new milestone is so well-written. (And the narrator does an incredible job playing the characters in the audio book.)

And it all culminates in this exchange, with Eva in full control and no longer hiding, or ashamed to be who she is.

Proud. Determined. No longer afraid to be who she is.

Parallels to Real Pluralphobia

The ages of settling are interesting to me. If it's not done intentionally, it at least feels like a pretty big coincidence.

I recently mentioned my feelings about imaginary friends and the belief that many of them are sentient beings. Through that lens, you can see a lot of parallels.

An imaginary friend in childhood may be treated as if they're real by the rest of the family, just playing around. It's often seen as a normal thing. But as a child ages, imaginary friends are more stigmatized. Children are expected to outgrow them. And most will disappear.

Except when they don't...

And then having people in your head is suddenly treated as an illness. You're suffering psychotic hallucinations or a dissociative disorder. Much like with hybrids, you're treated as if you're "sick" or "broken."

And the age range of this is pretty close. Most imaginary friends fade away during early childhood. This is also when self-states are alleged to become fully integrated and why 10 is usually considered the maximum cutoff for the trauma that causes DID.

Stigma of plurals as "dangerous" is persistent through our media in the form of the evil alter trope, and through media that portrays malevolent psychotic hallucinations as self-conscious entities with their own identities and personality.

There's not some huge government conspiracy in real-life. But the connections are definitely there between the fear of hybrids in The Hybrid Chronicles and the pluralphobia and ableism plurals experience in the real world.

And with our country's history of ableism, even being forcefully shipped away to an institution for being plural would have been a real fear 50 years ago.

On mechanics of Manifestation Types and Emotion Influence...

Having compared the plurality of the book to real plurality and to imaginary friends, I should mention that the souls of the book are exclusively fronters. There are no inner worlds, nor do either Addie or Eva have external visualized mindforms.

And even when she lacks control, Eva seems to almost always be attuned to the body.

Another thing the book handled really well, I thought, was the sharing of emotions between the two and how they can both experience emotions from the other, while clearly identifying those emotions as belonging to the other soul.

And with this excerpt, I feel I should also give a shoutout to the unique formatting choice to denote their mind speech. Though, full disclosure: the audio book can be confusing sometimes when that formatting doesn't exist and you have to depend heavily on context clues to figure out if something was said in their head or through their mouth. Sometimes I didn't realize that something had been verbalized... or not verbalized... until a few sentences later.

Conclusion

What's Left of Me is a fantastic book exploring (whether intentional or not) plurality and pluralphobia in an alternate universe where everyone is born with two souls. It's such a great story, and the dynamic between Eda and Addie is handled amazingly.

Writing this felt weird. When doing The Plurality of… Batman (Failsafe), I was focusing on one character who happened to be plural and ignoring most of the story aside from what was relevant to that.

Likewise, The Plurality of… Skyward - Diones dealt with a single alien species. None of these really felt like I was writing a review of the whole work.

But with What's Left of Me, the plurality is so central to everything that it's practically unavoidable. It's seeped into every layer of the worldbuilding and the characters.

I still left a lot out. There are a bunch of hybrids in this book and a lot I could say about each of them. Maybe I will another time. I chose to only focus on Addie and Eva to keep this from getting too unfocused and avoid giving much more away than I needed to.

And that itself is a situation I haven't been in, where I feel like I need to omit a lot of the plurality in a story just because there's SO MUCH there.

It's a plural world where about half the characters are plurals.

And I only talked about the main two.

There is just too much plurality in this book to cover it all in a single post. So do check it out for yourselves.

And as always, thank you for your time. Have an amazing day! 💖

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