As someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I was blown away by the amazing representation in the first volume of this series. It perfectly encapsulated the confusion and the worry of discovering the diagnosis and all that comes with it, but also the awe and appreciation of what a brain does to try to protect itself. The first volume was wonderful and it was the best piece of DID media I have ever consumed.
The second volume started out wonderful! The descriptions of inner worlds, all the different types of alters and roles they filled, even the friends being slightly suspicious of why their friend was acting different all of a sudden - all of those things were absolutely perfect and made me feel so seen. From the artist's work and the intentional changes of the hair color to even how the story let them make their inner world what they needed (even if someone else created it another way), was yet another thing that this author got absolutely right.
However, in the last few pages, it went from a wonderful story portraying a stigmatized mental health issue in a way that made it easy to digest and understand, to a sci-fi plot line that disregarded the disorder that the past 90 pages, and entire other volume, had been alluding to. I was very let down and disappointed at the plot twist and something that made me feel so seen twisted into something that yet another person used as a plot device to get to a different kind of story.
The reason this is 4 stars is because literally everything up to that point was spot on, and even when two alters went hand in hand in later parts of the story, their hair had streaks of the other alters color in it, portraying co-conciousness or a slight break down of an amnesia barrier. The art was beautiful, it was wonderfully unstigmatized, and the way it made me and my system feel so heard and seen and appreciated is unmatched by any other piece of media up until this point. But I took off a star because of the last few pages that entirely erased everything DID-related up until that point.
I will be reading the next volume because I want to see if this series redeems itself, but as someone who cried tears of joy at the last book, I cried tears of sadness at the end of this one and was heartbroken.
If I didn't have DID, I would think it was a wonderful story, but since I do have the disorder it just seems that a story that was plot point for plot point perfectly summing up the DID experience just to do a bait and switch at the end, made me very let down by this volume.