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"Hello, me, meet the real me!"
Megadeth, "Sweating Bullets"
"Isn't it true that at these times [Fred Flintstone] often descends into a delusional state, sometimes actually adopting another person's persona?"
In real life, Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD) is an extremely rare condition, and there is some controversy as to whether or not it even exists.
That doesn't stop it from being represented (and misrepresented) frequently in television and other media. Characters with a split personality are surprisingly common, but most of them don't quite match the textbook definition of dissociative identity disorder. In older media it will often be called "schizophrenia" even by psychologist characters, despite the fact that this is a completely unrelated psycological disorder.
See also The Chazz, Jekyll And Hyde, Superpowered Evil Side and Split Personality Takeover. Shapeshifting is sometimes involved.
If the two personalities are aware of each other, expect a Gollum Made Me Do It situation to develop.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Niki Sanders on Heroes has "Jessica", the personality of her dead sister, as an amoral alter ego with super-strength. This may be justified by being a superpower rather than a pre-existing condition, but this has yet to be made explicit.
- They've since clarified that it's neither: some people just can't handle having superpowers and the stress causes a dissociative break.
- While this is a staple trope of daytime soap operas, the soap One Life To Live took this to an extreme. Not only did established character Victoria Lord Buchanan develop a number of personalities (the most notorious of which was streetwalker Niki Smith, a full contrast to Viki's upper-crust manner), her daughter Jessica later developed her own split (tough girl Tess). Apparently, in the OLTL universe, split personality is a genetic disorder.
- In the third season of Homicide Life On The Street, a serial killer turns out to have multiple personalities, including a seven-year-old girl. One detective tricks this personality into burning herself, so another personality sues the precinct. However, it is implied that this may all be a ruse on the killer's part.
- Shawn and Gus run into a character with three personalities on Psych. Two are male, one is a female, and one is the killer, who is (understandably) a little ticked off that the female personality is scheming to get a sex change.
- On the British soap opera Hollyoaks, troubled emo kid Newt has an alternate personality called "Eli", who trashes the Deans' house and encourages him to run away from his foster home. In recent episodes he now plans to find and kill the real Eli (a friend from his days in the social care system) in the hope of banishing the "Eli" personality.
Anime
- On Dragonball, the character Launch (or Lunch, depending on the translation) would go from a sweet, naive, blue-haired (or black-haired in the manga) girl to a hot-tempered, gunslinging, criminally-inclined blonde who answered to the name "Kushami" and back again whenever she sneezed.
- In a comparatively realistic example, Lady Une in Gundam Wing changes personalities when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down, but is still effectively the same person.
- Sometimes, the split personalities actually acquire their own bodies, leading to an Enemy Without:
- Parodied in an episode of Excel Saga, in which a cute detective channels her late father whenever she puts on his hat. At the end of the series, its played straight with Ilpalazzo shows another kind of split personality, becoming possessed by his own desire to conquer. In the manga, of course, which had more time for these things, the split personality was more of a subversion, the only real differences being in fasion sense and prefered targets- neither was evil or good, and both were slightly insane.
- Yami Yugi in Yu-Gi-Oh! is initially presented as one of these, before it is revealed that he is actually the spirit of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. The same goes for Yami Bakura, but not Yami Marik, who is a more traditional split personality caused by childhood trauma. Ironically, Yugi's GX successor is a true example.
- Mahoraba's Kozue Aoba has four alternate personalities, switching to one at random whenever she's shocked or surprised. Her eye colors change for each personality, and each personality prefers to wear her hair differently. She switches back to normal by going unconscious. While each personality is pretty distinct from the rest, they all have several distinct traits they share, particularly a liking for her crush and a major thing for umeboshi.
- Sensui in Yu Yu Hakusho was a pure innocent before encountering the Black Book Club, rich men who tortured demons for fun. He couldn't bring himself to kill humans (as opposed to demons), and so developed another personality to do the dirty work. Over the years, he developed six alternate personalities, switching between them depending on the situation. Each one has a different level of power; the original one, Shinobu, is the most powerful of them all... and is still an innocent, as he let the others do the dirty work.
- In the manga Othello, the shy main character Yaya switches to her alter ego, bold and assertive Nana, when she sees her reflection.
- In Card Captor Sakura, Yukito turns out to be the 'disguise' of Yue, Kero's counterpart. Yue changes into Yukito on purpose, but Yukito has no idea Yue exists and cannot remember anything that happens to Yue. He doesn't know that his comically large appetite is due to the fact that he's actually eating for two (the other being a powerful magic-user.)
- A particularly odd case takes place in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, where Kaere Kimura has a split personality that contains an aggressive foreign persona and an over-the-top Yamato Nadeshiko persona.
- Another strange example is Sukisho in which both Sora and Sunao developed split personalities, Yoru and Ren respectively, due to experiences they were submitted to as children. The catch: the split personalities Yoru and Ren have a romantic relationship...unlike Sora and Sunao. Ever now and then the split personalities will take over and some awkwardness follows
- Gundam00: Allelujah Haptism has a rather pyschotic other half that he calls Hallelujah.
- Zetsu from Naruto has two well-differenced halves. His right side is black and speaks in a deep voice, while his left side is white and talks in a lighter voice. Both halves can talk with each other, and sometimes argue! The English dub even gives each half a completely different voice-actor!
- Air Gear: The perky, happy Akito has another personality, the violent and curse-spewing Agito, who was created after his older brother locked him in a cage and forced him into fighting against other AT users. Who's in charge can usually be indicated by his Eyepatch Of Power. The manga, however, went even further and introduced a third personality named Lind, who seems to be more mature and worldly than the two of them. Consider this troper confused all to hell.
- MPD Psycho really drives this trope to utter extremes. Hell, some of the multiple personalities even appear in other physical bodies, and this even when their original physical body has died. Which might make this manga a slight twist.
- Nyu/Lucy in Elfen Lied. One's has the mental capacities of a small child, the other's an insanely powerful killer out to take out a significant portion of humanity.
- Tyki Mikk of D.Gray-Man has commented how having a light side and a dark side makes life more fun. He can be a perfectly ordinary, personable man, but is also a trememdous sadist and has killed at least five Exorcists, including one of the Generals. Most of the other Noah have similar Split Personalities, albeit somewhat less extreme.
- Yumie Takagi, berserker soldier of the Iscariot Organization in Hellsing. The (not canon for the series) Cross Fire stories in the first three manga volumes involve her being brought out for various assassinations, to the dismay of her other personality, a thoroughly sweet nun named Yumiko.
- Jamie Hemeros in Zoids New Century Zero develops a cocky ace pilot alter-ego named Wild Eagle who takes control during battles every now and then. Although popular opinion seems to suggest that this happens when Jamie breaks the sound barrier in his Zoid, Wild Eagle actually seems to appear only when Jamie gets overly stressed out in battle.
- In the second season of Princess Tutu, Mytho starts to complain of "another me" being inside of him, an evil personality that quickly begins to take over more and more. Later, it's revealed that it's actually the result of one of his heart shards being tainted with Raven's blood.
Comic Books
- Two-Face, of Batman fame, alternates between the just Harvey Dent and the maniacal Two-Face.
- Dr. Banner in The Incredible Hulk was a different person when transformed into the Hulk. The comics took it to extremes, with different versions of the Hulk with different personalities: in addition to the traditional "Savage Hulk", there also developed a sneaky, amoral version called Joe Fixit (who was grey, like in the Hulk's first appearance). Eventually, the personalities were integrated into the "Merged Hulk", but this was retconned to be just another personality, the Professor (who had Banner's brainpower, Fixit's cunning, and most of Savage Hulk's strength).
- Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol featured, among other characters, Kay Challis, also known as Crazy Jane, who had no less than sixty-four separate personalities, each with its own name and function, and after a "gene-bomb" was detonated during an alien invasion of Earth, each with its own superhuman ability.
- Triplicate Girl/Triad from the Legion Of Super Heroes tends to show signs of this trope when she splits apart. The version of her in the Post-Zero Hour reboot was explicitly written as having three distinct personalities when split -- which was considered a mental illness on her homeworld.
- The DC Comics character Etrigan the Demon was bonded to man named Jason Blood as punishment for being tempted by Morgaine Le Fay into betraying Camelot. Jason switches places and lets Etrigan take over when there's superheroing to be done. (He's a prime example of Cursed With Awesome.)
- The DCU also has had two different Rose and Thorn characters over the years, one whose Thorn persona was a villain, and a later one whose Thorn is a hero.
- This troper remembers a Star Wars comic, where after a Jedi kills a love in a fit of jealousy she develops a dissociative disorder. One personality is a crazed killer, murdering women that remind her of the one her love was cheating on her with, while the normal personality obsessively "chases" this killer.
- Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, aka Aurora of the Marvel Universe's Alpha Flight had at least two separate personalities when first introduced: the demure and timid "Jeanne-Marie" and the forthright and fun-loving "Aurora". Flashbacks in an early issue of Alpha Flight revealed that the "Aurora" personality split off from "Jeanne-Marie" after she was severely beaten by the nuns who were raising her. Originally, only "Aurora" had superpowers (not surprisingly, since the nuns had beaten Jeanne-Marie for telling them she could fly -- she could, but they assumed she was lying), and if too much stress caused her to revert to the "Jeanne-Marie" personality in a crisis, it could cause serious problems. In her more recent appearances, she's shown signs of having a third, unnamed, personality, whose main characteristic is being psychopathically violent.
- Similar to Crazy Jane, Professor X's son Legion originally possessed three personalities with a distinct psychic power (one was telekinetic, one was telepathic, one was pyrokinetic). This was later expanded to an unnamed number of personalities ALL with a unique power. Unfortunately, when these personalities were successfully merged, he decided the best thing to do with his newfound sanity was to travel back in time to kill Magneto (he missed, killing his own father and unintentionally spawning the Age of Apocalypse timeline).
- Mary Walker, a supervillainess most commonly associated with Daredevil, has three distinct personalities. The "Mary" personality is a timid, quiet, pacifist; her "Typhoid Mary" persona is adventurous, lustful and violent; her "Bloody Mary" personality is sadistic, brutal, and hates all men.
Film
- Another well-known example is Gollum and Smeagol ("Stinker" and "Slinker") from Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. In the live-action movies, the two personalities frequently carry on conversations, to the point that they're practically two minds consciously coexisting simultaneously in the same head. This split-personality theme is not borne out nearly as much in either the earlier animated movies or the original books, making this example less literary than cinematic.
- In the movie Primal Fear, the shy and gentle Aaron, on trial for killing the archbishop, is revealed to have a split personality named Roy who is much more outspoken and aggressive and did in fact kill the clergyman. At the end, we also find out that Aaron doesn't actually have a split personality; the more disturbing truth is that Roy created Aaron and has been hiding behind the fake personality for years.
- Fight Club made this its most ingenious twist.
- The premise of the Farrelly Brothers' movie Me, Myself and Irene.
Literature
- In the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde, Dr. Henry Jekyll develops a formula to transform himself into the villainous Edward Hyde, making this trope one of The Oldest Ones In The Book.
- The protagonist of Simon Hawke's "Tribe of One" trilogy (set in the Dark Sun setting of Dungeons And Dragons) is a man with more personalities than he can count, who walks Athas in search of a way to bring his fractured mind together.
- Subverted to hell and gone in the novel Blindsight: one of the characters is a linguist with three surgically-induced alter personalities (known collectively as the Gang of Four). Some time is taken up in discussion of twentieth-century attitudes towards MPD, which are largely dismissed as barbaric and irrational.
- Altogether Andrews, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, has eight personalities, none of which answer to Andrews. There's also Agnes Nitt and her alter ego Perdita X Dream, who started out as a name she thought was cool in Lords and Ladies, then became the embodiment of her id in Maskerade, then became a full-on Split Personality in Carpe Juglum.
- Lord Mark Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, developed four extra personalities to resist torture: Gorge, Grunt, Howl and Killer. While he learns to control them, they explicitly do not go away. Fortunately they are all fixated of protecting/aiding Mark to the best of their abilities from the getgo and even like his girlfriend.
- The Christian novel Thr3e (as well as The Movie Of The Book) contains an example of this trope: The killer who's been chasing the protagonist is actually a split personality of the protagonist. But wait! Isn't the title "three"? That's right! It turns out his childhood friend who's been helping him solve the mystery is also one of his split personalities.
- One Word: Sybil
- Sidney Sheldon's novel Tell Me Your Dreams is about a woman who fears she is being stalked, and her two co-workers who become concerned about her. It is eventually revealed that all three are the same person; the main character developed two separate personalities because she could not handle the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.
Western Animation
- Played more seriously in Batman The Animated Series with the "evil" personality of Two-Face almost completely consuming the mind of Harvey Dent to the point where the "good" personality rarely surfaced again, much to Batman’s dismay.
- This troper likes to think of it as the two differing personalities fusing together. After all, for all his malice, Two Face still has a lot of Harvey Dent in him, not just when he gets "good heads."
- In the same series, Baby Doll alternated between being Baby, the happy child she once played and whom she had slipped into in obsession, and Mary Dahl, the sane adult woman. Her account of how it split was a Tear Jerker.
"Father": We're actors, remember? You canceled our show because you whined you weren't getting enough attention!
Baby Doll: But I knows now I made a boo-boo! (as Dahl) It was hard for me out there. I studied and trained and auditioned, but no one wanted me. Over the years I remembered how happy I was with all you around me, and the folks at home watching me each week... Me. (as Baby) Baby Doll. Hee hee! Now I'm Baby for good, and everyone will love me again!
- Blitzwing of Transformers Animated, with a face to go with each personality. He has a calm face (Colonel Klink), angry face (Arnold Schwarzenneger), and crazy face (basically, a Jack-O-Lantern). Blitzwing's weaponry and vehicle modes seem to be tied into his personality (in the only interpersonality conflict he's had so far, his angry and calm faces argued over which vehicle form to scan). The calm face uses some sort of ice missile and a jet form, while the angry face uses a flamethrower and tank form and the crazy face seems to be able to use both. Prowl actually caught on to this during a battle, and used Bumblebee to annoy Blitzwing so much that he switched from calm/jet to angry/tank--and promptly fell out of the sky.
Video Games
- This also happened in the Space Ace video game (which later became a short-lived cartoon). After being struck by the bad guy's "Infanto-Ray", Ace would sometimes involuntarily transform into Dexter, a skinny, nerdy, teenage alter-ego.
- One of the villains in Xenogears turns out to be one of the main characters that the player has been playing as. The villain's name, "Id", should be a vital clue to those with knowledge of psychology.
- Actually, the character in question had at least four personalities. Five, if you count the little boy whom Id calls "the coward". Even more if you consider reincarnations and Grahf.
- Actually Grahf isn't one of Fei's alternate personalities. He's a manifestation of Lacan's mind which went insane and began searching for the ultimate power much like Id with Fei. So only 5.
- In Killer 7, the player-controlled character actually has seven distinct personalities, with their own looks, special abilities, everything. There's even a personality that's albino, one that's paraplegic, and one that's a woman.
- In the first versions of killer7 the physical body that everybody else sees is Garcian's. There was either a cutscene or just a part of a level that showed this when Dan walked into a bathroom and saw
himself Garcian. This is also alluded to in the released game when confronting Curtis Blackburn when he says "you turned into a badass"
- Ford Cruller in Psychonauts suffers from this due to a battle that shattered his psyche in the past and is only able to remain stable within his underground sanctuary, which houses one of the largest psitanium deposits. His personalities are all named Cruller and serve as several different roles in the camp, ranging from Ranger Cruller, Admiral Cruller, Chef Cruller, and so on.
- Manah, the Creepy Child Big Bad of Drakengard seems at first to be suffering from this. It later turns out to be part-Split Personality, part-Demonic Possession.
- Slightly subverted in Super Robot Wars Original Generations. After Lamia Loveless had been repaired, her voice box got worse that she sounds like something else that is out of her character, she could sound enthusiastic or just plain cutesy, making it feel like she has different 'modes' of personality. Of course, she quickly reverts back to her calm, cool self afterwards, with much confusion on the events.
- And played straight in Mugen no Frontier: SRW OG Saga, whereas Lamia Expy Aschen Brodel REALLY have personality split disorder. Just wait until she reveal some skin, and all the stoic android facade got replaced with a Genki Girl personality.
- And still in Super Robot Wars, Split Personality is the gimmick of the heroine of SRW Destiny, Cliana Rimskaya. One is a rougher, stoic girl that is capable of piloting and kicking ass, one is a borderline sweet Yamato Nadeshiko.
- Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness from The Elder Scrolls is A split personality of Jyggalag, the Daedric Prince of Order.
Tabletop Games
- Eldar from Warhammer 40000 cultivate separate personae for wartime and peacetime so that they do not lose themselves to their bloodlust. The dang things are scary when they get pissed...
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