Dreaming-in-Shadow wrote...
ipgd wrote...
Dreaming-in-Shadow wrote...
I find it kind of insulting that people think that just because there's another... conciousness in the background waiting to emerge, a person ceases to be. I'm not in Anders' situation, but I can sympathise... I think...
But Justice isn't just waiting in the background. They've merged and share the same consciousness.
But Justice isn't the one always in control. He's always conscious, but not always in control. He is in the background.
To sort of expand more on this, this is how I've seen it: Anders and Justice are merged. They fully share the same mind and thoughts. Where the disconnect manifests is in cognitive dissonance, wherein the combined Justice-Anders entity holds multiple conflicting opinions about the same issue. He knows enough about his situation and his past separate lives to be able to attribute each conflicting opinion to the different "aspects" of himself that correspond to either Justice or Anders, and so that's how he
explains it, deliberately personifying each aspect of himself (at least partly to absolve his initially Anders-identified self from responsibility for his actions). At the beginning, his "Anders" aspect is dominant due to the immediate familiarity of the host body. Over the course of the game, he either begins to reconcile his cognitive dissonance (in the friendship path, with the "Justice" aspects taking predominance), or exacerbating it (in the rivalry path, with the "Anders" aspects resisting assimilation into the "Justice" ideals but being unable to quell them).
The "possessions" are a little more difficult to explain and is primarily what makes the whole thing seem inconsistent. The best I can make sense of it is that stressful stimulus acts as a sort of centrifuge effect, bringing his "Justice" aspects to the forefront in a way that makes them appear temporarily distinct. How much autonomy he actually has is unclear.