Even the way you're describing it, though, doesn't sound like something that's totally unprecedented among multiples? The only thing that really seems new about it is the grounding in an explicitly fictional show's concepts (sort of like how tulpas were a thing before they became associated with fandom and... the new version of what soulbonding used to be, in places). We definitely knew people in the early 2000s who had system members they described as the fusion or integration of two previous people, and sometimes people noted that that the fused/integrated/whatnot people had unique characteristics that couldn't really be explained as the combination of the people who created them. Like, Alice and Bob together don't become Alicebob, or the core person with Alice and Bob's traits added on, Alice and Bob become Chris, who is a different person from either of them. So "there's no reason they'd have a third complete identity" is just flat-out not true, because we saw people describing it as far back as the 90s. (ETA: And I don't have any of her books at hand, but I think Chris Costner Sizemore described it happening in her group? Have to read those books again.)
There's just so much reinventing of the wheel in the multiple community, it seems. I know some of it was unavoidable during the 90s and early 2000s, because research was harder without the Internet, and a lot of books were out of print and difficult to find. There were some frequently cited studies and essays that we couldn't find for years, and a lot of good insights were lost in deleted messageboards, mailing lists, personal sites obscure zines, etc. We wrote an essay for an online multiple zine called Chrysantheme in 2002, but damned if I can find any record of Chrysantheme even existing today, except on a couple of personal webpages with severe linkrot.
But it seems like nowadays, when research is much easier through the Internet, a lot of the problem is people actively refusing to read older stuff, which is severely frustrating to me. They think it couldn't possibly pertain to them, that traumagenic and non-traumagenic multiplicity are so inherently different (and apparently can't co-exist within the same system) that none of it could apply to their situation, or, worse yet, they actually believe it would be "appropriation" to study what people have believed about multiples in the past because "that's about people with DID, which we don't have, so we don't want to appropriate from them." So they'll never see people describing things that, if you can hold your nose about terms that you might not care for, might be very relevant to them and describe things they've experienced or close to it, and also give them ammunition against simplistic "people with DID do/don't do this" claims. It's not appropriation, it's self-defense, and I hate the culture of outrage currency where the angriest people are assumed to be the most morally righteous and are deferred to and believed even when they're completely wrong.
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There's just so much reinventing of the wheel in the multiple community, it seems. I know some of it was unavoidable during the 90s and early 2000s, because research was harder without the Internet, and a lot of books were out of print and difficult to find. There were some frequently cited studies and essays that we couldn't find for years, and a lot of good insights were lost in deleted messageboards, mailing lists, personal sites obscure zines, etc. We wrote an essay for an online multiple zine called Chrysantheme in 2002, but damned if I can find any record of Chrysantheme even existing today, except on a couple of personal webpages with severe linkrot.
But it seems like nowadays, when research is much easier through the Internet, a lot of the problem is people actively refusing to read older stuff, which is severely frustrating to me. They think it couldn't possibly pertain to them, that traumagenic and non-traumagenic multiplicity are so inherently different (and apparently can't co-exist within the same system) that none of it could apply to their situation, or, worse yet, they actually believe it would be "appropriation" to study what people have believed about multiples in the past because "that's about people with DID, which we don't have, so we don't want to appropriate from them." So they'll never see people describing things that, if you can hold your nose about terms that you might not care for, might be very relevant to them and describe things they've experienced or close to it, and also give them ammunition against simplistic "people with DID do/don't do this" claims. It's not appropriation, it's self-defense, and I hate the culture of outrage currency where the angriest people are assumed to be the most morally righteous and are deferred to and believed even when they're completely wrong.
-Amaranth