Dumbing of Age

Plot Synopsis

Set at Indiana University, Dumbing of Age follows the lives and growth of a diverse cast of characters as they come to terms with how to be adults, including a homeschooled Christian girl, her atheist best friend, a disgraced cheerleader, a caped vigilante, a teenage delinquent, and more.

How is it plural?

— Major spoiler warning! —

Throughout the course of the story, it is slowly revealed that Amber, the face behind the masked superhero Amazi-Girl, is actually a traumagenic plural system. Amazi-Girl is not simply an alter ego, but a fully distinct alter, and her superheroics serve as an outlet for Amber's destructive impulses. After Amber realizes that her next-door neighbor Sal is the same girl whose hand she stabbed when Sal held up a convenience store five years earlier, the two begin to function more and more separately, with Amber starting to not always remember Amazi-Girl's nightly escapades, and the two only fully restore contact and begin to consider each other friends when they're forced to team up and rescue their friends from their own abusive father.

In addition, during the aforementioned crisis caused by their father, a close friend of theirs, Mike, is hospitalized and is later revealed to have passed away. However, due to the additional trauma induced by the incident, Mike often appears to the two mentally to criticize their tendency to self-isolate, and it is currently unclear whether he is simply a hallucination or has been introjected into the system.