multi bechdel test, or an unsolicited unskippable moon knight cutscene poorly adapted from crow&'s tumblr blog

 

Recently, multi author and beloved mutual Rogan Lee made a post on Dreamwidth about a Multi Bechdel Test—basically, do two plural characters talk to each other in this piece of media at all? There were, unsurprisingly, very few examples, and one that got mentioned was Moon Knight and Sentry interacting once.

(This is a barely adapted version of my original comment/post on Tumblr, and also nerd shit, which is why I’ve suddenly discovered sentence case.)

But actually, Moon Knight has a more recent example—several of them—and they’re also much better moments! If you’ve been following the MacKay run, or talked to me for more than five minutes, you might already know what I’m talking about.

The current run of Moon Knight not only has multiple multis talking to each other, but has them talk to each other about being multi, and furthermore mixes discussions medical plurality and spiritual plurality. At one point there are three multis in the same place, the mindscape of one of them.

Marc Spector/Moon Knight has DID, of course. The MKsys is very medical (aside from some 2010s weirdness we don’t have to talk about, so we won’t, no thanks), and early in the run Marc is also very secretive about it because he has astronomical levels of internalized ableism and interpersonal paranoia.

In Moon Knight v9 (2021), a character called Hunter’s Moon (Yehya Badr) was introduced as the other Fist of Khonshu. Notably, he is spiritually plural and uses a spiritual framing to understand Marc’s DID, which I find cool as hell. When Marc finally comes out to him, he (after punching him in the face for an unrelated stupid plan) refers to his plurality as “a holy thing,” saying that Fists of Khonshu have always had the gift of chorus. He is in contact with, able to call on, and at time possessed by the spirits of the past Fists. In "Personality Crisis" (Moon Knight v9 #26), Badr experiences his first time having an involuntary switch, and actually talks to Marc’s therapist about his newfound struggle with it.

The three multis thing happens in "Journey to the Center of the Mind" (v9 #27), when due to a spirit possessing Badr beating Vibro into a coma, they enter his mindscape using, uh, sweat? There’s a Hawley guy with magic sweat. Not important. In there, they find a bunch of copies of the Vibro chasing down one normal frightened man, Alton Vibereaux (do you see where this is going). While trying to rescue Alton and hold the Vibros off, Marc's alters Steven and Jake manifest to help, and Marc reminds Badr that he also has headmates he can call on, specifically saying that he is also not alone.

It turns out Vibereaux is essentially the last remnant of Vibro’s pre-villain self (surprise!), and Marc ends up telling him that he’s plural and motivating him to fight the whole supervillain thing.

That’s also not counting when Badr mentions the gift of chorus in his first fight with Marc because he’s surprised Marc doesn’t have it (prior to knowing Marc has DID).

So by my count, that is at least two separate conversations between multis about being multi, you can argue that there is a third conversation in #27 if you split up the scenes, and there’s multiple other mentions of it between the characters.

In general I will be shilling the MacKay run until I fucking die, but this is one of the aspects of it I find the coolest. Go read it if you haven’t. (Please.)