Tulpas and Tulpa-like Things in the Media

[Breloomancer]

in doktor sleepless there is a character who is called a tulpa, but they act more like an egrigore. they are basing tulpamancy off of Alexandra David-Neel's accounts rather than modern tulpamancy practice though

[Kokichi Ouma]

Sometimes to Deal with the Difficulty of Being Alive, I Need to Believe There Is a Possibility That Life Is Not Real.

 

...Oh, I'm not suddenly having an existential crisis!  That'd be off-topic lol  What I'm talking about is this game that's on Steam.  Well it's also an art installation/absurdist scifi play/pizza simulator.  It's about this post-apocalyptic future where there's only AI left and they're trying to build a machine to make more AI like them but they kind of suck at it.  The player is called a tulpa, but apparently in this setting that means it's from an older AI making machine.  Or something.  Anyways, there's this 100 page manual for the game (which is a work of art in of itself tbh) the game's creator has this to say about tulpas:

Quote

I love the idea of a Tulpa: a spiritual being you make with your focused mind that acts independently from it. I am always having dreams where I interact with people I have never seen in waking life. I have fallen in love and grown very angry with people that don’t exist. I probably have a lot of Tulpas in me I could create if I could ever really concentrate. Our capacity for creating analogical spaces could be the greatest thing about us or make us the shortest surviving of all the homo species.

 

There's also this game called Pizza Game, which sounds like it should be a pizza simulator but it's actually a dating sim.  The protagonist Kiane has a "sassy thought bubble" that's referred to as Inner Kiane.  I guess she's technically more a median than a tulpa, though?  There's also times when she interacts with things or is heard by others, but it's usually lampshaded.

 

Also, Danganronpa v3, which has nothing to do with pizza.

Spoiler

There's a general theory in the community that Korekiyo's spooky dead sister that inhabits his body is actually a tulpa.  She's probably more like a soulbond, since she probably does believe she's his sister.

 

The whole thing is played out for that dumb horror trope of "oh it's a ghost making me kill people woOooOoo."  Basically, his sister was lonely and little brother ended up killing girls to give her ghost friends.  Although, apparently according to Word of God, when her ghost that turned on him and exorcised him after his execution, it was because she was mad that he assumed she wanted him to kill people?  But it's kind of ambiguous if it was her real ghost that or it was just some kind of thing Monokuma set up so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Luminesce]

I just realized a character in a Playstation game from 2015 is absolutely a tulpa as we know them in every way shape and form, but even just telling people the game has a tulpa in it makes it easy to figure out who it is and is a huge spoiler for a fun twist.

So uh, spoilers for {a game from 2015 only on the Playstation that's maybe a little spooky}
Title:

Spoiler

Until Dawn

Actual spoilers: (Please play or watch someone play the game before reading this if you haven't, but honestly it'll be thoroughly self-explanatory in-game now that you know, especially once it's revealed later on)

Spoiler

While he suffers from psychosis and schizophrenia, Josh's "psychiatrist" Dr. Alan Hill is absolutely in all ways shapes and forms a tulpa. Seriously, how did I never realize this? He's not some uncontrollable delusion of a crazy person, he's a person in Josh's head who helps him deal with his problems and if I recall correctly even leaves of his own volition while Josh is in utter panic at the end so he can "deal with reality on his own".

 

Amazing game by the way, highly recommended. I almost want to watch someone play it again partially to see those interactions again (and mostly because I just love watching people play it). Kind of insane the most clear and accurate example of a tulpa I've ever seen in media didn't even strike me as "That's a tulpa!" until years later. Probably because of the schizophrenia context, I guess.

 

Edit: Alright, I cannot mention this game without also leaving a super quick bit of advice for anyone who plays it. The devs let an INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT mechanic that can "ruin" runs be explained awfully poorly, and not a single person I've watched played the game understood what to do:

Spoiler

When the game says "Don't move", YOU DO NOT PUT THE CONTROLLER DOWN. Your CHARACTER needs to not move; the stick will move automatically in random directions, and YOU need to lightly move the stick in the opposite direction to keep it centered. "Putting the controller on the floor" makes it like a 30% chance the pure randomness won't fail the event, but the other 70% of the time you will fail it, and at points this can end in a character's death.

 

Edited September 6, 2020 by Luminesce

[weavermarquez]

The second book, The Dark Forest, from Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, aka the Three Body Problem trilogy.

 

I really loved the series. Any readers of hard sci fi or people interested in the sociology of alien threats would love this. Kind of weirdly gender essentialist, but different enough from western gender essentialism that it's interesting. Having exposure to a uniquely Chinese perspective on sci fi has been absolutely wonderful and has opened up my mind to a lot of new things.

 

Spoiler

The main character is a wallfacer, one of four humans given permission by the UN to direct unimaginable amounts of resources (with no accountability whatsoever) to mount a hidden strategy against an incoming alien invasion. While the aliens are able to surveil and observe everything on Earth, they cannot peer into the thoughts of human minds.

 

The book goes into long detail about the main character's relationship with his tulpa dream girl wife in the middle of his hedonistic detour away from his duties as a wallfacer.

 

The book goes into long detail about the main character's relationship with his tulpa dream girl wife, and is also a pivotal and crucial aspect of his character and the plot.

Edited September 18, 2020 by weavermarquez
fawning a lil more about the book

[Guest]

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

 

The Slime's "Great Sage" is like a tulpa, definitely within the boundaries of someone he consults that lives in his head so to speak.

[Tinyparrot]

This isn't exactly a tulpa, but Yana and Balor from the Demonslayer (Бесобой) comics- Balor is basically a demon who possesses Yana but like, they grow to be friends and work together and stuff

I haven't read all the comics cause they're Russian and don't ship to the US, but my tulpa and I are both pretty big fans from what we've seen 🙂

[Guest]

Anime "So I'm a Spider, So What?"

 

The main protagonist has a "parallel minds skill" where she has multiple minds like body, brain and magic among others. They talk to each other as independent persons (or spiders ig).

 

 

Edited October 24, 2022 by Bear

[AnxiousOutsider]

Just posting because I couldn't find anything on this entire site mentioning Disco Elysium. The structure of the character's mind you play as has many tulpa-like entities as part of the story and interaction.

[harvestmoon]

Buzz Lightyear is basically a fictive/introject (exomemories included!). Of course he doesn't share his body with anyone else.

 

And did neither Stone nor I mentioned the "night family" from Rick & Morty yet? I thought one of us did. They would front at night and do boring work so the "day family" could do interesting stuff during the day. Kinda relatable as how I started fronting for longer periods of time was by doing work.

Edited April 21, 2023 by harvestmoon

[Etna]

A show called Magpie Murders was recently on TV here in the UK. In it, the book editor of a series of crime novels starts to see and interact with the main character from the books. (Think along the lines of: she's Agatha Christie's editor and Hercule Poirot starts showing up.) We haven't read the book it's based on (but would now be interested to, for obvious reasons) but in the show the private detective character basically appears to her as what we would call a fully realised/imposed Tulpa, and she doesn't bat an eyelid. He helps her with the investigation, by asking the kind of questions that makes her put two and two together. Makes me wonder if the author has had similar experiences himself!