The strange thing about this is that even though Stephen knows and realizes that everything he sees is fake, he stills accept this hallucinations of his mind as being ‘real’ to him. Another example of his hallucinations being very real is that like real people he has no complete control over them, meaning he can’t summon them at will. Although the photograph is still in his hand, his mind perceives it to be in Tobias’ hand and therefore he can’t feel it anymore. Another example of his mind severely changing his perception was when he hands the photograph to Tobias. When his butler comes with empty hands pretending to hold drinks, his mind thinks he has drinks with him and that he hands that over to the aspects. Furthermore his mind fills in nonexistent details. Besides that, each aspect has an excessive backstory and leads an imagined life even when they’re not interacting with Stephen himself, like Audrey taking a shower. The hallucinations also interact with each other, they can hear each other, speak to each other, argue. His mind adds various nonexistent objects like JC’s guns and even adds their interaction with the real worlds (like the wall being damaged by the guns). This is accomplished in two different ways.įirst of all his mind creates his aspects super vivid and detailed which makes them seem real. The key however to the aspects is that to Stephen they are real. Because of this some hallucinations are older than others, Ivy for example is one of the aspects he already has the longest.Ī proposed theory is that he created them to shove the burdens for his responsibility and knowledge of to someone else. This means Stephen only creates aspects when he absolutely needs them.

His mind transforms the knowledge he gathered into a new aspect who holds that knowledge. He creates a new aspect by reading a book on a certain subject. This means his aspects can only know what he knows, which creates some interesting complications (see later).

They are in fact receptacles for his knowledge, like a book is a receptacle for words. They are not personalities though, they rather seem to be separate ‘entities’ bound to his mind.Įach aspect is a hallucination, created by his mind, that is an expert on a certain kind of knowledge. Legion, in reality called Stephen Leeds, is a man suffering from a quite unique and interesting disease: he sees a number of hallucinations (this number probably lies somewhere around 40, although only 12 of them are named, see Appendix), called aspects who help him on his assignments.

I would say have a nice read and be sure to post your thoughts. You will find this text (it is a first draft and I had no time to proof read yet so sorry for that) under this intro.

So last week I reread every Legion-related book/fragment (though I could not find any informative interviews) and puzzled as much information together about Stephen's aspects as I could.

Legion by Brandon Sanderson