Over the Line: Borderline Traits of Invisigal from Dispatch (Part 1) by Mare Hiles
*spoiler warning*
No matter which choices you make during your playthrough(s) of Dispatch, Laura Bailey’s Invisigal is going to be a complicated character. As a player, she intrigued me with her spontaneity. As a storyteller, she drew me in with a hinted, but not fully explored backstory. And as a therapist, she had me breaking out the DSM to make sure that my diagnostic spidey senses weren’t misfiring. I usually find myself trying to quiet this particular spidey sense while playing video games and TTRPGs and doing other non-therapist geeky stuff. Even if this sense doesn’t come naturally to you, I don’t advise trying to psychoanalyze the tragic backstory of your friend’s level 3 cleric; both your friend and the cleric have enough going on already. Besides, you have goblins to fight.
Invisigal, though, became a challenge for me — as she is so very good at doing in the world of Dispatch. Nearly every interaction with her made me feel like I should be taking notes to bring to my next therapist consultation group. I was fascinated by how much I wanted to figure out why she is the way she is, what led her to transition from Courtney to Invisibitch to Visi. All the Z-Teamers are complex in their own ways – and I firmly believe that each character in the game (except Beef) has plenty of reasons to seek counseling – but Invisigal felt like the asthmatic poster child for unprocessed trauma and its mental health implications. More specifically, she practically lit up with essence of borderline personality disorder.
The leading clinical understanding of BPD is a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-images, and affects, and marked impulsivity” (DSM-5-TR). By this definition alone, I can already see Invisigal start to fill in this criteria like she was the correct hero choice for one of your SDN missions. On a surface level, her stats seem to align enough to at least get a passing 70%.
Looking deeper into Visi’s character, we can see an unstable sense of self as well as a pervasive feeling that she is bad or evil. The primary moment in the game that comes to mind when I think about this is the playground scene. As Robert tries to
convince Visi not to quit the Z-Team, she tells him, “I have fuckin' villain powers. I can turn invisible and skulk in the shadows. My powers let me steal shit and watch famous people fuck. Being a villain is my fate. It’s in the fuckin’ stars.” We hear a similar message from her later on in the locker room at SDN: “I don’t deserve anyone’s forgiveness, anyone’s help, anyone’s love.” It’s clear that she has ruminated on this thought for a long time, likely much longer than her relationship with Robert, the Z-Team, and SDN. There are other examples throughout the game of how Invisigal might continue to steep in this belief of being intrinsically and irreparably evil: her last place ranking on the SDN office leaderboard, Chase’s unwavering disdain towards her, Blonde Blazer losing faith in her, the other Z-Teamers wanting her kicked off the team, the glowing red mechanics on her chest as a reminder of her past work for Shroud. All of this has the potential to reinforce her ingrained belief that she is unfit for hero work, destined for villainy no matter what she chooses for herself.
As players, we don’t get to know much of Invisigal’s life story before the events of the game, but dialogue exchanges like the playground scene give us a hint into how her lived experience has shaped her current perspective. It would make sense that “growing up around a bunch of scumbag villains” and more likely than not living through some adverse childhood experiences would not only cause an unstable self-image, but lead one to believe that their badness is inherent to who they are.