We come to another rarity.
The second person plural present tense. (You [both/all of you] go...)
I’ve had to make up an example.
You rush up the stairs towards the flat, but still manage to keep your boots quiet. All the time, you’re receiving detailed instructions through your earpieces. These don’t always work —sometimes the signal can cut out when there’s thick concrete around you — but today the controller’s voice is coming through clearly. They’re telling you to “Go go go” — you’ve got a green light on the operation. By the time you reach the walkway, B Squad have come up the stairway at the opposite end. No chance for the perps to escape. Silently, you motion to one another that you have met no obstruction and are ready to proceed to the suspect’s domicile. Just then, a mother comes out of one of the other flats, with a tiny baby strapped to her chest. You make sure she is hustled back inside.
It’s easy to see how this has already started to break down.
All of the collective you, in this case the police SCO19 unit, can be accounted for by those first sentences.
Some of you may be on the stairs themselves, and some on the horizontal parts of a landing, zigging back to the upwards zag, but the verb rush can apply to all of you equally.
But when we get to, ‘You make sure she is hustled back inside,’ only one or two of you can do the hustling — although you can all intend for it to happen (you make sure).
Even when humans are bunched closely together, on the same mission, there’s always the chance their sightlines will be different.
One person will be looking along the floor; another will be checking the top corners of the room; another will be following the motion of their own hands.
And this is leaving out the even greater likelihood that each will have different fears, attractions, triggers and preoccupations.
As soon as one or more of the you notices something the others haven’t noticed, the collective you will fracture completely.
You-1 to You-18 didn’t notice the shadows moving under the door, but You-19 did.
For humans, this makes the second person plural present tense a very difficult — perhaps an impossible — POV to maintain for an extended narrative, or a story that covers a long period of time.
As soon as the gang breaks up, not as a gang, but as a multi-headed monster all of whose eyes are looking in the same direction, seeing the same thing, the writer is going to need a she or a he or a name.
A collective entity being addressed or narrated as you, for example an ant’s nest or an alien hive mind, might be able to maintain enough unanimity for this POV to work for them, long term.
But then the question arises, why would any human reader want to pay attention to something that unvarying?
They might watch the waves on the sea for an hour or two, but for how long will they watch a dead calm underwater lake beneath unvarying artificial light?
This isn’t to say a you-plural central character wouldn’t be capable of growing and changing.
If, for example, you were capable of telepathy, and what you learned the other yous also instantly learned. And if this telepathy went beyond thought but also involved emotion and memory.
This, however, is getting close to reducing you to a central character who just happens to have lots of bodies.
If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of this kind of narration, take a look at Ann Leckie’s Auxiliary Justice (2013) and also Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2016). Both great, fascinating reads.
They’re not in this POV, but they deal with characters who are far more than usually derived from collectives (AI and arachnid).
How's this: "Then one day y'all decided to become ersatz hillbillies and after that there was no lookin' back for y'all". Oops! I forgot present tense. How's this: "I surmise that y'all are currently decidin' to become ersatz hillbillies".