duuuuuude you have GOT to come out tonight we're enacting cruelty upon those who have transgressed so badly that we can justify any act against them... and you KNOW we're interpreting our delight as moral righteousness... Yeah it's fucking crazyyyyyyy get an Uber
0209 parallels about their similar yet different relationships with their mothers.
Mikoto being a people pleaser and possibly taking on a more parentified role due to the divorce, maybe even harboring resentment towards his mother.
Yuno being a people reader which leads her to actively making the choice of not being a "burden" on her family, because of the amount of unconditional care she knows she might receive which is just not what she's looking for.
requiem doesn’t really feel like a mikoto song lowkey and he doesn’t even say nande ONCE i’m pretty sure 💔 only person sayin nande nande this trial is us apparently fuuuuck
I know ive been defensive abt mikoto but let it b known: there are some things i dislike with his T3… I dont post abt itcuz i feel like negativity is most of the current discussion. Um. But basically theres things i liked… and things i didnt like...
i have written this post to be emotionally evocative as a way to explicitly make frustrations and questions about Mikoto’s Trial 3 abundantly clear and also as a way to encourage people to vocalize their true thoughts and feelings on his Trial 3 through being an example of one. if you are discomforted, angered, riled up, shaken, or left with more questions/thoughts by this compilation-essay-ish then i have achieved what i intended with this post. the propaganda of civility and niceness in the end is really just censorship of talking about weighty subjects and i would rather assist in opening up the floor to dialogue especially when MILGRAM presents the perfect opportunity to talk about topics that are otherwise taboo in everyday conversations.
i will reiterate this at the end of the post but i encourage you to debate, retort, add-on, challenge, or whatever sort of dialogue you want to add/engage in any points that may or may not have been brought up in this post.
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people hating Mikoto's trial 3 are too enraptured with the label of DID on him that they forget that he's a character that just happens to have dissociative behaviors. he's not made to be DID's spokesperson.
how different would people cast their judgement if his diagnosis label was CPTSD instead? the symptoms of DID are the exact same symptoms found in CPTSD. what if he wasn't diagnosed with any mental illness at all? would people judge differently?
people are shitting on Mikoto's story because it doesn't live up to their fetish of DID-- that Mikoto didn't end up being their little symptomatic DID performance animal.
people forget that psychiatry is founded upon the criminalization of Others in order to systemically subjugate and dehumanize people through the power of a label’s reduction and the pathologization of a set of behaviors that are outside of a governing authority’s allowance. for example, it has historically been used as a tool of colonization where Others are “savages” and “psychopaths”, thus are not rational, thus are not human. it’s been used historically and presently to deny people of basic rights, dehumanize persons, and is used as a “reason” to hide this vulnerable demography away and/or abandon them.
Mikoto is a victim of psychiatrization, reduced to the label of “DID” by MILGRAM’s authority which—despite being an abusive and violating institution—is left unchallenged or uncriticized by people. instead, people are playing into this system of systemic abuse and violation and control of bodies throught engaging with its wants and games of dehumanizing individuals and the game of blame, rather than thinking carefully and critically about the system-institution and challenging it.
there’s claims that MILGRAM’s writers are using DID as a trope when, in reality, it’s being used a device to challenge the real world approach to mental illnesses being used primarily in mass media, such as the news, as attention-grabbing mechanisms rather than it just be a part of life like any other disability. the only mentally ill people you tend to hear about are those who transgressed societal norms so severly in an act of explicitly uncontestable social disorder, thus that person is finally diagnosed with a mental disorder as an attempt for insitutions of authority to explain disordered behavior through imposing a label that absolves the institution of blame and shifts it to an individual rather than tackling the failings of societal structures that is inhabitable to people thus creating inability to cope, thus “disorder”. the only reason that Mikoto’s mental illness is even a factor is the first place is due to the social panoptic need/pressure norms to paint those who are struggling with impossible demands as “insane” or “crazy” rather than a product of society.
like my wonderful oomf brought up, it’s not that Mikoto had mental illness and thus committed murder, he committed murder and then was labeled as mentally ill.
people seem to have forgotten that the prisoner/sinner reports (and diagnoses) are written by a biased authority: MILGRAM. if “Let’s rewind the clock to when Mikoto…” doesn’t sound like a recounting of a story rather than an objective log of a series of events, i don’t know what to tell you. the MV end report-files are in-universe files that the MILGRAM institution holds and authors. it only serves to give additional context but is written to how MILGRAM is to perceive the character.
there is also a clear demarcation and separation between the MILGRAM institution and the writers of the series, in which the writers are quite clearly trying to make people criticize MILGRAM and the institution(s) it represents or parallels. people are blaming Yamanaka for characters or the story not being exactly what they want it to be when, in reality, they should be redirecting that discontent and anger towards the real-world that MILGRAM is written to quite literally mirror.
yurusu doesn't just mean "innocent" or "forgive", it also means "affirm".
people can't seem to yurusu Mikoto who has now gained and developed the philosophy of (1) acknowledging his crime and wanting to atone— he will atone according to his Trial 3 VD; (2) challenging Es/you wardens' belief that he's innocent because John's the guilty one, instead claiming responsibility because even if a person doesn't remember their crimes at all, the person still committed a crime; (3) Mikoto finally accepting those parts of himself that he rejected and hated; (4) Mikoto developing a healthier behavior of self-compassion and self-understanding, rather than suppression, and actually working towards a better him; (5) working with himself with what he can do and being patient if he can't do it all right now.
people who can't seem to yurusu Mikoto's healthy character growth are baffling. it's been established since the conception of MILGRAM in 2020 that every single one of them is guilty of the act of murder, in which the law that decides guilt is based on the norms of society (thus leading to Yuno's case of abortion being considered murder). it has been a known fact. if you are voting him based on if he's guilty of the crime or not, then why not vote Muu guilty? why not vote Yuno, Amane, Kazui guilty, all of whom were voted innocent?
what makes Mikoto any different?
if you can't forgive Mikoto due to the amount of victims he has or the brutality of his crime, then are you going to choose to unforgive him, thus deny and disaffirm his character development and newfound healthier mentality (that will not only benefit himself but also others should he be rehabilitated/reintegrated back into society) all because of that emotional disgust? will you completely lock Mikoto who-is-alive out of the chance for becoming a person that will actually help people after rehabilitation and help that he needed all these years?
his victims are a tragedy, yes, that can be acknowledged but they are dead. fixating on the dead does nothing for the living. the dead can no longer affect reality. only the living can. the living can choose to change the systems that kills its members, whether directly or indirectly. if you are outraged by by 12 victims’ lives ending then be outraged at and tackle the systemic issues that create these deaths. the dead are dead. focus on the living now in order to preven other Mikotos from happening but also focus on how to help those who may relate to Mikoto and those who are Mikotos. be outraged at the labor systems, the social culture of not speaking about what you’re feeling and the taboo of—not just talking about—but also mentally ill people existing, of disabled people existing. the reason he committed those murders wasn’t because he was mentally ill. it’s because of systemic stratae of abuses that made him explode because he could no longer just implode.
this Mikoto Trial 3 so far is showing how plenty of people view judgement as a whole as punishment, rather than rehabilitation or incentive to help. it can explain why there’s witch hunts and how if people don’t like what a someone says, they try to punish that person through means of tarnishing repute, talking shit, harassment, etc.
do you only care about punishment? punishment on those that disgust you? punishment on those that don't fit into your ideas of what a person should be? punishment on those that don't fit your expectations? do you actually care about justice or do you only say you do because that's what's expected of you?
have you considered that each flash of the victim profiles in Requiem can be read as the moments that the abuses of his workplace and compounding stress from his life reached that certain point that locked in the death of those victims? the straws that broke the camel's back? the souls that were destroyed?
there weren't just 12 victims in that mass murder. it was 13. Mikoto is a victim of the normalized exploitive late-stage capitalistic society in which corporations quite literally run the nation legislative-wise and determine the cultural and economic norms. if Mikoto hadn't been driven to the point of a psychotic break due to 100 days of overwork and workplace abuse, and possible assault, in a society where even talking about feelings to your closest persons are strange or taboo and extreme extended sleep deprivation where dream and reality became blurred that led to him committing an act that is essentially social suicide— death in Japanese society, that murders his youth, his potential, his opportunities, his future and how many people he could have helped with how importance design is in the world. the failings and flaws of contemporary Japanese society murdered this youth and who he could've been.
i don't understand people who are saying his story got retconned.
do you need it to be explicitly stated that he experienced This Specific Trauma And That Specific Trauma in order to have him play into the fetishization of DID performance to be a True DIDer?
i’ve seen flack on Mikoto for supposedly being worse DID representation (despite not being made to be a rep for DID) than M. Night Shyamalan’s Kevin Wendell Crumb in Split (2016) but this is the thing: Mikoto is still dissociated and amnesiatic about his home and family life. there are aspects in all his VDs, timelines, and interrogations that show that his parent’s divorce is still affecting him— feeling that John “disappearing” is just like a father leaving— “abandoning everything and disappearing” (milgram-en) and leaving it all up to him to pick up what he abandoned; his father and/or John.
there are so many behavioral signs of Mikoto being a child of divorce with his abandonment issues and fixation on being liked by people so that he wouldn’t get abandoned again like how kid-him felt when his dad left in the divorce.
to a child it may feel like they weren’t good enough and that’s why the parent left, which explains Mikoto’s people pleasing behaviors and attempts to be friendly with everyone so they don’t abandon him. it also explains why he’s sensitive towards rejection. kids typically have egocentric thinking in not yet developing a sense of independent self from their caretakers, which could have made Mikoto think that his parent leaving was because he wasn’t good enough or likeable enough, hence his desperation for being liked and accepted and affirmed (such as the birthday timeline with Kotoko where he was restless until Kotoko wished him a Happy Birthday).
there’s so many signs that he was a neglected child with his hyperindependence and fixation on being capable, in which neglect is the most common reason for the development of DID in Japan. there’s signs that he’s an incest victim through the Eldest Child being the emotional support of his mother and the only masculinity that the Father role was placed unto, through both emotional incest and parentification through having to parent his younger sister despite being a kid himself— now a grown kid who’s still learning the ropes of a new world, the adult world, all on his own. there’s also signs that he was an assault victim through his fawning and people pleasing behaviors that could be an attempt to avoid being victimized again, not to mention how he dresses with his skin mainly covered with jackets/long-sleeves/pants/etc., only wearing clothes that reveal more skin area in privacy.
his obsession with normalcy and idealization of it also hints towards Mikoto never having had a normal and stable life and that’s what he just wants so badly.
John “disappearing” is claimed from an unreliable narrator (Mikoto) and an unreliable authority (Es/Jackalope) that have their own biases and understanding thus phrasing of things. in reality, John was just suppressed by Mikoto as he represents the parts of himself that he didn’t like, didn’t want to be, and didn’t want to accept is a part of him. not to mention, John is in the Requiem song. you can hear him as the second vocal part or voice, present from the beginning of the song as a very faint and quiet harmonization, to clear duets and solos with the other vocal part, Mikoto, all the way to the end of the song as a musical device to show that they’ve always been together but now actually acknowledging and accepting it all. hell there’s a call-and-response repeating throughout the song with the chord plucking and the higher pitch plucking as the response.
Mikoto expressing multiple self-states weren’t retconned either. we primarily got a professional, working adult Mikoto as the primary player in Trial 1, a protective big brother/hypermasculine figure that Mikoto never had due to his father leaving in the divorce in Trial 2, and the guttural, newborn crying a crying that’s instinctual and has so much potential for growth, development, and learning as children are much more understanding and open to everything, including accepting things that adults have a hard time swallowing in Trial 3, not to mention T3koto phrasing things like a kid despite being adept at language to express himself in a clear manner at other parts of his dialogue with Es.
Mikoto being born in Shibuya doesn’t mean that the interrogation answer of him coming from a Not Big City was retconned either. a person can be born in a big city in a hospital that has more resources and staffing but actually grew up somewhere else. it’s not uncommon for someone to say they come from where they grew up in rather than where they were born.
i’ve seen people thoughtlessly yapping and disregarding Mikoto having complex trauma, ergo leading to the development of a complex trauma set of behaviors, due to coming from a middle class family. he may have been middle class and from an “average” family but you can still be traumatized despite being born into a family that may have easier access to the potential of support in a society that famously lacks accessible and destigmatized social/community support. the invalidation of his struggles due to the socioeconomic class he comes from (that is arguably negated by being a child of a single mother, and the only masculinity in an otherwise majority feminine household situated in a severely patriarchal sexist nation) tangentially reminds me of dialogue akin the line of “you have a roof over your head, there’s food on the table, you get everything you need, so why the hell are you crying or saying that life is hard?”
it’s strange seeing people saying that his writing or story is weak because Trial 3 didn’t explicitly talk about his childhood or traumas or home life of a person from years ago that caused his dissociative behaviors to develop considering MILGRAM is about the now and present where the crime happened. we don’t even get anything about Amane beyond her life during the crime itself, yet i don’t see people calling for Yamanaka’s death with Amane or calling her writing chopped.
those who complain that Mikoto is unrealistic and badly written because of that "unrealistic"ness are spitting on so many people who do relate to him — all those complex trauma victims, all those complex trauma victims that seem to contradict themselves because of all those conflicting emotions that may come from expressing their own history or even opinions (thus affecting memory or what the brain can handle), all those "imperfect victims", all those non model mentally ill persons that don't have digestible and "perfect" presentations of a condition, and every other way that a person can relate to him — are part of the ableism you may claim to be against yet, you enforce through creating a radioactive weapon carved with words that outlast civilizations, through festering stigmatization, ableism, dis-compassion, and un-empathy through your sort of discourse proliferating like a disease through the internet's memetic battleground that cares more about virality rather than actual critical thought, self-reflection, and action for systemic change. you are a hypocrite.
you are also a hypocrite if you preach about ableism yet you reduce Mikoto to just a mental illness character. you restrict his complexity, his wholeness, his humanity to just his DID.
you are a hypocrite if you complain about the bad writing of “his crime being done because of DID” because you are reducing his entire character to a mental illness when, in reality, anyone would have broken through a lifetime of suppressed emotions in a society that forcibly hammers down emotions and expression whilst facing abuse, neglect, pressure and expectations, sexism, objectification, and even more abuse and bullying on top of 100 days of consecutive work at a company that practices what people have been referring to as “modern day slavery” for decades, all alone with no support interpersonally, socially, or society-wise, and the first form of stress release you get is substance abuse via downing a whole bottle of Smirnoff Ice vodka despite the clear signs of malnourishment from lack of being able to eat well due to overwork that unlocks far too many emotions in its depressant qualities to a brain that’s unprepared to handle it and a body not yet able to stomach it. you are ignoring the whole person in favor of constraining them to just one label imbued with so many expectations that reduce a person into the stereotype or trope you preach is there but, in reality, you are the one expecting, searching, and forcing it on. you are the ableistic person you claim yourself to be against.
those who encourage anti-intellectualism and further isolation thus stigmatization of DID through the process of making it taboo to even breathe about if you are not part of the plural in-group (i make a distinction here by phrasing it as plural rather than multiple or pwDID) that theatricalizes DID into a flanderized bastardation plurality of it are part of the problem. as my good oomf said, “you do not need to be anything or prove anything to have fair discussions on weighty subjects”.
anyways, these are just my messy preliminary thoughts so far. i’ll likely have more in due time and especially when Mikoto’s T3 interrogation releases.
i explicitly encourage you to debate, add on, or literally any form of dialogue and discourse regarding the points brought up in this post. all i ask is that you actually think about what you have read and what you actually think and believe.
A character trait/dynamic that I'm endlessly compelled by is someone dealing with (or, like, failing to) being the child of people who were too busy being good people to have the time and attention to be good parents. This can be anywhere from 'was a public defender who gave a shit working 60 hour weeks with basically no vacations' to 'left their family behind to join the revolution/war effort and is now a universally beloved martyr-hero who saved/remade the world with their final breath' on the groundedness spectrum. The important thing is a viscerally felt but confused and ugly mess of longing, resentment, and guilt about feeling the resentment.
#the idea that someone can simultaneously be a bad parent and a good person is one that seems to escape a LOT of people#I see far too many people who insist that if someone is a bad parent they're also a bad person#because being a bad parent MAKES them a bad person#“well they never should have had kids if they were going to be bad at it!” cool cool so I don't know if you know this but#not everyone is able to see how things will play out before they happen#also someone may be a GREAT parent for one kid but a mediocre one for another kid#because (and I know this is another pretty alien idea to a lot of tumblr) everyone is different#what one child needs is not necessarily the same as what another child needs#anyway#it's much more fun to explore this concept in fiction than in reality#when it happens IRL at least one real person gets screwed over; in fiction it's an interesting story to explore
So fucking true
I know people who are great as friends for example, but they shouldn't be parents.
Can someone smarter than me talk abt the parallels between yuno and mikoto. The words are getting jumbled in my head but i cannot stop seeing them as two sides of the same coin. Heres a woman whos committed no crime but begs to be guilty, can you condemn her? Theres a man whos committed the worst crime but begs you to believe it wasnt him, can you forgive?? (Undercover intro plays) oh fuck i get it now
Can someone smarter than me talk abt the parallels between yuno and mikoto. The words are getting jumbled in my head but i cannot stop seeing them as two sides of the same coin. Heres a woman whos committed no crime but begs to be guilty, can you condemn her? Theres a man whos committed the worst crime but begs you to believe it wasnt him, can you forgive?? (Undercover intro plays) oh fuck i get it now
You're the only person I've seen not hating on Mikoto T3. Also, same anon as before (the one not getting all the hate). My mind is like still boggled by all the comments saying that he is bad representation because he different suffer from severe childhood abuse/trauma and saying stuff like DID only forms from that sort of thing, when in the VD it talks about what may have been mildly stressful to one could have really badly affected another person. And then there's people saying that since they wouldn't have done what he did, they would have done something else like just quit instead, just kind of ignores just how bad a toxic work environment is and how there's a lot of pressure to just endure these things, not to mention how hard it can be to quit, and also all the stuff about how John is just an evil alter and how he got killed off. Anyways, I believe that Mikoto always had dissociative tendencies and this is based on some of the things he says about himself and his upbringing.
spins because i am full of whimsy and good takes and am the best in the world too.
the backlash is so myopic and pointless literally, the VD addresses basically all of the misconceptions people have and then some. 'evil alter and killed off' while the VD is a heartbreaking depiction of him accepting responsibility for his crime and making peace with the version/side of himself he'd rejected and disowned for so long, that in spite of that, could never truly be severed from him... cmon. tears.
i'm glad that they explored that trauma is relative, because we do all have different circumstances for sure. but also it is literally implied he was a parentified child, with god knows what unstable attachment style, who worked for an abusive company where it would not be strange if he was forced to stay on with blackmail. it absolutely makes sense why he stayed and why he broke under it the way that he did. it's not even a stretch.
his background absolutely predisposes him to the DID he developed most explicitly later in life, and his acute situation absolutely serves as an understandable trigger for someone sleep deprived, self-medicating, with little to no emotional regulation skills, with little to no support network (IN A CITY ACROSS THE COUNTRY!), under torrential abuse with no outlet, wanting to do anything to feel any sort of control in his life again.
but, oh, he's mentally ill, so we need to assume he did it because of his mental illness, in isolation, for no other reason than because he's a madman. that's totally what was written and conveyed.
i think people are just mad to be mad. i hope they stop soon. mikoto kayano hands down some of the kindest and richest and unique DID rep i ever did see.
Every mikoto trial has had an initial wave of “This isnt what DID is like!!!” before ppl dig into Why they feel that way. I should probably let my thoughts simmer more but for now here they are unfiltered
First off, yuno parallels!!! The sound reminds me a lot of Life instrumentally + the rap section. These two… neglecting themselves until the culmination of their buried pain confronts them. Collapsing from exhaustion causing their murders. Maybe if mahiru lived we couldve had a 0909 self love thing? But now it can only be alluded to via rap verse. Waaaah
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(Pushes my glasses up) erm actually hes NOT a serial killer!!! Translation error!!!!!! He killed a bunch of people in a short period of time. Hes a spree killer. Or maybe in japanese law those two are not differentiated idk. Hes a mass killer either way. Thank GOD they didnt go the serial killer route whew.
(Puts on conspiratorial hat) If anything this just shows how Flawed and Biased the final reports are. Nothing in here can convince me this mf had a perfectly normal childhood. NOT that theres trauma threshold one must reach to be capable of harm… but u do not become that hardcore of a people pleaser for no reason !!! In my opinion !!!
ACRUALLY THE ENTIRETY OF MILGRAM HAS UNRELIABLE NARRATORS. WHO WROTE THE REPORTS? WHY SHOULD I TRUST UR WORD. HUH? HUH?? HM???
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Umm i think the part where work drives him insane is relatable. He just like me fr. The Workaholic. Work defines your worth. Work causes pain. Work to ignore the pain. You dont have a life outside of work? Work till you forget that. Grisps him in my fucking hands. Mikoto you are so fucked up. I feel seen. Validated and Violated. Does that make sense?
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“Evil alter stereotype” this “Poor representation” that WELL MAYBE HES JUST NOT A GOOD PERSON AND THATS OKAY . BECAUSE BAD PEOPLE ARE STILL PEOPLE. I LIKE HIM.
YOUR HONOR MY CLIENT IS GUILTY AS FUCK BUT I BELIEVE IN HIS CAPACITY FOR GROWTH. I BELIEV IN KINDNESS. CAN WE BELEIEVE PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADSE
in a series of moral quandaries and difficult questions about the nature of guilt, mikoto's story asks the bold and brave question "is it okay to beat a dozen people to death if you're mentally ill?"
