YuuMori has a lot of villains (it’s, y’know, about the villains). YuuMori has a lot of characters with mental illnesses and neurodivergences.
Most of the time when you see this combo, well. Mental health issues have a pretty strong stigma. Usually the reason they’re evil. Something’s just wrong with them, and their mental health and inability to fit into society is another sign and symptom of it.
And yet, in YuuMori, we have these characters who call themselves demons, who are actively, intentionally, the villains of their story—and their mental health issues are not one of their sins. They do not add to their villainy.
So Albert is obsessive-compulsive. Whether it’s OCD or OCPD can be argued, maybe (although I lean toward OCPD, myself), but he is in fact seriously mentally ill, desperate enough because of it to commit murder. Personality disorders especially are hard to treat, in part because they’re so ingrained into a person. Someone with generalized anxiety might see their anxiety as separate from themselves, but personality disorders are harder to distinguish that way—and it’s part of what makes them so easy to demonize, even more than most others.
But Albert’s? Instead of making his mind looked warped and twisted, his very soul seeming wrong, his reasoning makes more sense now than it ever did before. This was a boy desperate for relief from constant discomfort, from the dissonance between how he knew this should be, how he’d been taught things were meant to be, and how they so obviously were. And it’s very obvious that he is suffering from something outside himself. He is not suffering because he is evil and his soul is wrong. He was suffering before he’d done anything wrong at all.
His discomfort was one of the most rawly emotional moments he’s ever had: Albert is usually quite cool and collected, sometimes angry, sometimes smug, but he has typically felt quite distant, even on the rare moments his internal thoughts are shown. His mental health issues, his suicidal ideation, his OCD? Those were not villainous, not cool, not collected, not careful. Those were human and desperate and fragile.
And while autism is not a mental illness, in this case it performs a similar function for William. He and Albert both have brains screaming at them constantly because that’s not right. That’s not Just. That’s not the way things should be. That doesn’t follow the rules. This can bring people with obsessive-compulsion disorder to their knees and claw their own skin open. It can bring autistic people to wordless shutdowns. It brought Albert the brink of suicide and William to murder.
They are in agony. Unless they fix the wrongness. And they have tried, so many ways, to fix it, and so many of those ways have fail.
William’s guilt may also be agony, but he’s choosing between two different forms of torment. And he thinks one helps others. Not much of a decision, that, not for someone with a soul and a heart, someone who burns so hot with love and hate that he has to turn it into something.
William’s depression, his mental illness, the way his brain doesn’t conform to society, his guilt, his understanding of his own misdeeds is so deep and his self-image so wholly negative, compared how virtually every other character in this series, even John, who barely knows him sees him, and especially compared to how the audience who adores him so much they overwhelmingly voted him their favorite character sees him.
We know he knows what he did was horrible. We are confronted with it constantly. And we are inclined to forgive him even when he might not, because we know despite it all, he has a solid moral center, a good core, the moral understanding of right from wrong. His depression is so all-consuming how could he not? Those things cause his depression.
Albert and William are the focal point of the villainy of the story in many ways: the two who started everything. The two who birthed James Moriarty, Lord of Crime. But while Albert and William may have started everything, they are not the only two with mental health issues.
Louis has always been quite stable. Anxious, to be sure, type A, very high strung. But not really mentally ill—everything he was ever anxious about was entirely reasonable (of course, I have an anxiety disorder myself, so my evaluation of that might be off—but still, worried Sherlock might ruin William’s plan, might lead to his death, might ruin something, worrying about William’s death, worrying about Milverton? All entirely reasonable, thank you). Informed by trauma, surely, but not necessarily mentally ill.
Moran, though? Louis’s behavior is informed by trauma, but Moran’s is poisoned by it. That double-dose PTSD not only from the war, but from his actions in The Final Problem tore him apart, and we saw it tear him apart. His PTSD pushed him into crime the same way William and Albert’s mental health did.
When Moran first gets his character focus, when his personality and character is delved into properly, it’s to show his trauma and mental health issues. His character is deepened, given structure and reasoning and understand, by showing us his mental illness, the way Albert just was in chapter 62. The way William’s has been for several arcs now with his depression.
I find Moran particularly interesting, because he’s not the only character with Shell Shock: John is also a veteran, and has a psychogenic illness from his time at war. When you take those two, loyal bosom friends of William and Sherlock, who are also set to contrast and parallel each other, down to their mental health issues and neurodivergencies, it becomes very apparent how differently the two teams have portrayals of their illness. Of course, John’s not a villain. Sherlock, for all that he can commit horrible acts, is not a villain.
But Sherlock suffers from bouts of listlessness and gloom just as William does—and he hides it even less. He doesn’t quite manifest as traditional depression the way William does—it really reads more like manic depression—but Moran and John’s PTSD doesn’t manifest the same way either. And Moran’s physical disability rooted in something more concretely physical than John’s and his struggle much more debilitating. The way he suffered pushed him to do worse things than John ever felt pushed into.
But suffering, like it did with Albert and William, makes us feel closer to him. It makes them these powerful men who call themselves devils vulnerable.
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