regarding Dust's depiction in the fandom.
i’m not sure if i’m the right person to speak on this, especially since my diagnosis has changed multiple times. at first, i was told i had hallucinatory delusional disorder—only to later be told that diagnosis doesn’t even formally exist. another psychiatrist changed it to bipolar II, and eventually, all of that was scrapped. i’m still in the process of trying to find real answers.
My therapist just told me that I don't even have delusions, just very extreme intrusive thoughts and severe depersonalization.
what i do experience is intense dissociation, and what could be described as “hearing voices,” though it’s not exactly a sound. it’s something between a thought and an external voice. sometimes i can hear a direction, or distinct tones like different people speaking, but what they’re saying rarely makes sense. it’s like fragments of a conversation, but the context is missing.
for me, what’s pushed me into dangerous territory hasn’t necessarily been the voices themselves, but the nightmares that come with them—and how much i’ve overanalyzed what they seemed to be telling me. trauma plays a huge role in how that spirals. i won’t go into it here, but it’s a big part of the picture.
that’s why i’d really love to see a more layered depiction of Dust. i actually have my own fanfic where i try to explore these kinds of things, but looking back, i worry that in trying to vent through him, i might’ve accidentally written something that came off as ableist. it’s hard to toe that line when you’re writing from pain.
i think what i want—more than anything—from portrayals of Dust is for his symptoms to go beyond just “hallucinating Papyrus.” i want to see the paranoia, the delusions, the intrusive thoughts, the nightmares, the flashbacks. the dissociation. the disorganized thinking and speech. the whole picture of what it feels like when your mind isn’t a safe place anymore.
right now, i’m still going through a diagnostic process. i’m crossing my fingers that i don’t get hit with another heavily stigmatized label—and honestly, that whatever i have is something treatable. but more and more, i feel like it all traces back to trauma. i relate to Dust so deeply it almost scares me sometimes, he has so much potential.
You and I are on the same page about wanting to see more depictions beyond hallucinations, although I was of course thinking of wanting to see more of those depictions with Killer.
Unfortunately, it’s very common in this fandom for Killer’s own psychosis to be ignored, overlooked, or just not know about—which is one reason why the common depiction of Killer making fun of Dust’s hallucinations doesn’t make any sense, given Killer hallucinates too.
And he has various forms of hallucinations, from vivid and real, to shadowy figures that watch him or attempt to reach out and touch him. He has full on and back forth conversations with “Chara” despite them not being real, when asked where Chara is he points directly at his own head—“it’s all in your head” is a common phrase associated with Killer.
He has flashbacks, hears multiple voices in his head in different ways—voices from flashbacks, the internal voices he relies on to make any choices on his own—he dissociates heavily, he experiences black out amnesia with Stage 4 and loses control over his own body. He struggles to tell what is and isn’t real thanks to the constant Resets, he constantly feels like he’s being watched by Chara.
He views himself as just something with Sans’ face. He often is showing having back and forth conversations internally and externally as if he’s watching himself argue with himself, his internal conflict is so severe that he sometimes even verbalizes it—which often comes out in confused, contradictory statements, especially when asked anything about himself. When asked how he’s feeling, he answers like “I’m fi—I don’t know. …I’m okay.”
And that’s just one example of it, the entire first page of the Something New comics shows his fragmented thought processes pretty clearly. He shows a deep awareness that something about him has changed, that he’s not the same as he was, but he doesn’t why and he doesn’t seem to know how to stop it.
He seems to struggle a lot with distressing cognitive dissonance, such as killing because he wants to feel something but knowing it doesn’t actually make him feel anything—seemingly believing he only exists because someone else wanted him to. [“Killer Sans exists because of you.”] Feeling more like a role or script than an actual person living a life.
All of this comes from both trauma, and externally induced dissociation + coercion, manipulation. This is a man who doesn’t know who or what he is anymore.
Both Murder and Killer are characters where their mind has become a deeply unsafe place, but for different reasons. For Murder it’s trauma and mental illness, for Killer it’s because of intense prolonged external control and manipulation—and as a result, he is suffering from trauma and mental illness. Even Killer’s own body has become his enemy.
