hysyartmaskstudio:

I might get more into this later in the week if i have the energy and if no one else does but here’s what I think we are being shown.

Mutsuki has something resembling DID. Ishida doesn’t work directly from DSM models, but whatever it is, it’s close enough so that’s the model i’m going to work with right now because I don’t have the brain power to be more nuanced.

There is the Mutsuki we’ve seen for most of the manga who is caring, scared of blood, has gaps in his memory, and a positive association with at least part of his family. He’s the Mutsuki we got to know. 

There is also at least one protective personality/alter who is sadistic, who killed Mutsuki’s family, and who is violent in excessive, in almost ritualistic ways, as we see with the organs in the bottle or the description of Torso’s body at the end. . Things this alter/personality does are not known to the main Mutsuki we know, but do seem to influence some of his fears.

When Torso hit Mutsuki in the head, the main, dominant personality gained some of the memories that he had been locked out of.

People with DID can have alters/personalities of different genders. Because Tooru specifies his gender again at the end, at least according to Michi’s translation [x], it is possible that there is something going on there.

Protective personalities/alters are most often formed to defend against abuse. Sometimes to absorb it, and sometimes to fight back against it. They are sometimes shaped to be exactly what the abuser wants them to be, i.e. sometimes protectors against sexual abuse will be hypersexual. This might be the case if it turns out that this alternate personality is female and was formed from Mutsuki’s abuse at the hands of his father, but that’s a lot of speculation.

Sometimes they develop in such a way as to make their “job” in defending the “core” ego easier on the mind. As might be the case for the sadism that we see in this personality. Mutsuki, the compassionate, empathetic Mutsuki, upon seeing/meeting this personality, claims that he enjoyed the act of killing and is therefore a monster. This is the sort of thing a protective personality might develop.

DID is messy, and even when a personality is developed for one role, it doesn’t always stay put and only “come out” to serve that role, hence this sadistic persona surfacing to kill the cat who was not a threat to Mutsuki at all.

It’s worth comparing this personality to other characters we’ve seen accept that they are monsters or have to act like monsters and what they have done once they accepted that. We see several characters accept the title of monster or some variant there of upon themselves in some form. Ayato does it at a young age, when he refuses to follow Touka’s path of trying to live with humans. He joins Aogiri and rises to the rank of Executive. 

Kaneki does after his torture under Yamori.

Yamori, too, is worth thinking about, as his persona he uses in the Torture room, and that he seems to have adopted to a degree in general is one he took on to survive abuse at the hands of Tokage. Tokage, who, of all people, seems to have found a kindred spirit in Mutsuki’s darker half / protector persona.

While not direct parallels to what this part of Tooru’s mind constructed as a defense against the abuse of his father, it is worth thinking about in terms of the monsters characters become voluntarily or out of necessity. 

At this point, we can only really speculate on what Ishida is really doing here, and where this road will lead. But I think it’s clear that the Mutsuki that we’ve known the whole time in this manga isn’t some sort of lie and is just as horrified by the reveals this chapter as we, the readers are. What caused this split/repression and how Mutsuki will deal with it from here, we will just have to wait and see.

But a final note – DID is a real thing real people deal with in real life and, like most people with any kind of mental illness, the vast, vast, vast majority of them are far more likely to be exclusively victims of violence and abuse than ever be violent towards anyone, even in self defense like Mutsuki in the story. Most people with DID do not have a sadistic, murderer alter who kills cats. When we talk about this this week and going forward, please keep that and these real people in mind.