link!!

note on names: for the purposes of this post:

mikoto refers to the overall human being. this includes when i am speaking about him as a collective, and when speaking about him generically (when i don't know or care 'which' alter did what act).

'john' refers exclusively to the mikoto that appears in Neoplasm and is named 'john' by es for convenience. i will not assume any other 'not-normal-mikoto' alters are necessarily 'john'. you will see why.

when referring to any other specific parts of mikoto (eg. his normative identities, other versions of him we see) i will clarify which ones i mean within the sentence by describing them.

introduction

the amount of 'jokes' i've scrolled through on twitter lately about him being bad rep or having one good personality and one evil personality has officially made me lose my marbles.

my girlfriend pointed out that tbf, that sort of impression about how his character is written makes sense if you haven't read the text very deeply. not everyone has spent almost a year picking apart every word this man has said.

so i'm doing the work reading and i'm going to personally spoonfeed the relevant bits of the text to people. now nobody has any excuse.

i will try to keep every section as brief as possible, but please know that every section has a lot more evidence and reasoning behind it. please feel free to ask me about them or see my other (significantly longer) essays for further evidence and reasoning.

psuedo-essay starts now.

1. 'John' didn't commit the murders.

every time 'john' confesses to the murders, he makes a point to always, immediately, make sure that this confession means that mikoto will be forgiven/considered innocent, as if he has an ulterior goal and preoccupation with keeping mikoto's identity 'clean'.

his account of the murders is incredibly vague and emotionally detached (compared to 'normative-John Doe-mikoto' who panics and dissociates when pressed on the matter, and to his response in Interrogation 2 Q.10 where he exhibits distress and is unable to answer the question on if he feels sorry for his victims). it honestly seems like he doesn't have much connection to the memory at all.

and 'john' says himself in his own words that his reason for existence is to protect himself, and that eventually he will "take it all - bear it all, everything and anything, and [] be rid of it". he also demonstrates a striking amount of self-destructive ideation and poor self esteem.

to me, all this is indicative that 'john' is a part of mikoto that exists to bear the guilt of their murderous acts (and the stigma of being labelled a murderer); he is not a part that exists to perpetrate murder. he protects mikoto by 'owning' the unacceptable acts and elements of identity, isolating them within himself, and then planning/wanting to vanish it with him, somehow.

obviously, because of this, he wants es, the audience, and he himself to believe that 'john' — 'not-mikoto-(trust)' — perpetrated the murders, and that that means mikoto didn't do anything bad. but because we are smart we see through his dissociative coping mechanism.

mikoto murdered people; mikoto is being labelled a murderer. and although he has a psychological scapegoat that he cannot recognise as himself to help himself cope with that fact, he ultimately cannot escape that reality.

when mikoto is lobotomised and loses the part of himself that es calls 'john', the guilt and reality of his situation remains. all that is removed from mikoto in the lobotomy is his ability to separate himself from this act and cope by believing it was somebody else.

almost as if the purpose of 'john' was to act as a dissociated part that bears his guilt so mikoto (who cannot cope with this reality) can protect himself from confronting it.

2. Mikoto is mask upon mask, and 'John' is the model prisoner.

milgram.jp/character/mikoto (Profile): 常識人なりに常に状況に対して順応しようとしている。 tl: "A sensible* person who is always trying to [adapt/conform/acclimate/accomodate] to whatever the situation is." By "sensible", it means acting in accordance with prudence and propriety with the mores. (@milgram-en)

mikoto is described on the milgram.jp website as a person who is always adapting to the situation at hand.

we can see this firsthand in his normative-identity-self that we meet in t1, who insists on what a standard everyday worker he is. in Double and Undercover and his interros we see how much he values his work and puts up with his abusive work environment, and how much he neglects himself to prioritise and bear it.

i find it practically textual that a major element of his identity is how he dissociates to allow himself to 'become' the role his environment expects of him, to survive these abusive environments.

by Neoplasm, mikoto's demeanour has adapted from his work-self to a 'prisoner-self', and he dissociates (through 'john') to 'become' the role MILGRAM expects of him.

in John Doe mikoto and es could not negotiate because mikoto could not accept any of this was real and insisted he was a regular guy.

in Neoplasm, 'john' is able to negotiate at length, making the warden's job easier and less frustrating. he accepts that MILGRAM is happening, he accepts that he is a murderer, and he even acts the part of a rough and aggressive prisoner without having it cause es any problems.

'john', on the surface, acts exactly as you'd expect an aggressive alter who perpetrated crimes to act, because that's exactly what es and the audience want him to be.

and just like in his life so far, by acting this part, he even gets on the right track for surviving this new abusive environment (T2 inno verdict).

3. Mikoto demonstrates very realistic dissociation from his absolutely justifiable anger.

when asked on if he'd ever even wanted to kill someone in the T2 interrogation, he denies it, uncertainly and disconnectedly. his handwriting shows visible distress and the beginnings of severe dissociation setting in. this claim that he'd never had such thoughts is also contradicted by him in Neoplasm, as 'john' says normative-mikoto "wished for a being that could destroy everything".

therefore it is pretty clear that despite having the capacity for violence and wishing for violence, mikoto cannot psychologically bear that coming from himself, and so whenever it comes up he either flat out denies its existence or attributes it to an 'other'.

he very obviously demonstrates dissociation from the fact that he killed people or has the capacity for such violent acts, because this reality is not one he can face or confront, because of the immense anguish it causes him.

in John Doe es persistently prods at his dissociation from his violent acts and thoughts and labels mikoto a murderer, despite mikoto begging for them to stop. es essentially takes a sledgehammer to mikoto's dissociation that has kept him stable all his life, and refuses to let up despite mikoto's begging and obvious immense distress.

mikoto's crashout is absolutely justifiable here. it's simply deeply unlucky that mikoto exists in a MILGRAM loophole and is therefore successful in connecting his attack, so this instance sticks out to everyone as a show of extreme violence.

(i don't think anybody thinks fuuta, who attacks es right at the start of his interrogation is volatile and violent, and yet mikoto is often labelled this way for reacting to relentless abuse.)

another element of his self that mikoto is clearly dissociated from is his anger. he cannot recall ever becoming angry and finds it an unacceptable way to be. hence the part of himself that does hold anger and is the one that explodes at es, is dissociated.

he didn't 'switch' into some fundamentally evil violent alter and start beating es for no reason.

he (completely understandably) cracked and lashed out under a relentless abusive assault, while also being unable to identify with lashing out or the idea of having angry emotions. hence, his demeanour changes for the period he is angry, and he forgets this understandable reaction after it happens.

this is literally just what DID is.

4. Mikoto demonstrates many more dissociative symptoms beyond alters. He also has more than two alters.

mikoto's writing evokes dissociative symptoms such as dereality (the feeling the world is unreal or dream-like), the feeling that you are watching yourself act without your own control, and the feeling that you have done things without being conscious of them, through his sleepwalking/dreaming imagery. these are common and significant dissociative symptoms found in disorders such as DID.

(i wrote this section in the miraheze wiki. i'm just not arsed to copy and paste it.)

he also demonstrates identity confusion and alteration outside of being a binary.

mikoto uses at least six distinct personal pronouns that are often intentionally alternated. most famously mikoto alternates katakana ore and kanji boku in Neoplasm (when talking about him ('john') vs 'normative-mikoto'), but mikoto also alternates personal pronouns in MeMe, wherein katakana boku and kanji boku are used as object and subject in a sentence respectively (ボクが僕を).

the mikoto who uses kanji boku in John Doe and the mikoto that uses kanji boku in Neoplasm also have distinct linguistic profiles and demeanours (see: milgram-en's commentary in how his boku pronouns are pronounced in their Neoplasm translation).

so pronouns are not the end-all for denoting which active part he is in; his identity and demeanour is persistently nebulous, inconsistent, and confused.

in mikoto's trial 2 interrogation alone mikoto also demonstrates at least five distinct handwriting styles.

the way the 'other' mikotos are drawn between MeMe and Double are markedly different. the ore mikoto in John Doe and 'john' use different personal pronouns (kanji ore and katakana ore respectively), while the ore personal pronoun in Double is back to kanji ore again.

and, literally anyone who has tried to analyse his MVs and definitively point out which shots are mikoto and which are 'john' can tell you that it is practically impossible.

mikoto isn't only two distinct parts, as much as we would like to assume. instead he has a lot of grey area, a lot of overlap, and is a character with a lot of undefined dissociated states.

5. Mikoto's DID label and the model of being multiple is coercively applied to him.

mikoto, coming into MILGRAM, does not consider himself to have DID. it is implied he does not know very much about DID even after he is labelled with it, and generally seems to sympathise with the notion of DID being a lousy excuse for murder.

however, after kotoko, es, jackalope, and the audience concede with his armchair DID diagnosis, and after MILGRAM ensures a main talking point between T1 and T2 is if having DID should let him get off for murder (by having kotoko suggest this angle), in T2, parts of mikoto begin to engage with the idea that he has multiple selves, and the argument that it was an alter that did it.

even after he has been labelled and begins to acknowledge he has different selves however, he doesn't seem to consider himself multiple entities with different names, like es (and the audience) expect him to. he (unenthusiastically) lets es provide him a distinguishing name for convenience, but he only identifies himself with this name once, at the very end of the voice drama and desperate to get through to them. he otherwise kind of ignores it.

a large part of how mikoto understands and presents his DID is directly informed by what people have told him about him, what they suggest he should be like, and how he knows they want to think about him. parts of it are also entirely constructed by the audience and es, as they mold him into a more stereotyped DID presentation that is digestible to them.

outside of MILGRAM's coercion, and within the less obvious parts of his writing, mikoto's DID is significantly more hidden, realistic, and nuanced. but under the audience's speculation and expectations he is shaped and plays into into what they expect him to be.

which is entirely in line with his vulnerable, highly adaptive, and socially conscious character.

conclusion

please be mindful when analysing characters like mikoto that you don't immediately assume they have bad, stereotyped writing just because they act in a way you don't understand.

when you pick apart mikoto's influences, his contexts, and look at his actions beyond the surface level, a very understandable and traumatised person emerges. just because many don't look beyond a surface level does not make his character illogical, volatile, or offensively written.