I love u Mr. Robot 💕🫶🥰 [spoilers!!]

!!! This Post Contains Spoilers! This Is Your Warning !!!

thinking about Mr. Robot on this fine Wednesday morning.

infodump incoming...

I was honestly kinda blown away by how they handled Elliot's DID. easily my favorite fictional representation of it I've seen in media so far. was it perfect? I mean you can't really do something like this "perfectly" because there is no definitive presentation of DID, and therefore no "perfect" one. it's a very individual (haha. irony intended) experience. I don't think they really wrote anything that was out-right wrong or misinformation.

I'd say the closest to that was maybe in season 1 where he was mistaking Mr. Robot as a real physical person who he interacted with, because that's definitely not a common experience at all. however I have actually read case reports of some patients who said they have vividly hallucinated their alters as if they were physical people before, so it does happen, albeit very rarely to the degree of Elliot's experience. since Elliot is someone who also experiences psychosis outside of his DID, I guess that's a possible explanation for it.

but it was still very entertaining and made for a great metaphorical representation of just how detached he was, and how detached severe dissociation makes you. fantasy and reality do feel very blended. and a good mind fuck, Mr. Robot's specialty, of course.

anyway. god. I just love it so much. I love how the Elliot we're watching isn't the ""original"" host. like. you NEVER see that in characters with DID. the current host is always the "original" host, even though that's actually less common than a system's current host being the second, third, fourth, etc host. hosts changing throughout a system's life is pretty common! but that's never depicted in media! and I especially liked how he Didn't know this. he thought he was the "original" host. felt. big mood.

and I love that our Elliot experienced amnesia for his OWN actions. you also never see that in media, despite that being so common and practically a given in actual people with DID. amnesia doesn't always equal that another alter did it. sometimes you just... don't remember. because you have a dissociative disorder. that gives you amnesia. and I also love how he experienced "fake" memories. memories that are real and did happen, but their narratives being twisted so much because the reality of what actually happened was just too painful to accept. that's a pretty common thing to happen too irl but doesn't really get shown much in media.

god and I love how they showed co-consciousness sometimes. that one scene where him and Mr. Robot seem to notice it for the first time ... mwah. chef kiss. no notes. yes it's very fucking disorienting first noticing it!!!!!!! you DO go "wait what the fuck is happening". and the switching that looked seamless from both the outside and inside, where sometimes you had to stop and think for a moment who was actually talking and interacting with the other characters and who was in the passenger seat just talking in their head... beautiful. lovely. fantastic. superb. switching is usually not that obvious or noticeable to other people, and can also be so subtle to the system themself that they don't even realize it's happened. personally I almost never recognize switches unless they're very intense and suddenly triggered by something happening that is also usually very distressing. but just day-to-day? nah got no clue. I'm lucky if I can even recognize it afterwards tbh.

also the part where Elliot was trying to stop the building bomb or whatever but Mr. Robot was trying to stop him so he kept forcing a switch to sabotage anything Elliot tried to do and just resorted to fucking flinging them down stairs and hitting they're head into walls... that was genuinely hilarious. somewhat dramatic obviously, but like .... stuff like that does legit happen JDBDNJSND. I have in fact had at least one instance of an alter taking control of the body just to smack me in the face.

and of course I loved how Elliot had other problems besides DID. it's always weird to me when characters with DID like.... just have DID (+ some PTSD). the average number of comorbidities that a person with DID has is like 5-6 I think. and that's only for Psychological stuff. it's very common for people with DID to also deal with somatic and physical issues on top of that. Elliot not only has DID, but deals with obvious and pretty severe depression, anxiety, substance abuse, paranoia, insomnia, and other stuff I may be forgetting. and tbh I read him as being autistic too, but I have no idea if that was intended or not lol.

I think the only thing I really didn't like is how it seems like the ending was implying that... the whole system other than the "original" Elliot was going to go dormant after??? maybe that's not what was being implied, but that's how I interpreted it. that's pretty much my sole complaint about how his DID was written. I'm just choosing to further interpret it as Mr. Robot/the rest of the system mistakenly believing they'll go dormant now that they ""aren't needed"" <3... but everything else? mwah. beautiful.

thank you for coming to my TED talk 🤖