Myself Said What?
An exploration of a complex Marvel characters disorder.
Moon Knight has ended, and I have plenty of different thoughts about it. This is not a review, it is not really a discussion about the show itself. Rather, it is a discussion of mental health and how it can bleed into our creation.
Marc suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly referred to as multiple personality disorder. The latter term is often used playfully with people who start acting differently. I think people may not comprehend that there is an actual disorder behind it. It is a fascinating one that affects somewhere between 1-3% of the population.
It typically occurs in moments of intense stress, such as abuse, where the victim dissociates themself from the reality of a situation and compartmentalizes it off into another stratum of their inner being. In turn, this can develop into its own personality that lives under the radar of awareness. It can happen over and over again and become any number of separate personalities.
It is an extremely interesting character point for Moon Knight that has been around since the early days of the character. It sheds a lot of light on a disorder that not too many people ever really talk about.
The point to contextualize is that even things like DID have a place in comic books. What is important is how they utilize it as a storytelling tool, and not just a way to forcibly place characters in books. What is it that actually makes the character work? The writers have to take a complex character, whose complexity only increases because there is more than one personality present, and form a vigilante/anti-hero story around it. That takes some real writing chops, and it seems to have been handled rather well.
I will close out on this, in the fifth episode of Moon Knight, we spend almost the entire episode exploring the reasoning for the personalities, and it is fantastically handled. More than being cinematically interesting, it beckons truth to what actually happens to cause this disorder.
So, take note that you can create a character with any features you want. However, how are you going to utilize those features to tell the best possible story?