#and while severance doesn't necessarily capture the real life experience of a dissociative disorder it DOES capture the emotions

[sleepdeprivedsurgeon]

i'm not going to say that severance is good or intentional dissociative disorder representation. i am going to say that a lot of horror/thriller surrounding dissociation tends to come at it from an outside angle, where a friend or bystander is hurt by the actions of a dissociated part. which is simply less interesting and less terrifying than approaching it from the perspective of the person who is dissociating. like the actual horror of dissociation comes from the knowledge that there are parts of yourself that you cannot access, and parts of your life you will never live, and that you have been permanently affected by someone you can never actually speak to. it's the tension of knowing that there is always the chance that you will blink and find that, in the time it took for you to blink, someone else has been walking around in your body for an undisclosed amount of time. it's also the idea that you exist because another part of you experienced something so traumatic that they decided to replace themselves with you to avoid it, and you don't know what that thing is or whether it might come back to hurt you, too. that is simply better horror than the idea that your friend might have a secret murderer living inside them. and in fact "your friend might have a secret murderer living inside them" is the perspective that drives the worst kinds of horror, because it is nearly always going to lead to some kind of minority scapegoating.