Just because

January 14, 2026

maybe it’s just me being old and jaded bc i’ve been having to cope with the symptoms of bipolar disorder since i was a teenager, but i genuinely think that people are trying too hard to determine whether or not there’s good rep for bipolar disorder in pathologic 3 and i gotta say… idgaf?
daniil dankovsky is having a severe, acute stress reactions to repeated trauma. while he has dialog/environmental hints towards being mentally ill in other ways, he states himself that he just calls his mental states “mania” and “apathy.” i do not think there was an attempt at depicting any one disorder, but more of a (tbh reasonable) response to the situations he finds himself in.
we can talk about the colloquial use of the term “mania” and the problems that come with general idea of game-ifying mental health, but i no longer relate to this need to shove this sort of thing into a diagnosis to make a judgement call on the depiction of a specific mental illness when there is none specified or that is definitively signaled and is instead very vague. and again, maybe this is just my personal emotions and beef with the psych system but dogmatic adherence to psych labels always makes my skin itch and that’s often what this “well what DOES he have, then?” angle spirals into.
like maybe i’ve just been dealing with it for such a long time that the bar is in hell, but i tend to care more about whether or not a text has contempt for the mentally ill more than like. total accuracy. like:
is daniil posed as a bad or dangerous person strictly on the basis drastic swings?
are we given material enough to empathize/sympathize with him when he is in crisis?
are we allowed to see the internal logic behind some of the more disjointed/erratic thoughts that might be happening?
when the aspects of this the mental illness start resulting in bad behaviors/dysfunctional thinking, are we meant to believe that this is fully the result of his instability or is because of the other factors coupled with it?
is he posed as someone to ridicule for being unstable?
idk where i was going with this, but while i think it is imperfect and the game is very brutal (it always has been), but i do not think this game hates mentally ill people given my experiences with it thus far. i think having different interpretations of his character are cool but given the circumstances of the story, it is a bit absurd to assume you could make some proper diagnosis and thus others have the wrong ones. he’s under intense duress and we get less than 2 weeks with him (minus the time loop) and that’s not enough to really make a call on anything like that in a concrete way.

7:59pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/Zzldapikboa0qu00

(Notes: 30)