Before I get labelled as some Yan­dere the­o­rist like meflo­raine: no, I’m not a Yan­dere expert. Heck, I’m not even a Yan­dere fan, even if Kaede from Shuf­fle sits on my MAL top 10 favorite char­ac­ters or that I tend to like a lot of yan­dere char­ac­ters or that I argue for them when— okay not help­ing my case.

Of all the char­ac­ter archtypes lying about out there, Yan­deres seem to be the most mis­un­der­stood and hated, far more than even the most sadis­tic vari­a­tion of tsun­deres. Obvi­ously, I can’t judge other people’s pref­er­ences on the mat­ter, but I always felt like peo­ple are tak­ing Yan­deres the wrong way. When most peo­ple think of yan­dere they instantly think of “they will mur­der you! Nice boat style!” Uuu­uuu— I feel bad for them already. After all, they just wanted to be your bestest friend for ever and ever and ever. That box­cut­ter busi­ness? It’s not going to hap­pen unless you cheat on or betray them, and in some cases you might be just a bit deserv­ing of what’s com­ing… I mean, Makoto (School Days) sure does.

But even then, it’s not quite that sim­ple. I knew that Yan­deres (and Yan­gires for that mat­ter, see their MAL club for word break­down) were on the extreme ends, but even I didn’t quite under­stand the issue involved until I read this TIME mag­a­zine arti­cle on Bor­der­line Per­son­al­ity Dis­or­der. Yeah, psy­chol­o­gists once thought of this as a fatal dis­ease, how’s that for you sick-girl Moe lovers, not to men­tion all the Dam­aged Goods and Katawa Shoujo fans.

I’m sure peo­ple are going to be too lazy to read an arti­cle so heavy on real-world psy­chol­ogy, so I’ll take some exerpts from it.

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What is Bor­der­line Per­son­al­ity Disorder

Bor­der­line patients seem to have no inter­nal gov­er­nor; they are capa­ble of deep love and pro­found rage almost simultaneously.

It’s also called the Emo­tion­ally Unsta­ble Per­son­al­ity Dis­or­der. Their ten­den­cies for depres­sion and self-harms sounds a bit like the pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of emo, but there’s a big dif­fer­ence: BPD peo­ple can be tremen­dously joy­ous also. The arti­cles gives another good one line metaphor of BPD:

Bor­der­line indi­vid­u­als are the psy­cho­log­i­cal equiv­a­lent of third-degree-burn patients. They sim­ply have, so to speak, no emo­tional skin. Even the slight­est touch or move­ment can cre­ate immense suffering.

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What does it have to do with Yandere

They are pow­er­fully con­nected to the peo­ple close to them and ter­ri­fied by the pos­si­bil­ity of los­ing them — yet attack those peo­ple so unex­pect­edly that they often ensure the very aban­don­ment they fear.

That’s really the sig­na­ture trait of a Yan­dere isn’t it? The com­plete attach­ment and devo­tion they have towards their beloved and best friends, fol­lowed by out­ra­geous reac­tions to any drama in the rela­tion­ship. Kind of like Kaede’s slave-like total ded­i­ca­tion to Tsuchimi Rin, as well as her break­down moments which scared both him and Asa.

A typ­i­cal exam­ple from last year was the lurid tale of an Ontario man labeled bor­der­line who used a screw­driver to gouge out his wife’s right eye.

Yep, that sure sounds like some­thing that came straight out of Hig­urashi to me, just swap the roles and give Sonozaki Mion a screwdriver.

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What causes it

Some bor­der­line indi­vid­u­als come from homes where they were abused, some from sti­fling fam­i­lies in which chil­dren were told to go to their room if they had to cry, and some from nor­mal fam­i­lies that buck­led under the stress of an eco­nomic or health-care cri­sis and failed to pro­vide kids with ade­quate val­i­da­tion and emo­tional coach­ing. “The child does not learn how to under­stand, label, reg­u­late or tol­er­ate emo­tional responses, and instead learns to oscil­late between emo­tional inhi­bi­tion and extreme emo­tional lability,”

Bad par­ent­ing, it sounds like. Basi­cally a case of ‘this child never learned how to han­dle emo­tions’. Sadly, with the social pres­sure of today’s fam­i­lies, the often­time lack­ing of par­ents, and all this eco­nomic reces­sion busi­ness, it’s not sur­pris­ing that BPD patients are on the rise. Yes, that means you’re more likely to meet a Yan­dere than ever before—

There is a good end, so why do peo­ple only think of the bad ones? Huh Rin-kun?

My point in all this? I’m not nec­es­sar­ily try­ing to get peo­ple to like Yan­deres, but I do think that Yan­dere char­ac­ters are those that needs sup­port (and pity, except that’s not always wanted), not ani­mos­ity and blame from others.

There also seem to be some kind of con­fu­sion that Yan­deres hurt their beloved because they enjoy doing so: that’s not Yan­dere, that’s Sadism, and a Yan­dere may exhibit sadis­tic traits but it’s not usu­ally part of their arche­type. Yan­deres don’t hurt their close com­pan­ions because it gives them plea­sure, it’s just that they phys­i­cally express emo­tions — which can be either a really good thing, or a really bad thing.

And frankly, if you were a good part­ner who took a Yandere’s inse­cu­ri­ties to mind, there are actu­ally quite a few joys in the trait. With­out the stabby stabby anger, what remains is ded­i­cated love and trans­par­ent dis­play of exhil­a­rat­ing joy… now there’s some­thing I actu­ally kind of admire. Don’t get me wrong— only kind of, a bit…

and you are the cen­ter of their universe

Well, I guess it depends on the amount of atten­tion you want.

Trolling her with the cake was prob­a­bly a bad idea…

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Mar­cana Tarot Project
• The Under­rated of the Sea­son: Ookami Kakushi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 18:48 and is filed under Anime, Crossvision, Manga, Visual Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.