Psychoanalysing Fictional Characters

I’ve been doing some reading and thinking. I’m honestly not sure how well I can word this but luckily my quiet corner of the internet is very quiet so hopefully I can post this without worry, ha ha.

While it’s annoying when people psychoanalyse characters to demonise their behaviour, it’s also annoying when people psychoanalyse characters to excuse their behaviour.

As I keep saying, explanations are not excuses. So after getting the explanation, the next question really should be: does it matter anyway? Like, where do you draw the line? When does the possible speck of good in a mostly bad person stop being worth more than the lives of mostly not bad people? Related: Extras Need Not Apply.

As an aside, I used the word ‘evil’ originally in the above-mentioned post but I honestly dislike using the word ‘evil’. I think I used it because stories like that usually frame the narrative as good versus evil.

Besides — and this might sound controversial! — I still think that psychoanalysing fictional characters is of less consequence than psychoanalysing real people by their reactions to fictional characters and fiction. Every person has their own experiences, preferences, knowledge and thus what they focus on in fiction, and you don’t know those. Like, people. You’re doing the exact same things, just from different ends of the spectrum.

Acceptable name-calling is still name-calling. Just saying.

It’s also true that mental health conditions have been and are misused, overused, and weaponised — particularly in fandom discourse and political discourse. But just as well they’ve been used as excuses to not hold people accountable for their behaviour.

Only you can know the truth of your own behaviour, others can judge you only by what they observe.

Not to mention that historically? Psychiatry, in fact, had its inception as a means of population control. It was a means to corral the undesirables and undesirable behaviours off the street, all the while blaming them for it, into facilities where doctors perpetrated horrific human abuses. So the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Consider them as household pets,” wrote Walter Freeman and his assistant Watts of lobotomised victims and that was less than a hundred years ago. So no, people, building psychiatric hospitals in the early 20th century would not, in fact, have been a good thing.

That said… I’ve been feeling bad about calling the wizards ‘psychopaths’ and ‘psychotic’ so often in my Harry Potter posts. Admittedly, after a certain point those posts devolved into shitposting and the reason why I was calling them ‘psychotic’ was that the wizards in Harry Potter are not, in fact, mentally ill but they are still Just Like That™.

Like, this:

‘It’s these – ouch – shoes my brother gave me – ow – they’re eating my – OUCH – feet – look at them, there must be some kind of – AARGH – jinx on them and I can’t – AAAAARGH – get them off.’ He hopped from one foot to the other as though dancing on hot coals.

‘Anyway,’ said Mr Weasley, in a raised voice, ‘this time Willy’s been caught selling biting doorknobs to Muggles and I don’t think he’ll be able to worm his way out of it because, according to this article, two Muggles have lost fingers and are now in St Mungo’s for emergency bone re-growth and memory modification.’

The wizards aren’t doing this because of any trauma or mental health conditions but because it’s supposed to be funny. They’re doing it for fun. Which I suspect is because of the magic and the utter lack of consequences of their behaviour but that’s a headcanon, not canon. Rowling 100%, unironically and unthinkingly, presents this behaviour as quirky little jokes. And even then she doesn’t commit to it fully but wants you to feel really bad for the violence inflicted on her darling little pets (by the bad guys) and it’s like, well, at this point I honestly don’t care? So where does that leave us?

So after seven mindbogglingly badly written books, I just lost all patience with her drivel. Hence the (often exaggerated) shitposting.

But I was thinking about future if unlikely readers of this blog who might look at those Harry Potter posts — particularly the later ones — and think “oh wow, this girl is totally unhinged”. And it’s like, I honestly didn’t write any of those posts to make anyone feel bad? I don’t want anyone to feel bad, okay?

The liberal use of ‘mudblood’ was totally deliberate, though.

“Science”

“I believe in science!”

I’m sure that most people who use this phrase don’t really think about it or mean anything by it. But if it requires your belief, it’s not science. The only thing that requires belief is the thing you can’t prove. When you start “believing” in science, it stops being science.

I actually had a conversation related to this subject with someone I know. I was reading this book that’d set out to disprove a well-known physicist’s theory. I thought it was interesting so I was translating bits of it to a few people.

Then one of them asked me: “Why did the author decide to attack the physicist?”

I was nonplussed because there were so many things wrong with the underlying thought process of that sentence I didn’t even know where to begin. In the end, the whole thing bothered me so much I pointed them out to the person in question. And then she basically flipped out on me, ha ha.

The author of this book saw this physicist’s theory as senseless. So like any independent, enterprising person, they set out to disprove it. Contrary to popular belief, refuting someone’s theory is not the same as attacking the person originating the theory. The author of this book hardly even said a word about the physicist himself, and even when they did they said nothing negative.

If you actually think that someone can’t set out to disprove other people’s theories they think are wrong — because gosh, that’s attacking the person and we don’t want to be mean — then guess what you can say goodbye to? Any sort of progress.

Look… You really shouldn’t accept anything just because it’s “settled science”. It’s just appeal to majority and appeal to majority isn’t an argument. For example, the history of the medical and psychiatric fields are so full of malpractices and cruel abuse that it’s staggering. And yet these practices were the “settled science” of their time.

One of the founders of lobotomy was Egas Moniz. His first victim, in a fit of cosmic irony, was a prostitute. He went on to be awarded with the Nobel Prize in medicine. (If someone gets a Nobel Prize, assume the opposite of the prize they’re rewarded with.) Another founder of lobotomy was Walter Freeman who wrote that lobotomised victims could be considered as “household pets”.

Lobotomy destroys the brain. And because it destroys the brain, it destroys the individual. Lobotomised victims lose all higher brain function and autonomy. It was even referred to as “surgically induced childhood”.

And all this piece of trash “physician” could say was “think of them as household pets”.

If his practices didn’t earn him capital punishment, I think that sentence alone should’ve done it. But hey, what do I know?

People really need to get out of this mindset that “authority” has your best interests at heart. “Authority” are just people. And they’re just as stupid, biased, ignorant, corrupt and bribable as other people.

The only meaningful authority in your life is you.