In Praise of the Yandere
Content warning! I talk about mental health stuff in a general way and there’s some talk of relationship violence and abusive behaviour. You should bounce if you’re not here for that.
In the parlance primarily of anime culture, but also its related spaces, there is the idea of romantic character archetypes. I’ve talked about this in the past, about the idea that having common language to describe media archetypes serves to make conversations about media (and everything else) easier, and genre media, as this under-examined place full of shorthand and signifiers, is no different. When you have terms for archetypes, it’s easy to identify them, bring them together, talk about them, and compare them. Then we can talk about these characters as a category, and that’s interesting and cool.
I think the one that’s most widely known, outside of weeb space, is the tsundere, the idea of a girl who alternates between being very angry and very loving. But, if you’re paying attention to gamer spaces, you probably have heard of the other big archetype, The Yandere.
