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terajkFor instance, where lots of people would be bothered by intrusive thoughts of hurting other people, she wouldn't give a crap. (Although she might annoyed if she wanted to think about something else.)
*But also really fun, because I get to be all, "Haha, forget your narrow categories, Western psychiatry, because YOU DO NOT EXIST!"
*But also really fun, because I get to be all, "Haha, forget your narrow categories, Western psychiatry, because YOU DO NOT EXIST!"
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Date: 2011-12-17 09:02 pm (UTC)And then, of course, adjusted for personality. Which is always an important part.
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Date: 2011-12-17 09:46 pm (UTC)This is the part where I run into problems, because her personality is so different than most people's.
(I also write someone who has an impairment portrayed scarily like mine, but our personalities and feelings about it are quite different (also our genders, which affect how people respond to us). Making this adjustments with him is nowhere near as hard.
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Date: 2011-12-17 11:56 pm (UTC)(well, I mean, without their LITERALLY having the power to have the people they don't like killed or exiled, but you'd be amazed the psychological fuckery they can manage instead.)
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Date: 2011-12-18 12:26 am (UTC)<3 <3 <3 This is probably true. Through nothing I've done or particularly deserve, I lead a fairly charmed life. For instance, when I was little all the other children knew I was Like That and accommodated me in subtle, really helpful and clever ways--which they all thought of themselves--even as all the adults were mean and clueless.
What I probably should've said was, the people with mental illnesses that I know/ have heard of are capable of guilt, and also, NT experts tend to write assuming a standard-of-person that Azula is not."
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Date: 2011-12-18 06:26 am (UTC)Just, yeah. Sadly, I've known many Azulas of greater and lesser stripe, and seen the damage they do carved out of people I love. And me, I guess. I've spent long enough trying to figure out what the hell goes on in their heads (and trying so hard to make sure I never become one of them) that I suppose it just doesn't seem so mysterious to me.
(which, you know: I'm GLAD that the kids around you were kind, because gods know one doesn't hear that often! I just had that moment of, how is this a myster . . . Oh. Not everyone knows this kind of person.)
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Date: 2011-12-18 06:14 pm (UTC)I suppose it just doesn't seem so mysterious to me.
I have problems like: Things that would bother people with consciences wouldn't bother her, like intrusive thoughts that they've committed horrible crimes. (Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt). Or just that she is so savvy in ways I'm totally not. Like, if she wants to use a person for reality testing. The simple thing to do would be to just ask them: "Did such-and-such happen?" But, no. Her Highness has to treat the whole thing like taking over Ba Sing Se and use ELABORATE EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION and LYING. Not that I'm a super-nice person who never lies, ever, but GAH my life, it is so hard.
Now that I think about it, these problems aren't with Azula, specifically; it's having to figure out a character's relationship with their disability when canon isn't very helpful. I have a lot of similar problems writing someone whose canon treats his disability really badly and I have to fix it. Canon can't decide if he's just really myopic or has low vision--I prefer the latter, but I sort of have to decide. (And even then, I have to MAKE IT UP). Also, he does things that no myopic or visually impaired person actually does, like hug lampposts because he thinks they're people. So when canon is like: "Haha, he doesn't wear his glasses because he is *stupid,*" I'm like, "No, no, they are his assistive device and he can use them however he wants," and then I have to ask him about all the subtleties of what his glasses do and what they don't. And it is complicated.
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Date: 2011-12-18 06:41 pm (UTC)This plays into your example of why she can't just ask someone if what she's experiencing is real. She can't do that, because it would be exposing a weakness and forcing her to truste another person. Instead, if she manipulates and so on, SHE is still in control, and has not exposed a weakness.
Similarly with the guilt: she feels no guilt because she does not see herself as having done anything WRONG. She'll self-recriminate far, far more for doing something like failing at one of her own plans than she will st committing genocide, because that's where her sense of right and wrong originates. She is Azula, daughter of Ozai, granddaughter of Azulon, great-granddaughter of Sozin. She has EVERY RIGHT to the power of life, death and pain over other people, because she's just that superior.
But failing, that's pretty much a sin, because it brings her power and right into question. So no, no intrusive thoughts about guilt at past "crimes", but plenty of creeping terror at failure and obsessive paranoia about avoiding past mistakes, and a need to prove her continued superiority. Same operation of illness (intrusive thoughts of things that reflect badly on one and violate one's sense of self and worthiness), different path because of where she's working from.
This may or may not help (mmv always with these things) but like I said, I don't think she's a sociopath, so her lack of conscience (that we recognize as such) has its roots not even so much in her pathology as in her way of understanding the universe.
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Date: 2011-12-18 07:17 pm (UTC)It's EXTREMELY helpful, thank you! I don't know how you did it, but you made Azula-in-my-head's behavior make more sense.
I tend to approach Azula as being a lot like a predator in a state of constant risk. She's actually afraid almost 99% of the time
You've said this before, and it was VERY helpful then.
She has EVERY RIGHT to the power of life, death and pain over other people, because she's just that superior.
This may play into why local Azula is very good at using a person as an assistive device without this person knowing. (It also plays into her ideas about strength and weakness, because of who this person is and why she has chosen her as an assistive device.) But because the assistive device doesn't KNOW this is what happened, she keeps doing things like drinking herself silly because OH NO AZULA IS HERE but I am a total badass and not scared of anything (making herself useless), and also trying to bring people in who don't HAVE her weakness and therefore mess up Azula's whole elaborate passing-for-NT scheme.
Oh! And!
Date: 2011-12-18 06:23 pm (UTC)Thank you. I know--I don't hear it very often, either D: I don't know why I was so lucky, when so many people aren't.
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Date: 2011-12-17 09:43 pm (UTC)I peg her as having a PTSD-related psychotic episode, coupled with learned sociopathy and tendencies towards borderline personality disorder, although really I'd say she's just on the spectrum.
(It is not by coincidence that myself and my immediate family have experience with all of these.)
But also really fun, because I get to be all, "Haha, forget your narrow categories, Western psychiatry, because YOU DO NOT EXIST!"
I sometimes think of Azula's breakdown as a more extreme form of the spiritual illness that overtook Zuko towards the end of season 2.
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Date: 2011-12-17 10:32 pm (UTC)I DON'T, EITHER. IT IS SO BORING. AND ALSO, WRONG--see glib, superficial charm, with which they can appear like very nice people in certain situations, like a party. (We ranted together!) Have another rant:
I like Hannibal Lecter and all, but I like him over in prison bargaining for books. He does not make a good protagonist/POV character, and not just in Hannibal Rising, which Thomas Harris's publisher wanted him to write. He is just...an urbane (charming?) genius who eats faces now and then. I don't think he has the depth to be a major character.
There is also this idea that everyone who has no conscience/is a career criminal is a sociopath, when "sociopath" is actually a very specific category within a larger spectrum. Even though there are people whose careers are based on there being differences between sociopaths and people in the other categories. ("Sociopathy is *not* antisocial personality disorder, because sociopaths have glib superficial charm which makes them even *more* dangerous.") And, if your bread and butter comes from being an "expert" in a certain category of people, you'll see that category as being more special and different than it actually is. Sadly, the best analogy I can come up with is: All people with Asperger Syndrome are autistic, but not all autistic people have Asperger Syndrome. Or, wait! My diagnosis is a learning disability; not all people with learning disabilities have my diagnosis.
I peg her as having a PTSD-related psychotic episode, coupled with learned sociopathy and tendencies towards borderline personality disorder, although really I'd say she's just on the spectrum.
This is because you and
I sort of...prefer this way, just because it's more helpful to ask the Internet: "How do people who have this experience feel about it and cope with it?" rather than: "What do NT experts know about Category of Thing?" Because the NT experts always annoy me. I got this book on bipolar disorder from the library--yeah, I know, my library has terrible books BUT THEY ARE FREE) and the NT expert was like: "When someone has anxiety and depression at the same time, it is pretty much always bipolar depression." And I was all, "Well, I have anxiety and depression together and am not bipolar, and there is also anxious depression which is not bipolar, so, no, dude." Or NT experts will be all: "The difference between [my diagnosis] and Asperger Syndrome is that kids with [my diagnosis] want friends and kids with AS don't." (They must've forgotten the argument in the 1990s that the difference between AS and autistic kids was that AS kids wanted friends and autistic kids didn't).
So, the whole "DSM-IV diagnostic categories are for suckers" is the freeing-slash-fun bit. It's the "And how would Azula respond to this?" that makes it hard.
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Date: 2011-12-17 10:48 pm (UTC)SO MUCH THIS. I mean, I read Hannibal and HATED IT QUITE A LOT, THANK YOU. Hannibal was interesting because his relationship with Clarice was interesting -- and typically, even the author seems to have missed that it was the young woman that made the story compelling, and dedicated everything that followed to the old guy.
So, the whole "DSM-IV diagnostic categories are for suckers" is the freeing-slash-fun bit. It's the "And how would Azula respond to this?" that makes it hard.
Turns out that "set it on fire" is not always the right solution.
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Date: 2011-12-17 11:18 pm (UTC)I saw the movie and hated it, and was never sure if it was because it was the movie or what. But I don't know how it could've been, because it was like, "Gee, Hannibal Lecter is boring."
(I did like Red Dragon, in which the protagonist is a dude, but it also keeps Hannibal off in the corner. He is better that way).
Turns out that "set it on fire" is not always the right solution.
No. No it is not. But someone did say that if they aren't sure if something is a hallucination, kick it. They were kidding; she isn't. (She also believes in kicking it again, just to make sure. Especially if it says, "OW DAMMIT!")
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Date: 2011-12-17 11:19 pm (UTC)Especially if it's Zuko.
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Date: 2011-12-17 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 11:43 pm (UTC)(I hate seeing people say "Oh, Azula's a sociopath," or "she's a psychopath" b/c I always go FUCK YOU WESTERN PSYCHIATRY AND YOUR WELL-KNOWN YET FREQUENTLY MISAPPLIED BOXES. Of course, you already know most of my thoughts on Azula.)
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Date: 2011-12-19 12:26 am (UTC)<3
Also I love love love all the comments on this post, Azula is making so much more sense to me now.
What can I say? My f-list is made of sparkly fabulousness.
(I hate seeing people say "Oh, Azula's a sociopath," or "she's a psychopath" b/c I always go FUCK YOU WESTERN PSYCHIATRY AND YOUR WELL-KNOWN YET FREQUENTLY MISAPPLIED BOXES
INORITE? Fuck Western psychiatry, indeed.