InsaneJournal

and lo, for a wild teal deer did approacheth
idk about the rest of you, but I've always felt that, especially in war-era games, Hogwarts might do well to have a counselor/psychiatrist on staff, to help the kids deal with all the shit that's going on around them. Enter Dr Theodore Orsini, my latest character at DMR and the newest member of the staff. But of course, his biggest challenge right now is in getting the kids to actually come and talk to him. The only reason Mary's going is because she made a deal with Chase (her BFF, who wasn't upholding his end of the deal until she refused to go again unless he went and could prove that he'd gone) that if she goes to talk to him, Chase will as well.

So, in attempting to log with myself a counseling session between Theodore and Mary (which is harder than it sounds because you have to switch back and forth between two vastly different headspaces and Mary can't just AUTOMATICALLY agree with everything Theodore says because, duh, that's not how it works even though Theodore is being v. logical with his logic and sense-making ... plus, I can't use my own headspace knowledge about what's really going on with Mary and have Theodore ~magically~ know what's going on in there, he has to come to his own conclusions, so I have to stop and think about what Mary's actually revealing in the things she says and does and where Theodore can go from there; seriously, the log took place a week ago, and I'm still not done, and I DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR ANYONE TO TAG, BECAUSE I AM TAGGING MYSELF), I got to thinking about which of my characters might need to sit down and spend some quality time with a psychiatrist. And then I started to get a bit depressed as to how many of my current and past characters could use with a visit to the shrink.

Which, naturally, leads to a teal deer being born. I'm going to limit this to my current characters, or I could go on forever. I'm hitting all of my current characters, even though they could, for the most part, continue on without actually seeing a shrink. This evolved kind of more into my characters' neuroses and psychologies than strictly "why they need to see a shrink."


Mary, obviously, is in desperate need of counseling. She's still struggling to come to terms with her attack by Mulciber last June, which has left her "broken" and in need of "shrink glue" (Chase's words). She can't stand to be touched, and she keeps getting irrationally angry and lashing out at people, which is out of character for the way she was before the attack. And on top of that, she has classic self-esteem issues because she is not a good student (no matter how hard she studies) and she's horrible at spell-casting (part of which stems from the fact that she's so afraid of it and so convinced that she's bad at it that she's simply bad at it because she believes so strongly that she is; she has this mental block up that is preventing her from being able to do better) so she feels as though she doesn't belong in the wizarding world, especially combined with the anti-muggleborn sentiments that many of her schoolmates (mostly the Slytherins) hold, which always seems to be so many more people than it actually is, and so much scarier when you're a pre-teen/teenager suddenly thrust into this new world and confronted by people who don't like you simply because of your background. And on top of all that, she has major abandonment issues because her family essentially ignores her and pretends that she doesn't exist when she's home, because they figure that if they just ignore her being a witch, it won't be real. Oh, and speaking of her family, the self-esteem issues are deep-rooted and long-standing because they started when she was little: her older brother was perfect and wonderful and smart and could do no wrong, while Mary just could never seem to get anything right, so she constantly felt overlooked in favour of her older brother and she just feels as though she is simply Not Good Enough.

But Mary isn't my only character at that game who probably needs to spend some time in Theodore's office. Septima seems like she's perfectly fine, but she's got a host of her own issues, as well. First of all, she's the youngest of seven daughters, so she's got her own familial issues, most of which stem from very rarely getting anything new and instead getting the hand-me-downs from her sisters. She has this great ambition (she's definitely a Ravenerin [I know it's generally "Slytherclaw" but since Ravenclaw is her primary, I prefer to call her a Ravenerin] in that she has the ambition that is often credited as a Major Slytherin Trait), and that ambition stems from the great desire to ... prove herself, I guess. She needs to show that just because she's the baby doesn't mean that she's not capable of greatness. And with her three oldest sisters being an Auror, Healer, and Quidditch player (granted, reserve, but still), she has a lot to live up to if she wants to hope to be "better" than them. I mean, we all know that she's going to become the Arithmancy professor at Hogwarts, and I can definitely see the teacher-y-ness showing in her even now, when the idea of being a teacher simply has not even remotely occurred to her. She tends to be tactful and diplomatic in her dealings with other people (it's how she became prefect), she does well in leadership roles, and she tries to stay at least several steps ahead. But even with all that, she does have feelings of inadequacy, such as "why wasn't I chosen to be head girl?" which do stem from being the bottom of the familial totem pole for so long, and she needs to start seeing herself as HERSELF and not as "Septima, the seventh; the youngest daughter; Angelina/Olivia/Emma/Catrina/Georgina/Diana's little sister" and to stop trying to compare her achievements with those of her sisters. She also has this mini-neurosis about hating her name and refusing to respond when people call her by it; she gets very passive-aggressive with a "Whoever this Septima is, I'm sure she'd appreciate knowing what you think of her." Which, btw, is another thing she could use a little help with, her passive-aggressivism.

Will, also, has familial problems. His dad is a ~ladies man~ who cheats on Will & Penny's mother. That alone isn't what you might consider a stable home life, but then let's add this on top: his dad used him, as a baby and toddler, to pick up women. Even as his mom was struggling to teach Will to respect women, and that it was his job to protect his little sister, his dad was teaching him how to pick up women and essentially how to be a miniature version of himself. So Will has a bit of ADD when it comes to women, he doesn't do the monogamy thing particularly well, and he's really into the whole casual thing. He will, eventually, get married and have at least one child (Katie Bell!), but what will be interesting will be to see how he'll get from Will The Ladies Man With The Gorgeous Abs to Will The Family Man (Who Still Has The Gorgeous Abs). I'm not saying here that it's necessarily wrong to have no desire to get married and settle into monogamy, but if Will is going to get married eventually, then he does need to really and truly grasp that what his dad was doing to his mum is Not Right and that if you're going to settle down with one person, then that's it, you can't be married to one person but then go around sleeping with anything in a skirt. Because right now, because that's the example he's gotten from his parents (and his mother, unintentionally, has reinforced this notion by not leaving Will's father, despite their arguments and her occasional threats of divorce; she's too ambitious and knows that being a divorced woman in the 1970s is a stigma that she doesn't want), he thinks it's okay if the man cheats on the woman, and that is Just Not Okay.

Even Teddy the Psychiatrist has his own issues. The primary one, of course, being that he's a single father. He lost his wife tragically in a car accident (as she was on her way home from the doctor's appointment that confirmed that she was pregnant with their second child!), and in the five and a half years since then, he's not managed to fully cope with that. He is dealing with the loss, for his daughter's sake, but it's just plain not mentally healthy that he relives the past every day: remembering that last day, imagining what the car accident must have been like, picturing what she looked like when he had to identify her body in the morgue. But I imagine for him, it's the same basic concept as doctors making the worst patients: he has the knowledge of psychology, so he's either too close to the issue to see it himself, or he'd be too caught up in what the other doctor is doing (if he were to go see a fellow psychiatrist) to be able to focus on himself and healing. Or, he'd try to fix himself.

I have two more upcoming characters for DMR, but I'm still hammering them out, so I don't know all their neuroses yet. But let's switch games here to WAH:

Juliet could definitely do with some counseling. There's nothing wrong with being afraid, but her fears just take over. She isn't truly living so long as she's afraid of the consequences. After Jillian got her arm all scarred up by Umbridge's quill in Juliet's second year, Jules is terrified of setting one toe outside the line, for fear of detention. It's only made worse this year by the Carrows' regime, where they are doing so many things to the students that are so much worse than just a quill that etches the words you write into your arm and uses your own blood for ink. And even though she very quietly supports the efforts of the Resistance and the DA, she desperately wishes that her sister would just keep her head down, too. I'm not saying that Juliet should be all gung-ho for "DAMN THE MAN! LET'S OVERTHROW THE CARROWS' REGIME" or anything of the sort, she just needs to learn how to deal with her fear and to be able to live while still staying safe. Of course, with the Carrows and Malfoy's goons being happy to punish you for such crimes as "being a halfblood," maybe her fear is a good thing to have right now.


And that hits all my current characters. I might go back at some other point and look at some of my past characters and their neuroses (Michael springs to mind pretty quickly), but for now, current characters is enough of a tl;dr.