I was talking about Pinkie Pie with someone and he gave me a hot take: Pinkie is meant to represent people with codependency issues and thus, not criticizing her character because she’s too needy is ableist and discourages kids with similar issues from relating to her. As a Pinkie Pie disliker person, what do you think about this take?
1. I gave this take the benefit the doubt and took some time to look up some info on codependency. The article I found has an important "Caution to Readers" section saying that while it was petitioned for codependency to be classified as a personality disorder, the American Psychiatric Association did not act on the proposal and therefore codependency does not have a medical consensus on whether it is or is not a disorder/disability. As a result, the definition and criteria for codependency has been shaped by self-help authors rather than psychiatric professionals, so the term has become too nebulous to be useful and is discouraged by some in the field.
2. It's worth pointing out that one of the reasons a relationship becomes codependent is when one side of the relationship enables the bad habits of the other. So Pinkie's friends placating her and capitulating to her tantrums is what's creating a codependent relationship. (See: Yakity Sax) The worst thing to do with someone who has codependency issues is enable their behavior, and this is something the article points out.
3. It's not Pinkie's codependency issues that are the problem. It's the fact that she doesn't learn from them and almost never makes the effort to improve in almost a decade's worth of episodes. If most of her episodes were like The Maud Couple, where she makes an effort to be better, there wouldn't be an issue. The article I cited earlier also has a section titled "Codependency is Recoverable. Denial is Not," and it says that "codependency is learned - and as such, can be unlearned." This means that if Pinkie Pie was meant to be a representation of people with codependency issues, she would be a very toxic one because she makes little to no effort in changing that behavior despite it being behavior that can be unlearned and despite being made aware of it several times over the course of the show, and that's more damaging to kids because it teaches complacency rather than growth.
Getting therapy, healthy coping mechanisms, taking your meds if you need them, that's all your responsibility. Even if codependency was a mental disorder (which, as we have established, it is not,) having a mental disorder is not a free pass to be inconsiderate of the people around you. Concessions can be made, but you still have to put in the effort to handle your issues.
4. It's not enough to be a representation. Said representation has to be good. If we just accept any representation of mental illness/disability in media regardless of how well or how accurate it's executed, we get episodes like Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep or characters like Mike from Total Drama.
I don't know if the person you were talking to genuinely believes in what they're saying or if they just don't like hearing criticism about a character they like, but their argument is faulty on several fronts regardless.
Tumblr really needs to stop encouraging people to just not expect neurodivergent people to have basic manners and consideration for others. We're more than capable of it, and Tumblr's insistence that we're not is itself ableist. They're saying we don't know how to operate as functional human beings and cannot possibly comprehend our neurotypical friends.
We CAN do those things because we're not incapable of learning. We just learn differently.
Here's the article I read for folks that wanna read more on the subject. https://bpdfamily.com/content/codependency-codependent-relationships
A funny thing about codependency is that when you are so focused on the another person, they become focused on themselves, too. Much of the
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