Today's Fictional BPDer is: Starlight Glimmer from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Starlight Glimmer is a unicorn who is very gifted in magic. She is initially introduced as an antagonist, motivated to force equality on a town by her childhood best friend abandoning her. She later becomes a student of friendship and eventually, the headmaster of the School of Friendship. Starlight shows several traits of BPD throughout the show:
Fear of Abandonment: This is Starlight's core. Abandonment pains her so much that it drives her to be afraid of making any more friends without controlling them. She struggles with feeling secure in her relationships, and she often believes people will leave her if they find out about her past. She consistently shows that she is very worried about the friends she has leaving her or liking her less than others.
Unstable Relationships: Starlight has a rocky past with relationships. She might have a Favourite Person, a common experience among those with BPD, where one person is idealized and loved above all others. A person with BPD wants to spend every second with their Favourite Person, which can easily lead to codependency and other unhealthy dynamics. When Starlight's Favourite Person leaves her, it devastates her to the point of her closing off all her walls to any future relationships unless she can control them and keep people from leaving her. When her Favourite Person comes back into her life, she is very possessive of him and feels insecure and abandoned when he spends time with others. Throughout the show, she begins to learn to spread out her love for multiple people and to avoid putting all of her value onto one person, and she ends the series in a much healthier place relationship-wise.
Emotional Dysregulation: Starlight has big emotions, and she can be prone to drastic mood swings or outbursts. She has an explosive temper, which she sometimes expresses unchecked and other times she bottles it up until she can't hold it in any longer. She is afraid of expressing her emotions freely because she fears that she will hurt someone else.
Black and White Thinking/Splitting: Starlight views people and situations as good or bad, and she can change her perception of things very quickly. She idolizes her friends and puts them on a pedestal, but if they do something that bothers her, she is very prone to intense feelings of loathing towards them.
Impulsive Behaviours: Starlight has a tendency to "go with her gut" and act without thinking, mostly expressed through impulsive uses of magic that typically have major consequences for others around her.
Delusional or Paranoid symptoms: Starlight feels immense amounts of shame for her past wrongdoings, so much so that it manifests as paranoia that people find out about what she did, or that she will continue to hurt others in the same way. She feels constant fear of being found out and ostracized, and avoids making new friends and walks on eggshells with her new friends to handle her fears. As she becomes more comfortable with others and learns to accept herself and her past, this paranoia dies down.