Philosophy Infodump!
Yandere: An Introduction to the Other
If you study philosophy, psychology, or politics, a term you've probably encountered is "the Other". It's a term originally from Hegel, who is notoriously difficult & abstract, and it's found it's way into various other fields. Today, I'd like to show you what the Other is, how it works, and what happens when it doesn't. In order for us to do that, we need to define two related terms: Subject & Object.
The Subject is the thinking individual (thinking subject) and the Object is anything that thinking individual might be able to experience. A boat, for example, is an Object. The Other is all the thinking subjects that aren't you. And this comes in all kinds of relations. Frantz Fanon used it to talk about race, Simone de Beauvoir used it to talk about sexism, and people like Hegel used it to talk about consciousness.
It's that last one we'll hone in on here, because it works best when describing the trope of the yandere. In psychology & phenomenology, the relationship between the Subject and the Other is an important one. Consciousness, especially self-consciousness, is not a given. In order for any of us to "be" a person, we would need to engage with the much larger structure of people. In other words, we need to socialize & be socialized. This means we have to engage with the Other. The Other helps form us and vice-versa.
The yandere, however, is a special case, and it allows us to look at what happens when this goes wrong. Imagine a healthy relationship between two people. It can be any kind - coworkers, friends, lovers, what have you. In these relations, there is a mutual recognition of the Other's humanity, and in turn, our own. But for the yandere, this simply isn't the case.
The yandere does not consider her love interest as a thinking Subject. Rather, to her, they are an Object to which devotion is given. The real feelings that the Other may or may not have (and in most stories they usually don't) are unimportant. What matters is that the yandere lives for this person, idealizes them, and ignores the actual, living, breathing, thinking Subject.
In doing this, the yandere also turns herself into an Object. She does not live for herself, but only for this Objectified version of the Other that she is obsessed with. Her own desires, goals, etc are turned into an afterthought by herself. She is, in other words, dehumanized by her own hand.
So when the yandere gets rejected, or, philosophically, when Others simply fail to coexist in society... Well....
I like boats. 🛥🛥🛥
