Who's worse?

[Davidj]

Cyndi? Why on Earth would she want to be fixed? Aside from this setback she's doing GREAT with her life! She'll probably manage to turn this into her having the upper hand if she hasn't already. Even with the boredom because the PennAggites are cracking down on her, she found ways to mess with people. Even if someone did recognize this and got her professional help- she'd tell the person what they want to hear and no progress would be made.

How much have the 'good guys' tried really cracking down on her? I mean, really cracking down on her, I mean.

I don't know what you mean.

Charlotte got caught multiple times but didn't start improving until recently. The primary factor in her growth and redemption seems - shockingly enough - to be her screen time, another big reason I'm leery of just writing her off.

You are reversing cause and effect. She got screen time because there was a story of growth to be told with her. One set up from the moment right near the start of her character when she looked into a mirror and shouted "You're disgusting!" Cyndi's been getting just as much screen time. Her story just happens to be one that isn't about redemption...successful or not.


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quote]Actions can be controlled. Your basic personality isn't something you get to pick.

Actions can be controlled, but if your basic personality which you don't get to pick guides you only towards a suite of awful actions to choose from, where exactly is the choice, Davidj?[/quote]

Why obviously it lies in choosing which bad things to do, and when the risk outweighs the amusement value.

That's just one very easy from-the-hip example of the shades-of-gray you're missing here.

It's not that I'm missing it. It's that I'm rejecting the whole premise that someone who has a sadistic streak combined with a lack of conscience, shame or empathy is not evil just because they have a nature that inclines them to be unfeeling and downright cruel all the time. This does not strike me as a shade of grey. It strikes me as an expanse of blackest night. Charlotte (and her mother) have shades of grey. I say this even though Charlotte has done things that are as bad or worse than anything Cyndi has done or in fact is likely to do. Charlotte has a conscience, inner pain and oedipal traumas. Stuff that makes her complicated and excites a certain amount of sympathy in me even as I recognize that she has to be stopped.

Some people do evil. Some people are evil.

Shrinks are just inclined to frame everything that makes people troublesome as being an "illness".

Yeah, I thought so. It's just as much a mistake to overprescribe psychiatry as it is to overcriticize it, because of course shrinks aren't so inclined. They're a widely varying group of people just like any other, and can't be so handily categorized.

"inclined" does not mean "without exception".

Cyndi is fundamentally a rational person. She has no more delusions than average person, and probably fewer than most. She has no great childhood traumas, no inner pain that she needs to pass on to others and that could be soothed with psychoanalysis and separation. She just feels powerful and dominant when she sees that she's hurt someone and she likes the feeling. That's not rare among teenagers. It's what makes high school such a special place. She just has more of it than the average teenage girl. Than five average teenage girls put together. Than ten.

In this group of thoughts, let's examine the unverified, irrelevant, or simply wrong as a question of fact statements. One, yes, Cyndi is rational, but that's irrelevant. Rationality or irrationality isn't the problem.

It was earlier when you were suggesting that Cyndi fit into the crazy category. It's the line I was drawing between Charlotte and Cyndi. Charlotte is not very rational. So far as I can gather, Cyndi is at least as rational as I am. Probably more. I feel a lot of irrational guilt. Never a problem for Cyndi.

Two, we've no idea how many delusions she does or doesn't have.

Untrue. It would be true to say that it is possible that she possesses some quirks that have not yet been revealed to us, especially about her father. But we've had plenty of looks inside Cyndi's head and we've seen her in operation so we have some idea about how accurately she can read other people and figure out what makes them tick. Therefore we have some idea how many delusions she doesn't have. She doesn't, for example, have delusions that prevented her from understanding without sharing Duane's mixture of adolescent lust and idealistic desire to redeem people, Stan's conflicting ego and love of Brandi, or Michelle's overly media-influenced self-image.

Three, we have no idea at all what sort of childhood trauma she might or might not have, or inner pain.

We've had enough looks into her head that "no idea" is a radical overstatement.

Four, we don't really know how rare sadism is among teenagers, or if it's as indiscriminate as you suggest,

I know how many people found the tears of others to be funny as I was growing up.
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Nah. I feel much more superior to crazy people than I do to evil people.

I'm not sure if you're joking or not (given the things you've said on these subjects, anyway), but you shouldn't feel superior to crazy people at all. It's not as though they picked being crazy. As well to feel superior for being tall or something.

Why can't I feel superior for being tall? (Well, apart from being distinctly not.) There are big advantages to being tall. I think you are stretching.

No, Charlotte has a slavering monster in her brain. She's the one with all that rage and fear and inner conflict. Cyndi's just empty, devoid of feelings like guilt or sympathy.

Oh, OK. You're one of those readers, the one who says to the author, "No, what you wrote about your own character is wrong, despite it being in black and white. Cyndi doesn't have a monster in her brain, even if she is plainly portrayed as having one."

Oh, is that plain?

I didn't say that they denied there's such a thing as moral responsibility. I said they define a lack of moral responsibility (not just doing something that's wrong, but not caring whether anything the subject does is wrong) as a mental illness.

No, that's not what you said.

Specifically what I said was that they defined being evil as a mental illness. That has nothing to do with moral responsibility.
Evil people aren't morally responsible. They don't respond at all to appeals to morality.

[Davidj]

No, Charlotte has a slavering monster in her brain. She's the one with all that rage and fear and inner conflict. Cyndi's just empty, devoid of feelings like guilt or sympathy.

Oh, OK. You're one of those readers, the one who says to the author, "No, what you wrote about your own character is wrong, despite it being in black and white. Cyndi doesn't have a monster in her brain, even if she is plainly portrayed as having one."

I'd rather give Davidj the benefit of the doubt here - I know there are people who don't bother reading the "filler" material over the Christmas period, and nobody remembers everything the author has written about their own character.

David, the "slavering monster" comment comes, I think, from this story, a pretty disturbing look inside Cyndi's brain.

Deep in the cold corner, something huddled and gnawed.

That line creeps me out every time. I don't think "empty" is the right term to describe it - but I will agree that she's been portrayed as devoid of guilt or sympathy. And your point about Charlotte's inner conflict is entirely true - I'd argue that both characters have something severely nasty living inside their brains, which is why it's so hard to make a call on who's worse.

I may have misinterpreted that, but it seemed to me that the thing huddling and gnawing deep in a cold corner wasn't her urge to be cruel to others, but her suppressed feeling of humiliation and loss at having been rejected by Sara. That's a pretty normal feeling...which makes it pretty lonely inside Cyndi's head.

[RD]

How much have the 'good guys' tried really cracking down on her? I mean, really cracking down on her, I mean. Don't get me wrong, I don't fault their intentions, just their methods. Anyway, my point is, RD, we can't make these evaluations until the attempt is made and then fails. Listen to what you're saying: we know it wouldn't work because if it were to be tried, it wouldn't work. Note that I'm not suggesting it's likely it would work, just leery of completely writing someone off until we at least try. Especially since trying isn't, y'know, that hard.

Actually, my argument is that people have to want to change to change in a non-traumatic way. (It's very possible that if Charlotte kept Cyndi here and emotionally tormented her even just for days she could cause enough damage to Cyndi to change her- but that's not a good thing) If Cyndi sees no reason to change her actions, why would she? Cyndi is happy with her life, Charlotte isn't. Cyndi has no reason to change, Charlotte does. Even if they had clamped down on her- how would that have helped anything? IT wouldn't convince her of the evil of her ways, it'd just serve as further proof that she was happier before and when she graduates and gets out of their influence, she'll be back to her old tricks.

Maybe there is a way to convince Cyndi that what she does is wrong and get her to change. But we haven't seen any indication. We've just seen that Cyndi is able to justify her actions, very possibly to herself as well, and that she considers what she does to be "better than sex"- meaning that she enjoys it a great deal.

Charlotte got caught multiple times but didn't start improving until recently. The primary factor in her growth and redemption seems - shockingly enough - to be her screen time, another big reason I'm leery of just writing her off.

When did I say this has anything to do with getting "caught"? It doesn't. If Charlotte got caught and showed no self-hatred, if she showed no regret when Duane was nice to her, if she clearly saw nothing wrong with what she was doing no matter how many times she was caught and punished- I'd say she's in the same boat as Cyndi.

And, uh, yeah, funnily enough the amount of time a character spends on screen is directly related to how much development that character gets- especially if you include flashbacks or people talking abotu the character to be a part of screen time. That's sort of how fiction WORKS.

[sentora]

I have trouble believing in the 'Cyndi is empty' theory. An empty person is just that, devoid of emotion, sexual desire, so forth. A lot of the time, such a person either seeks to fill that emptiness, revels in the fact that nothing ties them down, or is completely disconnected from humanity. A good example is #47 from the Hitman series or Golgo 13.

Cyndi comes close to example one, but we haven't seen the remorse or bitter hunger usually associated with that type.

[RakeJ4]

Davidj,

You are reversing cause and effect. She got screen time because there was a story of growth to be told with her. One set up from the moment right near the start of her character when she looked into a mirror and shouted "You're disgusting!" Cyndi's been getting just as much screen time. Her story just happens to be one that isn't about redemption...successful or not.

And now you're changing the subject from roughly half of the things that make Charlotte capable of fixing and worthy of redemption and Cyndi not. The things that happened to Charlotte to make her this way, the abuse we've seen hinted at, all of that happened long, long before (we can pretty safely presume) P&A ever even started. That cause is long in the past. It's not remotely tied to her screen time, except perhaps one brief flash back. We didn't even have a hint of it until she got screen time.

Why obviously it lies in choosing which bad things to do, and when the risk outweighs the amusement value.

Now you're just cherry-picking to avoid losing the argument on this point. What if the little beast in Cyndi's mind is steadily pushing her towards worse things than what she's doing? I'm not saying it is, I'm saying we don't know. Everyone's got a range, after all, of morality so to speak. I'm not saying it has to be that way, but functionally it generally just is. For some people, on a scale of -100 to 100, their range is, say, -10 to 10. What if Cyndi's range is -40 to -30? Whatever her range is, we can be all but certain it's not -10 to 10, because people with that range don't have things huddling and gnawing in their minds.

It's not that I'm missing it. It's that I'm rejecting the whole premise that someone who has a sadistic streak combined with a lack of conscience, shame or empathy is not evil just because they have a nature that inclines them to be unfeeling and downright cruel all the time.

Your words make it pretty clear that you're missing it, the problem of one's basic personality leading one to choose radically different actions, but *shrug*. Anyway, as comforting as you perhaps find your personal definition of evil, I personally don't share it, because what you're describing - an inherent lack of conscience and an inborn sadistic streak - well, so far as we can tell that's not something they chose. Are the outcomes evil? Well, certainly, or at least functionally identical to what we may call evil. But you may as well call cancer evil. To me, evil requires agency, and disease doesn't have agency. But that's a very different discussion.

Some people do evil. Some people are evil.

Yes indeed. But the ones who do bad things because they're mentally ill, well, that's where we enter a gray area. The things Cyndi has done are unquestionably bad, but before I come over all hellfire and brimstone particularly with the 'she's evil' rhetoric, I'd need a real look at her with some screen-time level examination like Charlotte has gotten, not the cursory looks we've seen so far.

"inclined" does not mean "without exception".

Really? So you have some actual data on this idea of yours, of course. It's not a pet peeve of yours or something, couldn't be.

Untrue. It would be true to say that it is possible that she possesses some quirks that have not yet been revealed to us, especially about her father. But we've had plenty of looks inside Cyndi's head and we've seen her in operation so we have some idea about how accurately she can read other people and figure out what makes them tick. Therefore we have some idea how many delusions she doesn't have. She doesn't, for example, have delusions that prevented her from understanding without sharing Duane's mixture of adolescent lust and idealistic desire to redeem people, Stan's conflicting ego and love of Brandi, or Michelle's overly media-influenced self-image.

This idea relies on the flawed premise that to experience delusions precludes the ability to read other people and make them tick. I don't grant that premise, and you're stating it as a given. You'll have to do better than that, I'm afraid, particularly since you're the one offering the point.

We've had enough looks into her head that "no idea" is a radical overstatement.

We've had...very few looks into her head, unless I'm mistaken. I remember one big one, the one recently mentioned in this thread, but that's about it. She's gotten screen time, but I certainly don't remember looks into her past, for example. And Cyndi is an outstanding liar. So 'no idea' is not a radical overstatement. Next?

I know how many people found the tears of others to be funny as I was growing up.

I see. And your experience is of course universal, yes? I understand now your point about psychiatrists earlier.

Why can't I feel superior for being tall? (Well, apart from being distinctly not.) There are big advantages to being tall. I think you are stretching.

Because you didn't do anything to be tall. It's not an accomplishment. Just like not being a crazy sociopath. Put in more colorful (no pun intended) terms, it's like a racist proud of being white.

[CBrachyrhynchos]

Shrinks are just inclined to frame everything that makes people troublesome as being an "illness".

Yeah, I thought so. It's just as much a mistake to overprescribe psychiatry as it is to overcriticize it, because of course shrinks aren't so inclined. They're a widely varying group of people just like any other, and can't be so handily categorized.

"inclined" does not mean "without exception".

It's not even an "inclination" as people can act in harmful ways without being mentally ill, and most mentally ill people are not remotely "troublesome" except to themselves. Both of which are widely recognized. Karen's ambition, Rich's machismo, and Aggie's inflated sense of self-righteousness are all troublesome, but they're not mental illnesses.

Specifically what I said was that they defined being evil as a mental illness.

Not really. The obvious counter-objection is that the DSM specifically excludes many things that traditionally have been called "evil" such as homosexuality and religious apostasy. (That, and clinical psychology is not the sum of the field.)

[RakeJ4]

I may have misinterpreted that, but it seemed to me that the thing huddling and gnawing deep in a cold corner wasn't her urge to be cruel to others, but her suppressed feeling of humiliation and loss at having been rejected by Sara. That's a pretty normal feeling...which makes it pretty lonely inside Cyndi's head.

I wanted to come back to this, because that seemed to me to be a very unlikely interpretation. The huddling and gnawing being a reference to sociopathy and greater mental illness and vacancy of conscience would seem to me to explain a very great deal about Cyndi, and 'fit' all we've seen about her character very, very nicely, whereas that blurb seemed to me to be largely about, "Sara rejecting me bothered me. How do I get over it? Here's how." It bothered her, but not in and of itself. Being bothered upset her, and she said (thought) so herself. It's not rejection that got to her, she was very clear about that. She took rejection before without being bothered.

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And, uh, yeah, funnily enough the amount of time a character spends on screen is directly related to how much development that character gets- especially if you include flashbacks or people talking abotu the character to be a part of screen time. That's sort of how fiction WORKS.

That's my point: it's premature to say, "Cyndi can't be fixed," because she hasn't gotten that sort of screen-time. Karen, once she had attained that sort of screen time and kept on making big decisions and having moments of uncertainty and then getting past them making the bad choices, well, she we saw get over her ethical hurdlers by kicking down the other hurdler, so we could make that judgment pretty fairly about her. With Cyndi things are different. Lots and lots of screen time, but when she's on stage, so to speak, we don't see in her head very much at all. Is that because there's just nothing going on? Is T being sneaky? Or is it because more will be shown later? My point is: too soon to tell, but perhaps it will always be too soon to tell.

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I have trouble believing in the 'Cyndi is empty' theory. An empty person is just that, devoid of emotion, sexual desire, so forth. A lot of the time, such a person either seeks to fill that emptiness, revels in the fact that nothing ties them down, or is completely disconnected from humanity. A good example is #47 from the Hitman series or Golgo 13.

I wouldn't say empty, but I would say there's a lot less water in her emotional glass.

[adamiani]

Consensus seems to have broken that the mean girl who spiked some punch and suffers from mental illness is considerably worse than the violent, torturing, kidnapping, murderous fanatic. This is a change from the early days of the poll. I wonder what shifted?

[RakeJ4]

Geeze. That's not all Cyndi has done, adamiani. Cyndi being 'the mean girl who spiked some punch and suffers from a mental illness' is wrong/inaccurate just as a question of fact!

[CBrachyrhynchos]

That, and diagnosing fictional people in a fictional melodrama with armchair psychology is kind of irritating.

[adamiani]

Geeze. That's not all Cyndi has done, adamiani. Cyndi being 'the mean girl who spiked some punch and suffers from a mental illness' is wrong/inaccurate just as a question of fact!

Obviously, I'm deliberately overstating it, but I think it's accurate. Spiking the punch with laxatives instead of toothpaste is the most concrete thing she did wrong, and the only bit that appears illegal. She toyed with some peoples' emotions (which I bracket into being a mean girl). She may have had a role in worsening Michelle's anorexia (I think she thinks she had a lot more to do with it than she actually did). It's not that much of an exaggeration.

[adamiani]

That, and diagnosing fictional people in a fictional melodrama with armchair psychology is kind of irritating.

Fair, but I thought T confirmed that she'd been presented as a budding sociopath?

[CBrachyrhynchos]

That, and diagnosing fictional people in a fictional melodrama with armchair psychology is kind of irritating.

Fair, but I thought T confirmed that she'd been presented as a budding sociopath?

Sure, even if we take that as a given though, I'm seeing a fair amount of chatter based on wikipedia-level knowledge of a disorder that's not even widely called sociopathy anymore combined with something that might be an atypical presentation.

[adamiani]

That, and diagnosing fictional people in a fictional melodrama with armchair psychology is kind of irritating.

Fair, but I thought T confirmed that she'd been presented as a budding sociopath?

Sure, even if we take that as a given though, I'm seeing a fair amount of chatter based on wikipedia-level knowledge of a disorder that's not even widely called sociopathy anymore combined with something that might be an atypical presentation.

I agree. And I wouldn't suggest that Cyndi withstands modern psychiatric scrutiny; it's probably not useful to make too many comparisons to Antisocial Personality Disorder in the real world-- but I do think she's being portrayed as someone who is mentally ill.

[RakeJ4]

Obviously, I'm deliberately overstating it, but I think it's accurate. Spiking the punch with laxatives instead of toothpaste is the most concrete thing she did wrong, and the only bit that appears illegal. She toyed with some peoples' emotions (which I bracket into being a mean girl). She may have had a role in worsening Michelle's anorexia (I think she thinks she had a lot more to do with it than she actually did). It's not that much of an exaggeration.

Does she have much to do with the underlying conditions that led to Michelle being vulnerable to anorexia in the first place? Well, of course not. But that's not the same thing at all as saying she things she has a lot more to do with it than she actually did. In order to arrive at that conclusion, in addition to doing a lot of squinting and head-tilting, you have to ignore her role in the Injustice Gang, her skill at reading people's vulnerabilities, her thus-far lack of moral compass and empathy, her ruthlessness, her...on and on and on.