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kohakhearts · 3 years

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[bdg buy my bed voice] hey uh why do you think harry's borderline

honestly this feels like a threat thanks so much. man i'm just saying but if you ever need me to guess your identity in the future this is definitely the way to do it because i sure do associate that song with you 100% JKDHFJGKDJSHFJDK

but! anyway!!! i have so so many reasons for this and absolutely self-projection is chief amongst them but!! i do actually think it fits well with the text. actually, i don't know if i've ever like...seen a character who gives me bigger bpd vibes than harry james potter like ik a lot of people talk about characters like anakin and elsa and those are very valid but when i say harry makes me feel #seen...lmao.

tangentially related, but with characters like this i really feel like it's just...interesting to look at the circumstances of their creation. obviously, their creators weren't coding them as borderlines (well, most likely, in any case), but characters who wind up reading this way often do seem to have some form of severe childhood trauma, which tells me that, you know, for most of us our understanding of psychology leads to a very basic sense of "these Bad Things cause x traits" wherein x is "borderline," but no one's actively searching up borderline traits, because people who don't have them or know someone who does or work in the field probably can't just say what those are off the tops of their heads. and even then i wouldn't say in the case of people who are aware of what they are that it's overly deliberate; just look at me and adrienne lmao. and again - there's a character with severe childhood trauma.

so my primary argument regarding that is that, like, these characters are wholly defined by their trauma. they don't know it. maybe their creators don't even realize it. and it doesn't change their roles in the story, either. in terms of how characters are created, i think that a lot of times we "don't know" things about our own characters because our subconscious understanding of our own psychology is at play when we're writing them. that means readers who do have a more conscious awareness of it might pick up on parts of that and interpret it a different way than we intended when writing (or even than other readers). 50% of writing, i think, is reading - and this is why. readers' individual experiences are absolutely the thing most informing their understanding of a text, right after the actual words on a page.

all that being said, let's talk about harry!! i have lots to say here, so i've put everything under the cut. i did write a fic about this last year, which doesn’t lay everything out like i did here but does cite a lot of the same reasons and explores them within his actual character! amazingly, it is longer than this massive essay, but i won’t lie: it’s a close thing.

to preface, i have bpd. apparently it's not exactly lacking in severity, either. i guess i'm considering "high-functioning," but realistically i just learned really young that outwardly showing emotions = bad and happened to internalize it in such a way that even into adulthood i was more "freeze" or "fawn" than "fight." i don't think this applies to harry, but there's also the factor of his age.

i know it's a spicy take, but i do think there's a good reason why teenagers aren't supposed to be diagnosed with pds. honestly, i do even see where the whole "diagnosing an adult but not telling them about it" thing comes form too, especially with borderline. i mean...it's super easy to meld our whole personalities with the disordered part of it. however! i also think age is pretty arbitrary, and that if teenagers are displaying symptoms then there's a good chance they're not going to just "go away" once they grow up, and some dbt will do good sooner rather than later. the sole reason i think it's good to be cautious about this is because of this symptom manifestation. it'd just be stupid to say that every teenager thinks, feels, and acts the way people with bpd do. and very concerning, actually, because it's definitely not true. but they are still in the process of self-discovery and everything, so! telling them you absolutely have this highly stigmatized disorder of the personality isn't really the move (in my opinion, but hey! i get it! i really wanted a diagnosis as a teen too never mind that it made me feel horrible when my psychiatrist said he ~suspected~ i had it as an adult lmfao). all this is irrelevant, because harry isn't a real person. bpd most often develops in childhood. i think anyone who disagrees with that is totally fooling themselves.

on a side note, i've seen a lot of people say harry seems adhd as hell over the years LMAO. i would honestly agree. as it turns out, something like 1/3 of people with bpd had comorbid adhd. emotional dysregulation is the big commonality for sure.

so, what i said above, about childhood trauma. i firmly believe that harry's character is shaped by his upbringing. i do not think his character would be recognizable removed from it. it's why i could never write a wbwl/no voldemort/lily and/or james are alive au (i have an old wip of a james lives au actually, and i'd love to flesh it out and try it again (i started it when i was 12 or 13 i think), but i'd have to do a whole lot of thinking on this point first LOL). and anyone who knows me knows i love dad snape, but as much as i enjoy content of him raising harry, i struggle to imagine a scenario where harry can retain his personality as we know it in the canon if removed from the dursleys' care at an exceptionally young age. same goes for remus and sirius, or the weasleys.

the details of harry's childhood are honestly a bit vague, though. a lot of the worst details are mentioned fleetingly, and not brought up again. here's what we do know (childhood being inclusive of his (particularly young) teenage years):

"harry was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he slept." (ps ch2)

"dudley's favourite punch-bag was harry, but he often couldn't catch him. harry didn't look it, but he was very fast." (ps ch2)

"...harry had always been small and skinny for his age. he looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear were old clothes of dudley's and dudley was about four times bigger than he was." (ps ch2)

[same paragraph^] "he wore round glasses held together with a lot of sellotape because of all the times dudley had punched him on the nose." (ps ch2)

"don't ask questions - that was the first rule for a quiet life with the dursleys." (ps ch2)

"every year [on dudley's birthday] harry was left behind with mrs figg [...]. harry hated it there." (ps ch2)

"the dursleys often spoke about harry like this, as though he wasn't there - or rather, as though he was something very nasty that couldn't understand them, like a slug." (ps ch2)

also noteworthy here is that when harry suggests they leave him behind, petunia says no because she doesn't want to come back to "find the house in ruins," and as soon as they say harry will have to come with them dudley starts to cry, saying he doesn't want harry to come because he "always spoils everything." he's faking it, and knows harry knows it, since he grins at him.

prior to this, petunia had told him she wanted him to cook bacon, but we see him cooking bacon and eggs? there's no indication that she helps him here other than setting the frying pan on the stove before he comes into the kitchen. during the course of this meal, harry begins eating faster out of fear that dudley will have a temper tantrum over his birthday gifts "in case dudley turned the table over."

"but uncle vernon didn't believe him [when he said 'i'm not going to do anything' before going to the zoo]. no one ever did." (ps ch2)

"next morning, however, he had got up to find his hair exactly as it had been before aunt petunia had sheared it off. he had been given a week in his cupboard for this, even though he had tried to explain that he couldn't explain how it had grown back so quickly." (ps ch2)

"...he'd got in terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens. dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual [...]. the dursleys had received a very angry letter from harry's headmistress telling them harry had been climbing school buildings. but all he'd tried to do (as he shouted at uncle vernon through the locked door of his cupboard) was jump behind the big bins outside the kitchen doors." (ps ch2)

"[vernon] liked to complain about things: people at work, harry, the council, harry, the bank and harry were just a few of his favourite subjects." (ps ch2)

"if there was one thing the dursleys hated even more than his asking questions, it was his talking about anything acting in a way it shouldn't, no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon - they seemed to think he might get dangerous ideas." (ps ch2)

"he was careful to to walk a little way apart from the dursleys so that dudley and piers [...] wouldn't fall back on their favourite hobby of hitting him." (ps ch2)

dudley punches harry in the ribs and knocks him to the floor at the zoo (i.e. in a very public setting LMAO). no one seems shocked or bothered by this.

vernon says when they get back "go - cupboard - stay - no meals," which is a punishment harry seems to have been through before: "he didn't know what time it was and he couldn't be sure the dursleys were asleep yet. until they were, he couldn't risk sneaking to the kitchen for some food." (ps ch2)

"he'd lived with the dursleys almost ten years, ten miserable years [...] he couldn't remember being in the car when his parents had died. sometimes, when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green and a burning pain in his forehead." (ps ch2)

[same paragraph^^] "he couldn't remember his parents at all. his aunt and uncle never spoke about them, and of course he was forbidden to ask questions. there were no photographs of them in the house." (ps ch2)

"when he had been younger, harry had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take him away, but it had never happened; the dursleys were his only family." (ps ch2)

"at school, harry had no one. everybody knew that dudley's gang hated that odd harry potter [...] and nobody liked to disagree with dudley's gang." (ps ch2)

"by the time he was allowed out of his cupboard again [after dudley's birthday, june 23rd], the summer holidays had started," (ps ch3) don't know how long this is for, but presumably longer than a week (as it was apparently his "longest punishment" ever).

"the rest of [dudley's friends] were all quite happy to join in dudley's favourite sport: harry hunting." (ps ch3)

"no one, ever, in his whole life, had written to him. who would? he had no friends, no other relatives." (ps ch3)

when harry gets his first hogwarts letter, vernon says, "didn't we swear when we took him in we'd stamp out that dangerous nonsense?" (ps ch3)

"unce vernon did something he had never done before; he visited harry in his cupboard." (ps ch3) (note: in the second chapter, he does say that his only visitor to the cupboard is petunia.)

vernon moves harry up to dudley's second bedroom because he thinks wizards are spying on them; they have only received one letter at this point, and he seems to believe they won't receive any others if this one isn't returned.

"he shouted at harry for about half an hour and then told him to go make a cup of tea." (ps ch3)

"his birthdays weren't exactly fun - last year, the dursleys had given him a coat-hanger and a pair of uncle vernon's old socks." (ps ch3)

in the hut, they make harry sleep on the floor; he doesn't seem to expect anything else, nor does he fight for anything else (although when they're trying to eavesdrop on petunia and vernon, he and dudley fight for the better listening position! harry presumably gets punched in the face then, though; his glasses are broken again at the end of the scuffle).

when hagrid says he must know all about hogwarts, harry says no, and then immediately says "sorry" when hagrid looks shocked about this.

from vernon after harry finds out he's a wizard: "i accept there's something strange about you, probably nothing a good beating woudn't have cured - and as for all this about your parents, well, they were weirdos, no denying it, and the world's better off without them in my opinion," (ps ch4)

"he'd spent his life being clouted by dudley and bullied by aunt petunia and uncle vernon; if he was really a wizard, why hadn't they been turned into warty toads every time they'd tried to lock him in his cupboard? if he'd once defeated the greatest sorcerer in the world, how come dudley had always been able to kick him around like a football?" (ps ch4)

"the dursleys couldn't have known about [how much money is in harry's vault] or they'd have had it from him faster than blinking. how often ha they complained how much harry cost them to keep?" (ps ch5)

"aunt petunia and uncle vernon didn't shut harry in his cupboard, force him to do anything or shout at him - in fact, they didn't speak to him at all. [...] although this was an improvement in many ways, it became a bit depressing after a while." (ps ch6)

"uncle vernon dumped harry's trunk on to a trolley and wheeled it in to the station for him. harry thought this was strangely kind until..." (ps ch6)

when they leave him at the train station, they're all laughing. presumably, though, they must go back later to find he's not there, because they obviously know somehow that he got to hogwarts(?). i think harry sends them a letter at some point before christmas but i can't remember the details and don't want to read for them lol.

"he didn't know where he was going to - but it had to be better than what he was leaving behind." (ps ch6)

when ron asks, he only describes his relatives as "horrible."

"he had never had money for sweets with the dursleys." (ps ch6)

"[harry] had never had anything to share before, or, indeed, anyone to share it with."

harry is surprised that he has christmas gifts, though he has presumably gotten gifts for his own friends(?)

hermione is uncertain when she tells harry to have a good summer, because she was "shocked that anyone could be so unpleasant" (ps ch17) wrt vernon.

"ever since harry had come home for the summer holidays, uncle vernon had been treating him like a bomb that might go off at any moment." (cos ch1)

"all harry's spellbooks, his wand, robes, cauldron and top-of-the-range nimbus two thousand broomstick had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs by uncle vernon the instant harry had come home. what did the durseys care if harry lost his place on the house quidditch team [or] went back to school without any of his homework done? [...] uncle vernon had even padlocked harry's owl, hedwig, inside her cage, to stop her carrying messages to anyone in the wizarding world." (cos ch1)

"he knew it was only their terror that he might turn them all into dung beetles that stopped them from locking him in the cupboard under the stairs with his wand and broomstick." (cos ch1)

"...aunt petunia knew he hadn't really done magic, but he still had to duck as she aimed a heavy blow at his head with the soapy frying pan. then she gave him work to do, with the promise he wouldn't eat again until he'd finished." (cos ch1)

harry is given "two slices of bread and a lump of cheese" (cos ch1) for supper even after doing all that petunia asked him to ^, including manual labour outside in the garden.

he compares his living situation to dobby's, saying "and i thought i was hard-done-by staying here for another four weeks" when dobby says he's literally a slave lmao. then when dobby says he shouldn't go back to hogwarts, he says, "but i've got to go back [...] it's all that's keeping me going. you don't know what it's like here. i don't belong here." (cos ch2)

when vernon comes up, his threat is "one more sound and you'll wish you'd never been born, boy!" which actually has harry shaking (weird show of fear from a kid who in this same book faces a basilisk, imo), then he says to dobby, "see what it's like here? [... hogwarts is] the only place i've got - well, i think i've got friends." (cos ch2)

he seems (rightfully, i think; any kid would be lmao) genuinely terrified by dobby's threat with the pudding. he says, "please...they'll kill me." (cos ch2)

vernon says "just our nephew - very disturbed" to their guests and "promised harry he would flay him to within an inch of his life when the masons had left." and of course, after harry gets his warning from the ministry: "well, i've got news for you, boy... i'm locking you up...you're never going back to that school...never...and if you try and magic yourself out - they'll expel you!" (cos ch2)

"the following morning he paid a man to fit bars on harry's window. he himself fitted a cat-flap in the bedroom door, so that small amounts of food could be pushed inside three times a day. they let harry out to use the bathroom morning and evening. otherwise, he was locked in his room around the clock." and "three days later the dursleys were showing no sign of relenting [...] "the way things were going, he'd probably starve to death anyway." (cos ch2)

"harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized [a bowl of tinned soup]. the soup was stone cold, but he drank half of it in one gulp" and he gives the rest to hedwig. (cos ch2)

he wonders, quite genuinely, if he's going to die, and if anyone will rescue him if he doesn't show up at hogwarts in four weeks.

vernon tries to use brute force to keep him inside the house (pulls him by his ankle).

"it was difficult not to feel jealous of ron when he thought of the dursleys and what sort of welcome he could expect next time he turned up in privet drive." (cos ch5)

harry tells ron "the dursleys haven't given me pocket money for about six years." (cos ch5)

[the dursleys] had sent harry a toothpick and a note telling him to find out whether he'd be able to stay at hogwarts for the summer holidays, too." (cos ch12)

hermione asks "your aunt and uncle will be proud, though, won't they? [...] when they hear what you did this year?" to which harry responds "proud? [...] are you mad? all those time i could've died, and i didn't manage it? they'll be furious..." (cos ch18)

"for one thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time of the year. for another, he really wanted to do his homework, but was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night." (poa ch1)

"yet another unusual thing about harry was how little he looked forward to his birthdays. he had never received a birthday card in his life. the dursleys had completely ignored his last two birthdays, and he had no reason to suppose they would remember this one." (poa ch1)

"[aunt marge] didn't often stay in privet drive [...] but each of her visits stood out horribly vividly in harry's memory. / at dudley's fifth birthday party, aunt marge had whacked harry around the shins with her walking stick to stop him beating dudley at musical statues. [...] she had turned up at christmas with a computerised robot for dudley and a box of dog biscuits for harry. [...] harry had accidentally trodden on the paw of her favourite dog. ripper had chased harry into the garden and up a tree, and aunt marge had refused to call him off until past midnight. the memory of this incident still brought tears of laughter to dudleys eyes." (poa ch2)

"watching harry being bullied by uncle vernon was dudley's favourite form of entertainment." (poa ch2)

vernon gives harry a false story to tell marge, that he goes to a school called st brutus's secure centre for incurably criminal boys. when harry says he'll stick to the story if vernon signs his hogsmeade form, vernon threatens to beat him but he points out that wouldn't make marge forget anything he said about magic.

"harry was bursting to say he'd rather live in an orphanage than with the dursleys." (poa ch2)

marge tells petunia to write to harry's supposed school because they're clearly "not beating him hard enough."

and, duh, harry runs away. he says "i've had enough" and tbh he's probably talking about marge specifically, but it's not really clear. could be a General statement lol. (poa ch2)

"aunt petunia always insisted that dudley was a very gifted boy whose teachers didn't understand him [...] they also skated over the accusations of bullying." (gof ch3)

"aunt petunia seemed to feel that the best way to keep up dudley's morale was to at make sure that he did, at least, get more to eat than harry." (gof ch3)

"allowing harry to go would make harry happy, something uncle vernon had struggled against for thirteen years. on the other hand, allowing harry to disappear to the weasleys' for the rest of the summer would get rid of him two weeks earlier than anyone could have hoped, and uncle vernon hated having harry in the house." (gof ch3)

"'you stand there, in the clothes petunia and i have put on your ungrateful back -' / 'only after dudley finished with them,' said harry coldly. [...] / 'i will not be spoken to like that!' said uncle vernon, trembling with rage. / but harry wasn't going to stand for this. gone were the days when he had been forced to take every single one of the dursleys' stupid rules." (gof ch3)

arthur makes the dursleys say good-bye to harry, even though harry tells him "it doesn't matter. [...] honestly, i don't care." (gof ch4)

"he had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother." (gof ch36)

"...he had barely staggered upright when two large purple hands reached through the open window and closed tightly around his throat." (ootp ch1) worth noting that vernon stops strangling harry because "some invisible force seemed to have surged through his nephew."

mrs figg says about all the times he was brought to her house, "the dursleys would never have let you come if they'd thought you enjoyed it." (ootp ch2)

they want to throw harry out after the dementor attack. before this, harry planned to run away (again).

they leave him in the house and tell him he can't touch anything or "steal food from the fridge" and vernon says he's locking the bedroom door.

before his hearing, harry asks sirius if he gets expelled from hogwarts if he can come live with him.

"he knew how it felt to be humiliated in the middle of a circle of onlookers, knew exactly how snape had felt as his father had taunted him," (ootp ch28)

i'm going to come back to this chapter later, but! chapter 37, the lost prophecy, they talk about the dursleys quite a bit actually. harry has two lines that stick out to me: 1) "she doesn't love me. [...] she doesn't give a damn -" (about petunia) and 2) "people don't like being locked up! [...] you did it to me all last summer -" but like. gestures to above. harry has a lot of experience being locked up, and it's not something dumbledore did to him (directly, in any case).

the order of the phoenix threatens the dursleys at the end of ootp, talking about how they'll know if they're "mistreating" harry.

other than the scene at the beginning of hbp where dumbledore says, essentially, that the dursleys raised harry better than dudley by not spoiling him (really), i don't remember much in this one and i'm not about to dig too deep to find anything haha.

dh though! i'd have to put like all of chapter 3 here lmao. again, someone says something to the dursleys for not saying good-bye to harry. harry says "they think i'm a waste of space, actually, but i'm used to -"

"this was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits [...]. harry was the least surprised by this, because he had suffered periods of near starvation at the dursleys'. (dh ch15)

this is not, by any means, an exhaustive list - just everything i remembered well enough to track the specific instances of down. and it's a lot longer than i thought it would be so sorry about that but! the tl;dr here is that harry was often locked up, withheld meals, treated as (an albeit ungrateful) charity case, and felt as early as age 10 that he was not loved - by anyone. exceptionally, i'd like to point out too how many people seemed to have known about it and did nothing. otherwise, it's noteworthy to me that his relatives told other people he was insane or a criminal. and it's definitely important that harry didn't know anything about his parents, except for a lie about the circumstances of their death, until he was 11 years old. but he'd been dreaming about it, presumably his whole life.

i don't think i need to "prove" that harry has childhood trauma, or was abused. it's pretty clear, as far as i'm concerned. as bad as starving a child and strangling him and threatening to beat him is, the thing that is especially important to be here i think is the fact that harry doesn't know he's loved. and this is pretty apparent even at the beginning of cos, when he thinks ron and hermione must not care for him as much as he cares for them because they aren't sending him any letters (never mind that he obviously hasn't been to send them any!). but it crops up in a lot of other places too: his surprise at getting gifts (which lessens over the years, understandably); how he spends all of his fifth year, pretty much, not going to dumbledore about anything because he feels like dumbledore doesn't care, or thinks something is wrong with him; how touched he is by molly saying she's "as good as" his mother. just to name a few!

the other part of this is that harry doesn't know he's wanted, which is, i think, even bigger. one of the chief symptoms of bpd is fear of abandonment. in my opinion, harry has a lot of this - but what he does is push other people away before they can leave him. he does it to hermione in poa over the firebolt, he does it to ron in gof and again in dh, he does it ginny in hbp, he does it to all the weasleys after arthur is attacked, and he does it to remus in dh. he feels lost when sirius says "james would have..." about him going to hogsmeade to see harry and he faces a lot of guilt after he and ron fly the car to hogwarts, thinking how horrible he was after the weasleys had treated him so well.

something that ties into this is another common thing with bpd, which is paranoia. harry's actually really cognizant of people talking behind his back. we see it in cos, then again in gof, then again in ootp, and especially, i think, in dh - when he's sure ron and hermione are talking behind his back (and tbh, they probably are) and he just assumes he knows what they're thinking (and it's nothing good about him; in fact, he seems under the impression here that they don't want to be doing this anymore, now that they know he hasn't got a "real" plan).

all of this leads to unstable relationships. perhaps the biggest red flag of them all, right? these are relationships involving a lot of fighting, miscommunication, or "on and off" periods. harry spends a lot of time yelling at people, and that's not exclusive to his fifth year. other than this, though, he's quick to get really...cold? and nasty? one moment that sticks out to me is in gof, he throws one of the badges at ron's head and says "there you go, something for you to wear [at the first task]. you might even have a scar now, if you're lucky. ...that's what you want, isn't it?" after he's just been shouting at ron for interrupting his conversation with sirius (which he refuses to tell ron about), when all ron was doing was checking to see what he was doing. and this scene ends with this line: "he strode across the room towards the stairs; he half-expected ron to stop him, he would even have liked ron to throw a punch at him..." and we see this with dudley a lot too, that harry really likes to...goad him into violence. and then there's, of course, in ootp, the bit where harry gets banned from quidditch because he couldn't control his temper and physically attacked draco.

interestingly, the only people he doesn't ever really yell at are the dursleys (except for marge). which is especially interesting because we know they spent a lot of time yelling at him. mostly, though, he’s short, cold, and sardonic with them. he’s kind of passive aggressive, really. but, then, this makes a lot of sense - he was a child, and he got in trouble - serious trouble - for doing much of anything. removed from the dursleys, he's able to push a lot of boundaries, see how far he can go without consequences. i don't think this is exclusive to his temper, either; there's also the fact that harry is not a very morally "good" person. i think this is most largely evidenced by two spells: the cruciatus curse and sectumsempra.

i actually find the chapter "sectumsempra" quite disturbing. like, there's one brief moment where harry's very disgusted with what he did, but it's...very brief. harry never stops to feel sorry for what he did to draco. this is important. he's not upset that he almost killed someone. he's upset because the figure he'd been idealizing (this is also important to my point; i'll come back to this) through the half-blood prince's textbook turned out to know a very dark and nasty spell. he's quick to rationalize this, too. he's very insistent that the half-blood prince can't have been a bad person - after all, he's been really helpful to harry! what else is he upset about here? he's upset that he got caught. he outright tells snape he doesn't think he deserves the detentions he's assigned. he's more outwardly horrified by having to miss the last quidditch game of the season that his near murder of a classmate. and, of course - he can't be too put-off by the spell, because he uses it multiple times, and not just on the inferi. he tries to use it on snape, in fact - following two failed attempts to cast the cruciatus curse on him.

in ootp, when he tries to cast the cruciatus on bellatrix, he says he has to mean it. we don't see him ever manage to cast it in hbp, but he does successfully do so in dh, when amycus carrow spits on mcgonagall. this is...absolutely baffling to me. unlike bellatrix and snape, this guy didn't even kill anyone. he just...disrespected harry's teacher. and he tortures him? and says "i see what bellatrix meant [...] you need to really mean it." this from the same kid who refuses to cast the killing curse, even against the man who murdered his parents. he's also able to cast the imperius curse with no issues at all. and we know sectumsempra is very dark magic. harry is very capable of casting dark magic, and seems to derive genuine satisfaction from hurting people. it's not awesome to say "this is good proof for him being borderline," because obviously we don't want to hurt people, but it does point to the fact that harry's moral compass isn't very well-aligned, and he doesn't even realize it - largely, i would think, because he uses these spells on “bad” people (i.e. death eaters).

all of this suggests something that we see a lot otherwise, which is that harry is a very black and white thinker. it's interesting, because there is a recurring theme of, like, there's more than just black and white. and we know even that harry, snape, and dumbledore, in particular, are all pretty morally grey but are the people who ultimately have the largest hand in ending the war. harry's inability to see nuance, however, is not just present in the fact that he doesn't mind torturing people (but certainly would never kill someone!). when he hates people, he does so fiercely. if he loves them, then he's wholly dedicated to them. he doesn’t do much in moderation, either. he’s very quick to assume the worst about things (the second task is a good example of this). any time he feels sympathy, or anger, or anything like that for another person, it goes away very quickly, which leads me to another big facet of this black/white pattern, which is splitting. harry actually does this a lot, i think? his feelings towards dumbledore in ootp and dh absolutely oscillate hard between idealization and devaluation. but the person he does this most to is ron, which makes a lot of sense, because ron is his most important person - that's why he was taken in the second task! this first pops up in gof:

ch19 - “at this moment he hated everything about ron” / ch20 - “but harry didn’t care, he wouldn’t have cared if karkaroff had given him zero; ron’s indignation on his behalf was worth about a hundred points to him."

and then there's a similar thing in dh:

ch16 - "harry felt a corrosive hatred towards ron; something had broken between them...” / ch19 - “the subject of ron’s departure seemed to rise like a wall between them. and yet he was here. he had returned. he had just saved harry’s life."

his idealization patterns are pretty significant too. he idealizes dumbledore and sirius, for sure. after his death, he seems to really put snape on a pedestal as well? and he unknowingly idealizes snape, in the form of the half-blood prince (this is also interesting, because snape is given a lot of effeminate qualities through this, even as harry insists he’s sure the half-blood prince isn’t a woman LOL). this one is big, i think, because he sees the half-blood prince as someone who has been helping him, and so he’s absolutely certain that he can’t have put a dark spell in the book because he invented it and/or wanted others to use it. harry is largely seen to disregard authority, but he treats this book like gospel because it gives him helpful directions. this, paired with the fact that the people he probably idealizes the most are lily and james, says a lot about his lack of reliable adults imo? and while he's shown that james is imperfect, lily remains fixed in his mind as someone with no flaws, who loved him dearly, who died for him. harry doesn't get that most parents would die for their children, because he didn't grow up with adults who cared for him. what does he know about lily, other than that petunia hated her, snape loved her, and she died for him?

this, amongst other things, tells me that harry really desperately wants a parental figure. he seeks it out in sirius, who can't be that for him because the circumstances won't allow it, and even dumbledore says they had a bit more of a brotherly relationship. he doesn't find it in remus - and ironically tells remus to leave him and go back to be with his own son so he won't grow up like harry did, which is honestly...a pretty shitty thing to say, not gonna lie, but my opinions on remus and tonks and teddy are irrelevant to this particular subject so. i digress. he doesn't get it from dumbledore, or from mcgonagall. he wants it from molly and arthur, but he definitely knows, all along, that as much as they've done for him, they are ron's parents. not his. and he certainly doesn't get it from petunia or vernon.

harry is impulsive, and reckless, and cares little for his own safety. i don't think i need to cite anything here. pretty much all seven books are just...harry doing impulsive and dangerous things because he thinks it's the right thing to do. he almost dies so many times, and he hardly seems fazed by it. mostly, he's bothered by what happens to other people - he's bothered by what happens to other people because of him. this is obvious in a few scenes, where he tries to do things alone. there's the guilt he feels after they go to the hall of prophecies, because people got hurt, even though none of them blame him for it at all. then there's the fact that he breaks up with ginny (and i'm going to circle back to this one too, but for a different reason) because it's too unsafe for her to be with him. and, of course, that he tries to make ron and hermione leave (more than once), because it's too dangerous and he never wanted them to get hurt. but it's okay if he, harry, gets hurt. he forgives dumbledore for raising him to die, with little to no hesitation, largely because dumbledore proves to him that he did care all along. cared about harry. loved him. that's all he ever wanted.

and i think this all speaks to the fact that harry fundamentally does not value his own life. and that's not really any wonder, i mean - just look at how he was raised! dudley was a perfect child, and he was a no-good, ungrateful freak. dudley did everything right, and he did everything wrong, even though dudley was the one throwing temper tantrums and he was punished for things he had no control over. and for his most foundational childhood years, he didn't even know why. harry's willing to risk his life to save one 12-year-old girl. he's willing to risk his life to save his school rival (whom he nearly killed a year before this). and, of course, he's willing to die for the greater good. is it hard for him? sure! but to me harry seems like someone who is very passively suicidal, maybe without even realizing it. as early as cos, he thinks that dying "isn't so bad," and is clearly at peace with the thought that he would die in the chamber before fawkes's tears healed him. yeah. 12 years old. and then he just moves on, like that didn't happen at all. i’ve done all my basic training in suicide prevention and mental health first aid, never mind my own experiences in that corner. before harry walks to his death, he is literally showing every red flag for suicide possible. he doesn’t want to talk to his friends because he’s afraid then he wouldn’t have the “strength” to do it. he tells himself it’s better for everyone, especially his loved ones, if he dies, in order to prevent himself from approaching anyone. he tells neville about nagini to pass on the responsibility to someone as it was passed on to him by dumbledore. he tells neville he’s fine, and not to worry about him, but look out for ron and hermione, essentially. he’s at peace with his decision, believing it is the best thing for everyone. he doesn’t want to die, but i think a common misconception people have about suicide in general is that these people want to die, when in fact they more likely want to stop living, and there is a very big difference between these two things. suicidality presents somewhat differently for borderlines, who are often described as “chronically suicidal,” and are more prone to impulsive attempts. this isn’t the first time harry has made peace with dying. this isn’t the first time he’s thought it was bound to happen anyway, because he’s been living on borrowed time all along. along with the sense of borrowed time is the idea that harry lives for one purpose, and one purpose alone; it’s okay for him to die, as long as it ensures voldemort does too. he absolutely sees his life like this. even before he ever learned the prophecy, in my opinion.

aside from his extremes in these respects, there’s also his extremes between explosive anger and utter apathy. my favourite chapter for sure is the lost prophecy. it’s absolutely fascinating to me. it feels like there are a lot of layers in it. and i think it’s the place where we see best how affected harry is by everything he’s been through, and how he will continue to be affected. i would argue that his grief for sirius in this chapter is paralleled with a grief for his “inner child.” very importantly, the main focus of this chapter winds up being dumbledore’s plan - harry’s life, which has always been in dumbledore’s control. harry starts out in this chapter very quiet, squirming with guilt. just as quickly he begins yelling and throwing things at dumbledore. almost immediately, he gets quiet again and tries to flee, and when this is unsuccessful goes back to yelling. he rides this particular wave the entire time. he is very apathetic about the prophecy, though! when he asks if it means that one of them will have to kill the other, and dumbledore says yes, he just kind of...takes that. i wrote some of my thoughts about this chapter out here if you want to read about it at length, because there’s a lot that is relevant here but would take to long to get into lol.

and there’s one more facet of unstable relationships that i think is worth bringing up, and that’s his romantic relationships. harry is very obsessive, and kind of clingy. it’s why a lot of us wind up feeling kind of weird about his relationship with ginny. it seems like his feelings are very intense and kind of come out of nowhere. when they’re on the run in dh, there’s a point where he thinks he misses ginny more than he misses hogwarts, the only place he ever called home. uh...yeah. i doubt that, honestly. he says when they break up that his time with her felt like “something out of another person’s life.” we know from how they get together that the feelings there are intense. when he breaks up with ginny, he can’t bear to stay near her because he thinks he would take it back, since he doesn’t really want to break up with her. this absolutely screams “leaving someone so they can’t leave me first” to me. realistically, breaking up does virtually nothing to protect her, when his feelings for her don’t go away.

another good example of his obsessive personality is his obsession with draco malfoy. this isn’t about romance, obviously, but it does show really well how singular-minded he can get about people when he thinks he knows something about them (and is another good example of the fact that he is a paranoid thinker; he turns out to be right about this, but everyone else is quick to say he’s paranoid, in such a way that suggests they’ve observed him as being paranoid before this). this works in the opposite way, too; when he fights with ron, he pretty much acts as if ron doesn’t even exist. in this case, he knows ron left, or doesn’t trust him anymore, or hates him, so he just endeavours to erase him entirely. he barely speaks his name at all if he can avoid it after he leaves in dh. again, extremes.

another romance thing is cho. harry is very interested in cho, until she returns his feelings. and this is pretty classic borderline behaviour, honestly. he’s very awkward with her and largely oblivious to her feelings. he doesn’t get close to her, at all. after sirius dies, he just...doesn’t talk to her again. from huge passion to intense apathy. he doesn’t seem particularly upset that their relationship doesn’t work out.

and there is, of course, his self-image. his identity. he struggles with this from the very beginning, and it’s obviously exacerbated by the fact that a piece of voldemort is literally attached to him. he struggles with thinking he doesn’t really belong in gryffindor in cos, and actually really despairs about it, wondering if the hat had made a mistake and he was more of a slytherin after all. he believes in multiple instances that he is a dark wizard, possessed, or deep down a bad person, like tom riddle. other people assure him he isn’t. he has no idea of this himself, though. he values being like his father, and is very upset to learn that his father was a bully, especially because he himself was a victim of bullying, i would think. he only ever considers one career, and doesn’t seem to really “consider” it at all, actually. it also seems very logical for him to stay on a path to become an auror as long as voldemort is alive. i can’t see her doing it after voldemort is dead, honestly. related to this, he is so uncaring about his extracurricular subjects that he just signs up for the exact same ones ron does. and, of course, he has a difficult time believing he’s a wizard, and again thinks that there must somehow have been a mistake.

my last big point is that harry deals with a lot of guilt. some of it is extremely misplaced. there are some things (like using sectumsempra on draco) that he ought to feel guilty for, but doesn’t appear to dwell on it much. he also has a tendency to project his guilt on to other people. like how he blames snape for sirius’s death, and i’d argue he does the same thing with dumbledore’s death (again, on snape. obviously snape did kill him, but only after harry has just force-fed him poison). in this same vein, he often seems under the impression that he is somehow the thing causing the people around him to suffer. whether that’s a matter of being somehow “dark,” or just that his life is clearly dangerous, it doesn’t matter - he isn’t blaming voldemort for this. he’s blaming himself.

so! there are nine symptoms of bpd. here i think we’ve got 1) explosive anger, 2) a pattern of unstable relationships (largely defined by a pattern of idealization and devaluation/a lot of “push-pull”), 3) impulsive behaviour, 4) massive and rapid mood swings, 5) unstable sense of self, 6) suicidal thoughts, threats, or actions, 7) a chronic feeling of emptiness (apathy), 8) fear of abandonment, 9) paranoia. i can see all of this stemming from his childhood environment, easily. other things that aren’t dsm symptoms but are common include those feelings of guilt, and a high comorbidity with ptsd (which harry also meets the criteria for, much of it even before ootp).

#answered #anon #*meta #harry potter and the borderline personality disorder #literally the stand-in title for that fic lmfao #hjp #harry potter #ive thought about this so much. you have no idea #sorry if there are typos. i tried #there was so much here i started off strong but i was wearing out by the end LMAO #if anyone ever wants to hear my thoughts on a specific Thing i am always happy to talk about harry

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