Sincerely, The Stranger You Call Sister

Year 1: Humpty Dumpty

Dear Little Brother,

Boys have a habit of asking why girls 'always' go after the mean, bitchy bad boys. Or at the very least they used to in my time.

Personally, I've found it to be the mixture of the thrill and hanging out with someone 'dangerous' (but not really) and the warm feeling of being fucking special. Like the boy is rude and uncaring towards everyone else but sweet and loving for them. What really matters is being the exception to the rule here.

Because everyone likes to be special.

Also, the 'bad boys' were often the characters that had confidence, were domineering in bed, and had a playful personality. All traits that turned me on. Still do, if I'm perfectly honest. (Did I make you throw up a little in your mouth there? Good.)

Zoe was the same. We would spend countless hours at school and on the phone chatting and fangirling over our shared favourite characters. And when we were older, around fifteen, we would exchange smutty fanfictions to each other with wide, unashamed grins.

(I found that a good chuck of my so-called favourite characters are people that I wouldn't actually like if I met in real life. Some had anger issues, others were nut cases -but that's the beauty of fictional characters isn't it? That no matter what happens, what the characters do, at the end of the day it doesn't matter because they don't actually exist.

How naive of me.)

We also shared a slight fascination with yandere characters.

'Yandere' is a Japanese term that comes from characters that act very nice and demur publicly, but are secretly fucking crazy. They obsess over the main character (romantically, in an unhinged and mentally ill fashion.) They're the type of people that no normal person would suspect to have those tendencies, the type of people that say "if I can't have you, no one can."

There are different variations of yanderes, of course. Some that, upon rejection, would sooner slit the person of the obsession than 'lose' them -see the quote above- while others may be more...mild for a lack of better word, and would simply imprison their person instead. A good chuck might pull out a knife or scissors for some good ol' blood and pain foreplay. Both would undoubtably stalk both their person and any possible threats/rivals, secretly taking the latter out of the equation.

And although I never had it confirmed, I'm pretty sure they -whether they be crazy or fucking crazy- originated from psychopaths and sociopaths. The ones that are wrongfully romanticized.

I will admit; Yandere characters were my guilty pleasure as Olivia. I would have an on-again-off-again phase were I would fucking devour romantic mangas (Japanese comics) where the male lead was a yandere, and English novels that I could find where they had yandere-like characters -though they were more like the stereotypical 'bad boys' than anything else. Though personally, I shied away from the more hardcore yanderes; the ones the fall off the edge to the point of attempted murder of their person. (Anyone else? Fair game.)

In the end, it all comes back to the desire to be someone's Number One, to be their top priority.

To be special.

You were one of them, actually.

I know, I know, it's fucking gross now -but as Olivia, you were only one of many fictional characters. People would write stories where they would pair you off with either Harry Potter (the main character of the original series), Hermione Granger (Harry's female childhood friend), or their own made-up character.