desire is a tricky thing

For example, you’ll see fans insisting that XYZ Naruto character should be in therapy, but CBT won’t fix the trauma of being a child soldier, not being a child soldier will. Rather than investigate the systems of power that shape these imaginary worlds and explore ways to dismantle them, therapyfic instead arms its protagonists with the tools necessary to conform and flourish within their bounds. 

And you see this across fandoms! If a canon’s original setting doesn’t support the existence of therapy, an in-universe analogue will be invented in the fanon – see, Star Wars ‘Mind Healers’ or ‘Halls of Mandos/Gardens of Lorien’ in Silm/Tolkien fandom. These narrative devices take the place of a modern therapist and magically churn out characters that are rehabilitated and well-adjusted – i.e. they think, react, and feel in ways that make sense to the audience. They no longer pose a threat to the fictional status quo or, more importantly, the audience’s comfort. They have been effectively neutered. Lobotomized. The Joker is gently inquiring if your boundaries have been violated, Sasuke has sagely forgiven his family’s state-sanctioned massacre, the Sons of Feanor have learned breathing techniques for the next time they’re seized by horrible flashbacks of all those innocent people they killed.

The primacy here is given to the character’s inner, affective world rather than the material one. The most important change that can happen is internally, and this internal change then acts upon the external world rather than the other way around – its redemption fics that feature a former antagonist who now uses therapyspeak to tell everyone how he feels really very bad about everything he did without making a single, tangible move towards reparation, and if any of his (female) victims refuse to forgive him, then they are unreasonable, vindictive, and mean-spirited; its traumatized characters receiving therapy and realizing the orphan-crushing machine that killed all their friends wasn’t so bad, actually, and they were misguided to try and destroy it; its characters that are threatening and angry and illegible being rendered docile and comfortable. 

The impulse here is deeply neoliberal in nature – hyper-individualistic, depoliticized, and rooted in imperial practice. It’s important to remember that not only is therapy not a magic cure-all, it’s also a practice that has historically been used to protect the status quo and suppress dissident elements in society. When we use it as the vehicle through which a fix-it is occuring in fics, it’s worth asking ourselves what role it’s playing in our narratives, whether we’re applying a band-aid to a gushing, arterial wound, and if we’re using therapy and modern psychobabble as a crutch to avoid asking deeper, possibly uncomfortable, questions about the source text.