Anya No. 1 Fan

She also carries a kind of depth that's easy to miss because the game doesn't package it loudly. Anya studies psychology in her free time, jogs to clear her head, and kept trying to build a future for herself through medicine after being rejected from medical school multiple times, which makes her feel much more substnatial than The Anxious Nurse. She's someone who had ambitions, discipline, and an interior life before the Tulpar became a trap. The tragedy is that by the time the player is fully taking her in, so much of her life has already been crushed under fear, assault, isolation, and the crash.

Psychology

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/PTSD fits Anya very strongly because the game gives her a clear traumatic break and then shows how much of her later behaviour grows around that break. Before Jimmy assaults her, she's described as livelier, funnier, and more at ease with the crew - afterward, she becomes much more nervous, withdrawn, and focused on avoiding him, which already points to a mind and body reorganising around threat. The Tulpar then traps her in the worst possible conditions for recovery - she remains in close proximity to the person who harmed her, receives no real safety from the people who should protect her, and has to keep functioning in a caregiving role while her own sense of security is collapsing - which is one reason her distress feels so believable. The game isn't presenting a single terrible event followed by space to process it, but ongoing trauma, where fear stays active because the danger never fully leaves.

Anxiety also deserves its own weight because it shapes the texture of how she moves through the ship from scene to scene. Anya doesn't just seem sad or damaged in a general way, but tense, watchful, cautious, and increasingly unable to relax in her own environment. Her anxiety has a practical quality to it - she's trying to assess Jimmy, manage her own reactions, keep doing her job, and hold herself together in a crew structure that keeps failing her. The game's description of her becoming more meek, self-isolating, and prone to breakdowns after the assault makes that even clearer - her fear isn't abstract nervousness or a vague personality trait, but the day-to-day mental strain of surviving in a place where she doesn't feel safe, doesn't feel protected, and can't trust that the people around her will act decisively on her behalf.

Neither one of those things erases her intelligence or moral clarity - she's still the nurse, the person responsible for care, someone trying to think seriously about other people and their pain, and someone with ambitions and a real interior life outside what was done to her. Her trauma doesn't make her smaller as a character, but they make the extent of what she's carrying much more visible.

Strengths and Flaws

Anya is intelligent in a way the story expects you to notice quietly rather than announces for you - she's trusted with the Tulpar's medical supplies and psychological evaluations, studies psychology in her free time, and kept trying for medical school even after being rejected multiple times. All of that points to someone serious, disciplined, and determined to build a life through care and skill. The ship reduces how much of that future she gets to live in, but it never erases the fact that she had one.

Her compassion is one of the strongest things about her - she keeps tending to other people even while frightened and increasingly worn down herself, and that impulse survives conditions that would justify much colder behaviour. Curly is the clearest example - she has every reason to feel anger toward him, yet she still responds to his pain as something real and still takes on the work of caring for him after the crash. That kind of care comes from character rather than from passivity.

She also has a very serious moral sense. Anya keeps thinking about responsibility, harm, and what people owe one another long after the rest of the ship has started to run on panic, denial, or self-interest. As I mentioned earlier, her line about wanting to believe that a person's worst moments don't automatically make them monsters says a great deal about her - it shows someone still trying to hold onto a human standard while living in conditions that are stripping dignity away from everyone on board.

Another major strength is endurance. By the time the player sees how frightened and isolated she's become, she's already carrying assault, pregnancy, ongoing proximity to Jimmy, the crash, and the burden of still being expected to function as the ship's nurse. Her breakdowns matter, but so does the fact that she kept going for as long as she did. There's a great deal of stamina in that, even if the game presents it in painful rather than triumphant terms.

Her weaknesses are just as real, and many of them come from the same environment that's hurting her. Withdrawal is one of the clearest - after Jimmy assaults her, she turns inward more and more, becomes quieter, and increasingly tries to survive by reducing her own visibility, which makes perfect sense, but it still leaves her easier to ignore and less able to force other people to confront what's happening to her.

She also keeps too much inside for too long. Anya seems like someone who's learned to continue functioning first and break down later, which means fear and humiliation keep building without enough release. On the Tulpar, that becomes dangerous - by the time her distress is visible to everyone else, the damage has already had a long time to deepen.

Hesitation is another problem. Anya often understands what's wrong before she can act on that understanding in a forceful way. She knows Jimmy's dangerous, knows she's unsafe, and knows Curly isn't doing enough, yet fear and the crew's structure leave her with very little room to turn that knowledge into decisive protection for herself. That gap between perception and action leaves her trapped in situations she can read clearly but can't safely control.

Her empathy can also cost her more than she can afford. She keeps caring for people who've failed her, and she keeps responding to suffering even when her own suffering is being neglected. Curly again is the clearest example - her willingness to keep tending to him says something abuot her, but it also shows how easily her care can keep binding her to responsibiltiies that are draining her dry.

Relationships

JIMMY Jimmy is the central source of Anya's trauma - he rapes her before the events of the main story, and the assault left her pregnant. When she tells him about the pregnancy, he tells her to "take care of it" and walks away, which is about as clear a summary of his relationship to her personhood as the game could give. After the assault, she becomes nervous, meek, and focused on avoiding him - he isn't just someone who harmed her once and left a wound behind, but a continuing threat inside the space she's forced to live in.

CURLY Curly is one of the most painful relationships in the game because Anya seems to have trusted him more than most of the crew, and because he fails her in such a recognisable way. Her page says she had the best relationship with him before the crash and that they shared quiet moments together. After she tells him about the assault, that relationship becomes strained because he chooses to keep the peace with Jimmy instead of taking full responsibility and acting decisively. What makes this worse is that after the crash she still becomes Curly's primary caretaker. Her care is real, but so is the bitterness built into the fact that she's tending to someone who, in one of the moments that mattered most, didn't protect her.

SWANSEA Swansea isn't as emotionally central as Jimmy or Curly, but he still matters because he's one of the few crew members connected to Anya through practical ship life rather than the larger assault dynamic. The fact that he passes along notes and becomes part of the ship's internal chain of communication places him inside the same tightening world she's trying to survive. He helps show how impossible privacy really is on the Tulpar - even ordinary tasks and messages have to move through other people in a ship environment where nothing can stay wholly separate. The game also strongly implies that she confides in him about the assault after the crash, which means he becomes one of the few witnesses to what happened, someone who understands more than Curly was willing to act on, and someone whose later hostility toward Jimmy makes more sense once that knowledge is in view. Their relationship is still limited by the ship's overall collapse - Swansea doesn't become a full rescuer any more than Curly does - but it matters that Anya appears to trust him with the truth at all. It gives their connection more weight and makes Swansea part of the game's larger pattern of partial recognition without real safety ever being restored around her.

DAISUKE Daisuke helps show that Anya's life on the ship wasn't defined only by fear from the beginning. The game notes that before the assault she got along with the rest of the Tulpar crew, that she was competitive over board games with Daisuke, and she has his doodles pinned on her wall in the medical office. In other words, Anya existed inside an ordinary social world before Jimmy's violence and the crash destroyed that normalcy. Daisuke helps preserve that sense that she was once part of a more casual, livelier crew dynamic rather than only the broken, frightened version seen later.

Just for Fun / Typology

MBTI - ISFJ She reads much more strongly as Si-Fe than as an intuitive type. Her role on the Tulpar is rooted in care, routine responsibility, and practical attention to people's mental and physical wellbeing. She isn't written as someone driven by abstraction, symbolism, or long-range visionary thinking - she studies, observes, evaluates, helps, and keeps the immediate human environment functioning as best she can.

The emotional side of her character also points much more toward Fe than toward a private, sealed feeling style. Even badly hurt, she still thinks in relational and moral terms; she's concerned with what happens between people, whether someone becomes a monster through their actions, and caring for others even when doing so costs her. The way she continues to nurse Curly despite everything is one of the clearest examples of that - her care isn't abstractly ethical, but personal, relational, and expressed through direct service.

I could see INFJ because she's quiet, observant, psychologically aware, and carries a great deal internally, but the problem is that her characterisation stays much more concrete than that. Her intelligence is tied to study, nursing, evaluation, practical coping, and immediate human dynamics rather than to a more intuitive or visionary inner style. She feels grounded in lived reality in duty first, not in symbolic or future-oriented interpretation.

MORAL ALIGNMENT - Neutral Good She doesn't feel strongly Lawful or Chaotic. There's no real sign that she's driven by loyalty to structure for its own sake, and there's just as little sign that rebellion or rule-breaking defines her. Most of her energy goes into surviving, caring for others, and trying to get through an intolerable situation without losing her moral centre, which places her much more comfortably in the middle.

The Good side is much clearer - Anya's consistently kind, nurturing, morally serious, and still trying to hold onto a humane view of other people even after severe trauma. She cares for Curly, worries about pain, studies psychology, works as the nurse, and frames suffering through compassion rather than cruelty. Her circumstances strip a great deal away from her, but they don't strip away the basic fact that her instincts run toward care.

Conclusion

Anya is one of the most painful characters in Mouthwashing because the game makes her intelligence, kindness, and ambition easy to see, then shows how much fear and damage a person can be forced to carry while still being expected to function. She isn't just there to suffer symbolically, and she isn't just The Nervous One - she's a nurse, a serious student, a woman who wanted a medical future, and someone whose basic decency remains visible even after the Tulpar becomes a place of assault, coercion, and collapse.