Reynauld is such a fascinating guy to me because you can read him in so many ways but for today i will be reading him through clusterfuck B disorders and specifically OCD.

We will start with the ASPD tendencies because that is the easiest for me to write about but prepare for this to get rambly and interconnected very quickly.

Part 1: the disorders affecting the guy himself

I think Reynauld has trouble truly "caring" for people in a genuine sense, seeing people as precious objects/ useful tools rather than "people". He treats most people with an internal apathy and has a tendency to discard those he finds to be not capable of providing anymore. On the outside he appears cordial and well put together but internally he honestly doesn't really feel any obligation to be kind to others. In fact, his main motivation for following the Light isn't because he wants to help other people but rather because it earns him supposed "good person" points in his mind. He doesn't care whether someone is helped or not, but he knows on a surface level that people will like you if you do something for them. It is very easy for him to turn a blind eye to suffering as a result.

In essence, Reynauld likes the validation that being zealous and devout gets him and the sense of community with other closed (yet like) minded individuals. He likes being right and a lot of the actions he does "out of the kindness of his own heart" is backed with some sort of internal desire for validation from the people within his community. It is for this reason that it was so easy for him to fall into bloodlust. A lot of individuals with ASPD tendencies(especially coupled with BPD) tend to angle towards committing bad acts because of the thrill of being in power and being in control. Combine that with the fact that he was actively being rewarded for doing something "wrong" was essentially heroin for the cluster B brain. He essentially constantly felt the thrill of being in control of other people's lives while being allowed to feel the thrill of getting away with something as abhorrent as genocide.

Don't get me wrong, Reynauld is a bad person for giving into these impulses and letting them control him rather than recognizing them but the issue is that he is (on some level) aware that he is doing bad things; he just doesn't care that he is because doing these "bad things" gets him validation and community.

It would be very easy for Reynauld if cluster B was the only disorder he was suffering from.

OCD makes this carelessness a living nightmare, especially because I think it is a mix of moral OCD among other things, hence the whole "God fearing" thing. He flip flops between moral perfectionism with genuinely trying to be kind/helpful to others, and complete apathy for the wellbeing of other people. Compulsive thought spirals convince him that people will find out he's doing shit insincerely, so he tries to quell those thought spirals by doing "good things" for supposedly nothing in return (but he doesn't realize he is inadvertently asking for something in return in the form of validation)

Hence, Reynauld is trapped in a very nasty flip flop of apathy and self flagellating because of this apathy yet being too apathetic to really do anything to change that.

I need to clarify that Reynauld is capable of FEELING guilt. ASPD/sociopathy does not mean the lack of feelings rather moreso a pathological lack of empathy. Reynauld is capable of feeling guilt, anger, sadness, and all that nasty stuff, but he is too apathetic and uncaring to do anything about it except to look like he is making progress to other people so he can be rewarded with praise/validation.

It is very hard to properly explain the full scope of sociopathy/ASPD through a tumblr post. i heavily recommend reading "sociopath" by Patric Gagne for more information on it!

Part 2: The disorders affecting his interpersonal relationships

Hello borderline personality disorder.....

BPD makes it so that Reynauld suffers extensively from feelings of emptiness, exacerbated by the apathy from ASPD, which messes with his impulse control that is already pretty fucking shit from OCD, which bubbles and boils over into his extensive kleptomania. It's a viscious cycle for him: emptiness -> impulse control fails + thrill seeking behaviours start -> steal something-> MORAL OCD GUILT -> rage at his own apathy -> hollow/emptiness -> repeat

This obviously makes people offput with him, not even mentioning his discriminatory behaviours and his zealousness and his preaching and everything in between. But that is beside the point of BPD.

The way BPD REALLY rears its head for Reynauld is through splitting, most notably known as black and white thinking. It is...impossibly difficult for Reynauld to see people in nuanced grey areas as opposed to simply seeing them as pure angels or pure demons.