#bpd coded

Before we get into it, let’s talk about what Borderline Personality Disorder even is. Personality disorders are disorders with “unhealthy patterns of thought or behaviour” which often impact personal identity and social relationships. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) falls into Cluster B, which is characterised by “emotional instability and unpredictable behaviour”. In this cluster are the most well-known and most stigmatised of the personality disorders in my experience.

When it comes to BPD, symptoms are usually categorised in four areas. Each section of this analysis will centre around one of those areas. I will list common ways in which each area can present itself, and then discuss these in relation to the three characters. For the purpose of this analysis I will not be differentiating between male and female presentations or using the term “quiet borderline” because I’ve personally never found these specifications helpful.

So, here are the symptoms:

Emotional Dysregulation

feelings of numbness

overwhelming feelings of loneliness

feeling emotions very intensely

severe, rapid mood swings

suicidality

anger is often overwhelming, whether directed at the self or at others

lack of emotional permanence (when you’re unhappy, it feels like you have never been and will never be happy. When you’re really happy, the whole world feels amazing)

We don’t see a lot of Vox in S1, but the second season is enough to make it clear that he’s emotionally unstable and he does seem to experience pretty severe mood swings. Out of the three characters, Vox is the only one who I would say exhibits suicidal ideation. This is during the S2 finale, when he is willing to throw away his life and everyone else's just to stop Alastor from smiling. I also suspect that his death was a mass suicide, as cults have been known to do. There’s no other reason for a bunch of TVs to be strung up in a flooding room. Everyone else in there also got electrocuted so it’s not just Vox who died. His anger is intense throughout the series, even in the small glimpses we get of it in S1, though of course they become even more intense in the latter half of S2.

Lute also ticks many of these boxes. Overall, she does strike me as the most likely and most straightforward case of being BPD-coded. She could be described as experiencing emotional numbness, as she comes across as quite detached and closed off for the majority of the first season, only outwardly showing emotion during and after the courtroom scene in S1 Ep6. It’s clear that when she does get emotional, said emotions are incredibly intense, though I don’t think she particularly has super rapid mood swings, nor does she display any hints of suicidality. But her anger does frequently consume her, and overall I think she displays enough emotional instability to qualify for this aspect of BPD.

On the other hand, Charlie rarely seems emotionally numb, but has intense mood swings and feels her emotions to a very high intensity. For her, something that is very clear is the sense of loneliness and fear of abandonment she feels as a result of her parents being absent and unavailable at various points of her life. It is not confirmed if Charlie has a lack of emotional permanence, but to me it would seem in character. I think Charlie very likely has BPD comorbid with autism and ADHD which all create difficulty in managing emotions.

This, I think, is the most simple and straightforward of the four areas to dissect for these characters.

Disturbed Patterns of Thinking

black-and-white thinking

believing self to be a horrible person

dissociation, derealisation, depersonalisation, etc

ntense fear of the future

some people experience hallucinations

lack of personal identity or sense of self

Lute’s moral compass is shown to be strictly black-and-white, as she believes angels do not make mistakes, and reacts harshly to Vaggi’s change of heart, therefore it can be inferred that her general thinking patterns are similarly lacking in nuance.

I would imagine that, considering her dedication to Adam, to heaven, and to her duty as an exorcist, it is incredibly likely that Lute struggles with personal identity in many of the same ways that Vaggi does — that being that she cannot envision herself outside of her job or the people she serves. Lute’s name emphasises this idea, as it is short for ‘Lieutenant’. Her entire identity is constructed around her role, and this affects even how the audience perceives her.

In the same vein, Lute struggles with hallucinations throughout the second season. Her hallucinations are realistic audio-visual depictions of Adam, though they are not tactile. While her hallucination constantly reminds her that it is not real, she still seems to struggle with seeing it as the real Adam anyway. In BPD, hallucinations can occur as a result of traumatic experiences (like watching the subject of her hallucination be murdered), stress (such as the stress that she was feeling about demons killing her best friend) or social isolation (like her feeling ostracised by the other angels for her differing views to them in the wake of Sir Pentious being redeemed after aiding the people who killed her best friend). The other two do not show this symptom, however that is not to say they do not have BPD, as not everyone with BPD hallucinates.

Interestingly, Charlie qualifies too, albeit in a very different way. She doesn’t experience hallucinations nor have I ever gotten the sense that she dissociates, but despite Charlie’s sense of morality being incredibly different and more malleable than Lute’s, I do feel that she still sees things in a black-and-white way. This is illustrated most obviously in her relationship with Angel. Take S1 Ep2, for example, when Charlie calls Pentious the hotel’s “first real guest”, because Pentious is trying to redeem himself in the way that she understands redemption, whereas Angel — who obviously cares for the people in the hotel and wants them to see him as good — doesn’t put the same effort into the activities she organises. Charlie does have an incredibly positive view of Angel, as we know, but she does have a tendency to place Pentious on a higher pedestal because he succeeded at redemption and Angel, thus far, has not. Charlie struggles to comprehend that someone who is not doing it ‘her way’ may still be trying to improve themselves. It’s actually a common habit of Charlie’s to devalue those who are not acting in the way she wants, but we’ll get onto that in the relationships section. It’s worth mentioning here because the black-and-white thinking symptom of BPD is intrinsically tied to the idealisation/devaluing aspect of the disorder.

Charlie’s thinning is also black-and-white when it comes to the angels. I think on the surface she tries to keep an open mind when interacting with them but considering her reaction to learning that Vaggi was an angel, it is clear that at that point in the narrative she was not able to reconcile her extremely positive idea of Vaggi with her extremely negative view of the exorcists. And she’s right to hate the exorcists, of course, but it does show a lack of grey tones in her thinking.

While I think Charlie is paranoid and anxious about Hell and the future of her hotel in a sense of being afraid of exterminations and fearing that she might fail, I wouldn’t say this counts her under the BPD symptom of fear of the future because I typically find this, in myself, to manifest more as a fear of the unknown of it and not being able to imagine myself in it, rather than a sense of looming dread about a recurring traumatic experience. Charlie’s fear just seems more grounded in reality than most people would assume about my fear.

What Charlie does have is a lack of personal identity. It was always hinted that the hotel was created because of Charlie’s view of her parents’ dreams, and in S2 we have it confirmed that Lilith was the inspiration behind her dreams. This means that Charlie’s dreams are not based on any personal core belief or intrinsic goal, but an external factor of wanting to prove herself and get her mother to come back. That is not to say that I don’t think Charlie cares about redemption or about Hell, but ultimately her motive is much less about sinners and much less about her ideals than it is about her abandonment issues. We’ve known this. Husk and Alastor both said in S1 that she wants to fix other people’s problems instead of her own, so what that tells me is that she struggles with confronting and understanding herself.

Funnily enough, Vox, who is equally as disturbed as Lute, fits far less into this category than either her or Charlie’s The way that the symptoms present themselves are just not incredibly clear in Vox. But I would argue that he at least lacks a sense of self, hence why so much of what he is actually comes from the people around him. Every person who he murdered in Brighter, he then took not only their jobs but their clothes. He doesn’t really express himself, he just copies. Even his main outfit in Hell is very close to the way Alastor dresses. Alastor plays the piano, so Vox uses a self-playing piano. He steals the motifs of many other characters in his S2 music. He even literally steals other characters’ faces and voices sometimes. He knows what he wants, but I don’t think he knows who he is.

Intense But Unstable Relationships

relationships based on idealisation and devaluing (person is either all good or all bad)

splitting between the two above opinions with little cause

having a favourite person, who the borderline’s mood is dependent on

rejection sensitivity

constant need for reassurance in relationships

very strong fear of abandonment

People with BPD often become victims of abusive relationships because they can idealise their abuser

As previously stated, Charlie does exhibit a pattern of idealising and devaluing people, particularly tending to devalue anyone who isn’t acting like she wants them to. She lashes out at Vaggi and Lucifer for going against Vox when she didn’t want them to (getting mad at someone for stirring the pot enough to start a war is more valid than I think Charlie is given credit for, even if her anger is somewhat misdirected it is incredibly easy for me to see where she’s coming from). She also expresses annoyance towards Alastor for “letting himself get kidnapped”, pressures Angel into going along with her redemption plans, and in S1 she puts Pentious on a higher place of priority in her life because he’s more enthusiastic about trying to get redemption. Her opinion on Vaggi also shifts from idealising to devaluing the second she finds out Vaggi is an angel, though again I do think this has some justification as I imagine being lied to through a three year relationship and finding out your girlfriend participated in the genocide of your people to be quite distressing.

When it comes to idealising, I think Charlie does this with Alastor, saying in S1 Ep5 that Alastor believes in her more than Lucifer does when Alastor has never actually shown any sign of actually believing in her cause. He calls her vision unique and says that they’re all proud of her while in front of Lucifer, and I think Charlie really takes this to heart despite the evidence to the contrary, because that’s what idealising is. He tells her what she desperately wants to hear and then her outlook on him quickly becomes entirely positive.

All these things are also examples of splitting, albeit some of them having a lot more cause than other examples. In the scene in S2 specifically, in which Charlie lashes out at both Vaggi and Lucifer, I see a lot of myself reflected in her. She acts petty and immature with Vaggi after the argument, which cements Vaggi as her favourite person for me. She holds Charlie together. When Vaggi and Charlie are not getting along, Charlie spirals. And it’s spending time with Vaggi that regulates her again. It’s not a healthy dynamic, but there have been times in my own life where I’ve felt like I was emotionally falling apart, and it took me a few days of that feeling before I realised it was because I’d had minimal contact with my FP over that time period. It’s not my FPs fault, and it’s something I have to learn to cope with, but it’s difficult to navigate and hard to know how to fix it. It can also be really embarrassing.

Charlie’s fear of abandonment is evident through her reactions to Alastor, Husk, Angel and Lucifer all disappearing from the hotel one after the other. It stems from her childhood, feeling as if she “didn’t know” her dad, and then her mother eventually leaving, which Charlie blames herself for.

Vox’s rapidly changing attitudes towards Valentino and Velvette, while orchestrated by Alastor who was purposefully getting under his skin, does remind me of a BPD split. It’s likely that Alastor knows Vox has a tendency to idealise and devalue and preyed on that specifically, making Vox feel worthless in comparison to make him dislike the other two, and knowing that Vox relies on Alastor for validation (likely because he might be Vox’s FP), he’s able to manipulate him. I wonder if Alastor recognised any of Vox’s BPD traits in Charlie (considering the two of them do foil each other) and that’s why he played with Charlie’s need for reassurance when Lucifer was around?

Vox craves external validation and may rely on reassurance in relationships. Having an increased sensitivity to rejection could be taken as one explanation for his extreme reaction to Alastor’s over the top rejection in the bar flashback, though I personally lean more into the idea that Vox was playing up to Alastor rather than the whole “you’re inspiring!” starry-eyed Vox being completely genuine. We’ve seen what he was like on Earth now, and I find the pipeline of brutal self-serving murderer with a god complex -> sweet and naive guy with a crush on his bestie -> brutal self-serving aspiring dictator to be kind of unrealistic. I think he did have romantic feelings for Alastor! But I doubt they were as naive and sweet as Alastor recalls them as. Perspective is important.

Lute clearly has a favourite person, with whom her relationship is incredibly codependent, fitting the bill for an intense but unstable relationship Her mood is so dependent on him that she is always with him until she physically cannot be because he’s entirely lost to her, and at that point she creates a new version of him for herself because it is genuinely that excruciating to not be around him. Lute is even with him when he goes to talk to Vaggi while her and Charlie are in Heaven, despite Vaggi being someone Lute despises. Fear of abandonment is more than likely, and losing Adam would have probably worsened this for her. Personally, I’m a big fan of guitarspear, so while I wouldn’t classify Lute and Adam’s relationship as an entirely abusive dynamic, it is evident that it could be read that way due to Adam’s history and his misogynistic tendencies. He, at the very least, can be verbally hostile towards her.

The spiral she experiences in the courtroom in S2 Ep1 does suggest to me that she is sensitive to rejection, as the sense that she isn’t being listened to causes her to lash out and become frantic and overwhelmed. She does show a pattern of idealisation and devaluing that signs with her black-and-white morals, hence why she turns on Vaggi so quickly and so wholeheartedly. Splitting can happen for much smaller reasons, though, and for me tends to flip-flop more frequently between the two. This is something that I find quite difficult to find examples of in media, because petty conflict tends to be annoying to watch, as illustrated by my own annoyance in the wake of Chaggi’s bickering in S2 Ep6.

Impulsive Behaviour

self-harm impulses

reckless behaviour such as overspending, drink-driving, having sex with people you don’t know very well, etc

risk-taking activities

addictions, especially eating disorders, are common in people with BPD

Vox shows impulsive behaviour really only when Alastor is involved. Other times he kind of keeps a lid on it, he describes himself as “forward thinking” and this is evidenced even in S1 when he convinces Valentino not to do anything reckless regarding Angel being at the hotel. But it falls apart whenever Alastor is involved, from taking the deal without really thinking about it to messing around with a literal nuke.

Charlie is impulsive in a way that isn’t usually as catastrophically destructive as Vox, but her impulsivity does still cause people to get hurt sometimes. It’s a big part of what she does in S2 but is also present in S1 Ep4 when she interrupts Angel at work, or even as far back as the pilot in her interactions with Katie Killjoy.