>>130 Ugh. I’m sorry that I ever brought “bizarre pseudo-Stockholm Syndrome†into this conversation. My background is not in psychology and I wasn’t intending every wannabe Dr Phil to nitpick over the term. The author failed to make the character’s motive clear, and I was grappling for a term to describe how out of place and contradictory the behavior was. As I’ve said before, I’m not trying to diagnose fictional characters with anything. Trying to do that would be wildly inappropriate in the context of this fic anyway. Ahem. In your 1.5 years of college I’m sure you would have learned that sociopathic disorders manifest themselves through many behaviors and to varying degrees. Blanketing six characters as all having identical manifestations of a rare disorder—especially considering that they canonically come from extremely different backgrounds and have extremely different personalities—is ridiculous and your attempt at using this to defend glaring flaws in this story is laughable. Please don’t try to call bullshit on other people when you’re spouting it yourself. The Psych 101 textbook blurbs don’t prove a thing. If anything they only highlight the fact that the author was oblivious to psychological nuance. You can’t excuse flimsy writing with “Well, the characters are sociopaths!†because they’re not even written as sociopaths. They’re not written as anything except vehicles of torture. Once again: fine for porn, awful for storytelling. To their credit the author seems to plan on addressing current weaknesses through rewrites or later chapters, so this whole discussion is likely not even relevant. Last note: I wouldn’t go offering your services as any kind of authority on a subject after studying it for barely over a year.