Anyone who knows me knows that I really despise the YouTube channel “Game Theory.” This was originally because I have been a serious game theorist since long before Hyrule Historia crushed Zelda Timeline Theory, and I don’t like how the host of the show’s comedic approach to the matter of theories, coupled with his popularity, is making us all look like stupid jokesters. It doesn’t help that I personally don’t find him all that funny. However, the biggest reason I dislike Game Theory isn’t this, but is rather the fact that on multiple occasions the host has thrown around a variety of mental health diagnoses on fictional characters as a joke, with clearly little knowledge on the subject.
Game Theory has done this on multiple occasions, but the one that bothered me most was when the host tried to argue that Princess Peach of the Mario franchise has bipolar disorder. I myself have had bipolar disorder all my life, and it really irked me that his argument basically boiled down to “She likes cake and people with bipolar disorder have cravings for junk food, and she had mood swings as a power in Super Princess Peach.” I’m going to debunk this right now by noting that cravings aren’t really a bipolar thing, but rather a common side effect of medication for bipolar treatment. I should also note that the island Peach was on in Super Princess Peach has the side effect of giving the people on it mood swings. Theory disproven.
So anyways, I guess what I’m trying to lead up to here is that I really hate that nobody ever calls anyone out on stuff like this. Gay stereotypes are wrong, racial stereotypes are wrong, sexist stereotypes are wrong, all this is taught to us from the moment we learn what all those words mean, but you never hear “mental Health stereotypes are wrong”. You rarely see people get mad at their peers for using the word retarded, but when someone says, “that’s so gay”, they are immediately labeled an asshole.
I blame two forces of power for this: one is the government, and the other is the media. The government doesn’t make enough of an effort to publicly say, “by the way, mental health awareness is a thing.” And the media is full of negative portrayals of mental illness. Watch any crime show, I guarantee there’s an episode or two where the killer had some sort of mental health diagnosis. Coming back to the gay rights thing, all sorts of shows have taken to featuring gay characters, and the token gay is just as necessary to producers as the token non-Caucasian, but there’s never any mentally ill characters unless that’s all there is to their characters, and even that is exceedingly rare.
So now that this has occurred or re-occurred to you, what you gonna do about it? I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna write a slice of life story with a mentally ill character, and that’s NOT going to be the only trait they have.
– Originally published March 10, 2014