#they'd have already left Team Rocket. just look at how much happier they seem now that they're doing mostly other things

[salsa-di-pomodoro]

FUCK!!!! I'VE BEEN THINKING THIS BUT I NEVER FOUND ANYONE ELSE WITH THE HEADCANON FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please read my tags i have the bad habit of ranting there instead of here

Give us the jessie bpd rant

JESSIE TEAMROCKET HAS BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A POST

[Paraphrased behaviours. I’m not a psychologist I just read the DSM-5 for fun. This is not a diagnostic tool, but if you identify with this post maybe look into some actual ones and learn some fun stuff about yourself.]

Identity problems, an unstable sense of self.

Jessie describes herself as adaptable, someone who can fit in anywhere, and this is indeed one of her strengths! She doesn’t let a lack of experience or qualifications discourage her because she believes that she can shift and change to suit her environment, and she’s right!

It’s also a major weakness of hers, though. Jessie in her element (when she’s her true self) is loud, confident, assertive, and bold. However, whenever she 'imprints’ on someone she throws her true personality aside entirely--buries it under the facade of someone who is malleable, softspoken, easy to be around, does whatever they can to make the person they love choose them. This trait of hers, and how it’s a fault, is a MAJOR plot point in XY063.

there’s a scene early on in this episode where she’s partially paralyzed from a stun spore, and Dr. White, the man who saved her from drowning, feeds her a berry to fix it. She poses triumphantly with her arms in the air and shouts ‘THAT DID THE TRICK!’ then realizes she’s being too loud around an attractive man and immediately throws her hands over her mouth, trying to stop more words from coming. It’s an incredibly effective way of showing how contradictory Jessie is when she imprints on someone. The Jessie we know would never even think of second guessing how much room she takes up in the world. 

In this episode, Jessie has feelings for Dr. White, and she completely buries her personality to make herself a silent, sweet, softspoken housewife in the hopes that he’ll fall in love with her. Dr. White instead falls for his childhood friend, a loud, rude, brash girl who likes to fight, calls him a wimp and tells him to fuck off when he presses her buttons.

The tragedy of this episode is that Jessie is forced to confront this about herself--this way she shifts and changes to keep people near may very likely have caused her to lose something here. She’s forced to reckon with the idea that if she had just been herself, he might have loved her back. Not in spite of her personality, but because of it. 

In Borderlines, this trait is often a survival mechanism, driven entirely BY:

A debilitating fear of potential abandonment, perceived or based in past trauma.

Jessie’s childhood trauma, though not often discussed, hinges entirely on her abandonment issues. She was given up to foster care around kindergarten age, which was long enough to learn to love her mother before never getting to see her again. Jessie’s implied to have been a deeply lonely child who never had a family to call her own, and who didn’t fit in with any other girls her age because she was too poor to afford even basic food and couldn’t keep up.

When Jessie opens up about her love life, she doesn’t go into specifics, only mentioning that it’s been full of nothing but heartbreak thus far. She’s an unreliable narrator, always, but when she’s inviting pity on herself it’s almost always manipulation to gain something, and these moments don’t seem to have that element. When she talks about her love life in EP100, it’s very carefully accented with this image:

In her adolescence, Jessie tried to center herself around her passions, pursuing them whenever she was handed the opportunity. Frequently, though, she’d find herself meeting people and growing attached to them, and would eventually reach a crossroads where she forced herself to choose between the people she cared about and the goals she chased relentlessly.

The biggest example of this is DP073, where she chooses to stay and train to be an idol, rather than to travel with the boy she’s in love with.

She ends up not passing her audition, losing both him and her shot at her career. This starts Jessie’s descent into compulsively abandoning/parting ways with everyone in her life in an attempt to control how people exit her story. The only way to prevent yourself from being abandoned with 100% certainty is, of course, to leave them before they can leave you.

This kinda blends into the next point, which is:

Instability in personal relationships.

As previously mentioned, Jessie has a tendency to leave people behind & sever ties. It’s only speculation on my part, but it would make sense that she does this because she has been left behind in so many regards and by so many people she loved, it’s the only way she feels she can take control of this phenomenon.

People who watched a lot of OS back in the day, but don’t necessarily keep up with the series much now, will famously circulate Jessie’s speech to the Ghost of Maiden Rock in EP020. The maiden was a woman who died waiting for her lover who was out at sea, and since her death her spirit’s remained on the cliffside in the hopes that he would come home. Jessie shoots the ghost of the maiden with a fucking bazooka half her height and says this:

This is lauded by 90s kids everywhere as a #GirlPower speech about how Jessie don’t need no man (which is true), but it’s actually, like... kinda tragic? She hates the ghost of the maiden because she sees herself in it, and she takes the opportunity to proclaim that what she sees of herself makes her sick to look at. This speech she gives is so aggressively out of nowhere and so long and rambling that you have no choice but to read it as deeply personal. She just short of confirms that you can’t leave Jessie because Jessie leaves FIRST.

And you GET to see this in action. Jessie struggles so hard with loyalty. In ALL her relationships! Literally all of them. Every time something shakes up her foundation with a person in her life, she hardlocks herself into run run RUN mode because there’s a slight chance they might leave her and she CANNOT have that.

It was shown in the most explicit detail in the side story about what she was like in training, where Jessie’s inability to stay beside various partners in Team Rocket is literally the trait that defined her to everyone in the organization.

There’s even a beautifully symbolic shot in the beginning of that episode where she abandons her 12th partner, and kneels down while the world literally collapses behind her.

In DP073, when Jessie sees her Dustox has fallen in love with another Dustox, she demands that Dustox leave despite the pokemon hesitating. She doesn’t let Dustox control that scenario--Jessie crushes her pokeball and demands she migrate with her mate.

When Meowth dips on her and James to work food service because he finds it more rewarding, Jessie doesn’t try to fight it, instead focuses her energy on also leaving her teammates in her dust because at least she can get out of there and move on before James abandons her.

When she realizes White loves another girl, she doesn’t bother to even say goodbye to him, she just leaves wordlessly with nothing in her wake but a bouquet of daisies, and when she remembers that oh right, her wobbuffet is also in love with White’s own--

She tries to leave him, too.

You can’t fire Jessie. Jessie quits.

This is the in-depth, analytical part of me Diagnosing Her. Everything else she exhibits is far more General and really doesn’t need a trained eye:

Instability in one’s goals, aspirations, or career: Jessie has a steady job in Team Rocket, but is constantly picking up side-hustles and being distracted by passions like acting, performing, contests, and the like. She’s left Team Rocket entirely before to pursue Contests, only to return almost immediately. (DP117)

Difficulty controlling the range/intensity of one’s emotional responses: Long past the Slapstick Days of the original series, Jessie’s still incredibly prone to outbursts. It’s not just anger--she reacts equally strongly when she’s sad, happy, lovestruck, anything. I have used this exact phrasing before, but Jessie doesn’t feel her emotions, she becomes them.

Poor impulse control: Kind goes hand-in-hand with the above.

Engaging in dangerous/risky/self-harming activities with no concern to personal limitations: This applies to all of Team Rocket, but Jessie seems to take it a step further in thinking she’s invincible. She’ll throw herself headfirst into anything, rarely backs down from a fight, and often has trouble taking rest days even when she needs them because she lacks self-preservation.

Hair-trigger temper: lol yeah.

Unstable emotions/mood swings: lol YEAH, Jessie will be crying one minute, screaming the next, immediately fine. She can cycle the whole spectrum of human emotion before you can finish a sentence.

Idealization & Imprinting: Jessie frequently rushes into relationships based entirely on the idea of a person, not grounded in reality. She becomes attached to people incredibly easy at times, willing to throw her entire life thus far away to run away with someone she’s just met.

Living entirely in the moment, unable to comprehend the past/future: Jessie prefers to go with the flow and, as previously mentioned, adapt if things don’t turn out in her favour. If something doesn’t work out for her, she immediately will turn in the other direction and start toward whatever’s there.

This post is so long and I could probably make it longer but I’m gonna stop here. My credentials are I’m an Incredibly Powerful Jessie Kinnie who has BPD herself as well as an autistic who’s special interest is the pokemon anime and team rocket specifically fdhdfghg.

IN CONCLUSION,