Continued from part one.
The most common cause of minors thinking they're unloved likely comes from a lack of apparent fondness in both their home and school lives. When a child spends eight hours a day asleep, eight hours a day in school and the remaining eight hours at home or elsewhere, such as a on a bus or in a car, it's understandable that how people view them at school and at home - the two places where they're liable to spend the vast majority of their time while awake - will have a significant impact on how they view themself.
If people do not openly care about them or their well-being at school or home, they're prone to believing they're unloved. If they believed they're unloved, you can expect their confidence and worldviews to be heavily affected. If I could only mention two "ingredients" in the metaphorical recipe that makes a person clingy, they would be an intense, persistent feeling of worthlessness, followed by the love or acceptance of another person. It's no wonder that so many real yanderes have low self-esteem, or used to have low self-esteem for many years.
Another major factor in the existence of yanderes is age. In teenagers in particular, hormones cause people to behave more emotionally or erratically than they otherwise would. It's also no secret that as we age and have more relationships, the initial importance of being in one wears off for most people; having a boyfriend for the seventh time is no longer as important or exciting to someone as it was to have a boyfriend for the very first time. It's no surprise, then, that younger people - who have only lived long enough to be in one or two relationships - tend to be more passionate about them. (And what is a yandere if not impassioned?)
Tying in with the above, it's a well-known fact that teens are often rebellious and try to shrug off social norms and expectations. Because of this - and an almost contradictory, innate desire to be accepted by those around them - it's not unheard of for them to grow into certain archetypes. Not "nerds" or "jocks" (though the following can certainly apply to the former group as well), but in this case, "goths," "emos," and similar ones - teenagers who frequently (or want to) wear black clothes and black makeup, dye their hair unnatural colors, and so on.
It's obvious that traditionally "darker" media usually appeals to these groups of people - things like horror movies and death metal. But what about a particular form of media that's consistently become more popular with American youth since the 90's: anime? Where Western cartoons, comics, and books fail to attract a young audience, anime - Japanese animation/cartoons - and its magazine-like counterpart, manga, often succeeds. It's common for anime to be targeted at teenagers, and it's also common for teens to watch it - especially ones with darker themes and characters.
Enter yanderes. Having already been impressionable enough to join a clique that takes part in gothic or similar cultures, it's easy to guess what might happen next: a person sees a fictional character they like, then tries to emulate them. In most cases, this doesn't go much further than simply buying and wearing an accessory worn by the same character, or doing something equally harmless. In more extreme cases, this can mean trying to mold their personality to be more similar to that of the character they idolize. This is sometimes rationalized by telling themself, "People clearly like this character; maybe if I was more like them, people would like me, too." Can you honestly say you've never witnessed someone who seems to think this to themself when they try to act like their favorite singer, celebrity, or anyone else they look up to?
Concluded in part three.
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