Attachment Styles of the Mane 6 · 12:50am Apr 4th, 2021
Anyone who is writing a fic with romance might be interested in this article about attachment style from Psychology Today.
It identifies attachment styles on two axis, anxiety (low to high) and avoidance of intimacy (low to high).
- A Secure attachment style (50% of the population) is the result of having low anxiety and low avoidance of intimacy.
- Anxious (20%) or Avoidant (25%) attachment styles are the results of having high levels of anxiety or the avoidance of intimacy, but not both.
- Combination (3-55%) attachment styles are rare.
If you find these definitions useful, check out the article for a useful graphic description of the various attachment styles.
MLP / EqG
Based on these definitions, how would you characterize the Mane 6 and their friends? Because relationship drama is more likely when characters have issues, and we’re talking about fanfic writing here, I haven’t put any of the characters in the Secure category. Here is one breakdown.
Anxious
- Twilight Sparkle
- Fluttershy
- Pinkie Pie
- Rarity
- Sunset Shimmer
- Luna
Avoidance
- Applejack
- Rainbow Dash
- Starlight Glimmer
- Trixie
- Celestia
The article describes how these attachment styles are likely to impact relationships.
Anxious Attachment
You want to be close and are able to be intimate. To maintain a positive connection, you give up your needs to please and accommodate your partner. But because you don’t get your needs met, you become unhappy. You’re preoccupied with the relationship and highly attuned to your partner, worrying that he or she wants less closeness. You often take things personally with a negative twist and project negative outcomes.
High anxiety can cause troublesome actions.
To alleviate your anxiety, you may play games or manipulate your partner to get attention and reassurance by withdrawing, acting out emotionally, not returning calls, provoking jealousy, or threatening to leave. You may also become jealous of his or her attention to others and call or text frequently, even when asked not to.
Avoidant Attachment
There are two sub-types: Dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant. If you’re the former, you’re easily able to cut off difficult emotions. Narcissists fall into this category and those who repress their feelings. If you’re conscious of wanting closeness but distrust or are fearful of it, you have a fearful-avoidant style.
If you avoid closeness, your independence and self-sufficiency are more important to you than intimacy. You can enjoy closeness—to a limit. In relationships, you act self-sufficient and self-reliant and aren’t comfortable sharing feelings.
High avoidance can also cause troublesome actions.
You protect your freedom and delay commitment. Once committed, you create mental distance with ongoing dissatisfaction about your relationship, focusing on your partner’s minor flaws or reminiscing about your single days or another idealized relationship.
Just as the anxiously attached person is hypervigilant for signs of distance, you’re hypervigilant about your partner’s attempts to control you or limit your autonomy and freedom in any way. You engage in distancing behaviors, such as flirting, making unilateral decisions, ignoring your partner, or dismissing his or her feelings and needs.
The article goes into more details about the impact of the different attachment styles, and how people can try to change their style.
- Does this version of attachment style seem like a useful tool for creating stories about relationship issues?
- What attachment styles do you think best fit the Mane 6 and their friends?
- Are their differences in the attachment styles of the same characters in MLP vs. EqG?
I’d say that this largely depends on how you choose to write the characters.
5489863
Agreed that you can write any character in any attachment style. However some of them do fit their canon depictions at different points in the series. I think most of the characters moved toward more secure attachment styles as the series went on.
For example, anxiety is often part of the early seasons canon depictions of Twilight and Fluttershy.
Through most of Rainbow Rocks, Sunset demonstrates some anxiety by bending over backwards to make a positive connection.
This also sounds a lot like misplaced generosity, so it might fit some depictions of Rarity.
Or it could be a description of Celestia's commitment to the nation over her own happiness. I may have Luna and Celestia flipped.
This sounds a lot like early depictions of Rainbow Dash and of Trixie up till the end of the series.
But it is true that I have enjoyed depictions of all these characters in all of these attachment styles.
5489900
I usually find the MBTI tests helpful for writing if you want to check those out.
5489981
Sounds good. Any recommendations for references? I am especially interested in any suggestions of how various classifications may use different methods to solve their issues.
Do you have suggested MBTI ratings for the Mane 6 or others?
Do you create MBTI ratings for OCs?
5489982
I use this one: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
I don’t have any for all of the main six, but I have some for my more developed OCs, Twilight, the princesses, and a few others.
5489997
Thanks for the link! I’ll check it out.
Care to share your MBTIs for any of the canon characters? It would be instructive to see your ratings and what you think it represents about their personalities.
5490011
I’d have to check my notes, since I usually get to a point where I don’t need to go back to the MBTI all that often.