Zombies Ruin Everything

I found one! Look guys! Over here! I found an INFP villain!

In my MBTI: Villains article, I hated that I had to leave our NF buddies out of the fun. It’s not that there aren’t any NF villains, it’s just so rare. Cue annoyed emails that I’m wrong about half my villains and that many are actually INFJ (Holy crap I got one as I typed this sentence) or INFP. The genres I’m mostly familiar with contain so few and many that are typed as that just ain’t right.

But now that I’ve searched through the anal cavity of my mind, I’ve actually got a real, live, fictional villain. And thy name is Harry.

*I typed comic book Harry as ESTJ. Immediately got well placed arguments from a friend and a user below that he’s ISFP or ISFJ. That being the case, I don’t want to have a conflicting post from a character I’m not going to back up all the way, so I’ve deleted it for now. I’ll probably give druggie Harry his own post later than.

So amazazing…

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the cinematic counterpart being dubbed an Intuitive on the grounds that this is the one that matters or this is the one with depth. Comics are a different medium than film and comics don’t end. So different writers are going to bend the characters a little more to their will and the details change over time but that doesn’t mean the “N” character is any deeper.

Alright. So.

Harry’s never really in a good place at any point in the movie. Even when he’s hanging out with Parker, he’s got to get some stuff off his chest. But he’s got a lot going on with his dad “dying” and all and being that dad didn’t really care for him in the first place doesn’t make things better.  But what makes Harry an INFP, at least in this film, is that his reaction to it all is very centered on his own feelings.

Any strong Fi user on a rampage really is stranger than anything else. First you get their pain and anguish oozing out in a way that’s unsettling to anyone in the room. If their mood continues like this (and if it’s already started, it will probably keep going), lashing out in some sense is inevitable. But it won’t necessarily be in a way that makes sense to anybody around them. Fi users tend to blurt out seemingly random things anyway so their fits of rage aren’t any different in that sense, only now nobody’s happy.

Harry himself is seething the majority of the movie, isn’t he? As mentioned, the guy is going through a hard time so we get Fi brooding. I’m not saying functions are recognizable in characters directly But Fi broods and so does Harry. A good example of this is Harry trying to set up a meet with Spider-Man through his “photographer” Peter Parker. There’s no kind of understanding from Harry as to what a bizarre request it is for Peter to get a superhero to give his blood to dying Kid Billionaire but Harry is not only desperate, his mind is on his own priorities.

Even when he turns completely evil, it’s all about the vendetta. No mission, just revenge.

Woulda had better luck if he contacted Spidey through the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Spidey turning him down to give his blood away doesn’t receive begging from Harry but he almost immediately get a sort of “Why are you letting me die?” type of reaction. Or a similar but more everyday reaction in an argument “Why are you doing this to me?” Anybody that knows a strong Fi user that’s bent out of shape tends to victimize themselves. This puts their friend or acquaintances in quite the spot, especially if those people are Fe users. Martyrs, they are!

Did I mention Harry is on the negative side of the INFP list? They can also have high standards that not even they can meet at times, which explains Harry’s frustration with everybody around him, including himself. I think the perfect representation of Harry’s character is throwing his glass past Spider-Man’s head and having it shatter on the wall only to ricochet back and cut his own face. As reasonable as his angst is, he only makes it worse for himself.

When Harry breaks Electro out of prison, his offer isn’t anything like a business transaction, more based on a mutual hatred of Spider-Man. He isnt persuasive in any sort of manipulating sense but out of an earnest “need” for Electro’s help. What an ISFP, the INFP’s Sensor cousin, would have done in this situation we can’t say but the INFP’s second function is Ne (Extroverted Intuition), which is all about the immediate and the most exciting idea. It’s why INFPs seem so random. Fi is blunt while Ne seems chaotic.

Thanks to Dane Dehaan’s acting, we do hear the empathy in Harry’s voice before he’s escorted out of Oscorp by security while simultaneously being blamed for the corruption of the business. “You’re experimenting on people!” he says to the accuser as though he really does feel for those in his situation. He’s getting screwed by Oscorp, as have countless others.

Nobody takes up the cause like an INFP. While some believe his need of Electro extended only to how he could be used, Harry really did seem to sympathize with his fellow villain. Both had been screwed over by the same people (Spider-Man and Oscorp) and it’s only right that Max and Harry would be the ones to bring them down although they’re perceptions were of course, askewed.

Remember the thing about INFPs, that even the villains still need their righteous cause. Key words there- “righteous cause.” Them simply believing in what they’re doing isn’t enough, everybody believes in what they’re doing; the INFP has got to feel it.

Twins!

This entry was posted on 03/27/2015 at 2:16 am and is filed under MBTI Idealists, MBTI Stuff with tags Green Goblin, Harry Osborn, infp, the amazing spider-man 2, villains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.