Snakes Are Cool
In a moment of madness and loneliness brought on by the coronavirus quarantine, I bought a new pet: a female king snake hatchling, and I named her Rubi, short for Rubirules from TOME.
This inspired me to add animals to my thesis project, Do I Date, a visual novel to raise awareness for mental disorders. Each character has a “statistics” card that displays their basic information, in order to help the player decide which character to pursue. After attempting to add “pets” into the card, I quickly realised that there was not enough room in the current layout. This led me to redo the entire interface of the stat card. I ended up going through several very different iterations of the card layout. Ultimately, I decided on a more open, polished look for the cards
Note: I will be using the term “sociopath” to refer to people with antisocial personality disorder from here on out. See my article here.
Back to the topic of snakes, I decided that the character Aura should have two snakes as pets. It took me a while to figure out why this seemed to fit. In my lifetime, I have known and extensively interacted with four diagnosed sociopaths over the course of several years. Funnily enough, all four of them had pet snakes. Now I am not saying that every sociopath has a pet snake, or that anyone with a pet snake is a sociopath, but it is certainly an interesting coincidence. After realising this, it made perfect sense that my sociopathic character, Aura, would have not one, but two snakes- one a deadly viper, the other a sizeable python.
After having had her for a few weeks, I am actually able to note several similarities between the way a snake behaves and the mannerisms of a textbook sociopath.
First and foremost, sociopaths are stripped of their ability to distinguish between moral right and wrong, which leaves them with their primal, “lizard brain” instincts- fight or flight.
Snakes are masters of camouflage. This is a quality found in serial killers- someone who is extremely adept at blending into the background, usually by their ability to act “normally” in society.
Many snakes are also ambush predators, which means they do not actively go out and hunt, but disguise themselves and wait for prey to come across their path. This is similar to a sociopath’s ability to plan ahead and manipulate others without bothersome emotions and morality getting in their way, tying back to both the “lizard brain” as well as camouflage techniques.
Ultimately, me purchasing a snake led me down a path to study the similarities between these legless reptiles and sociopaths, which is certainly something I never intended to investigate. In no way is this meant to be a clinical evaluation of sociopaths; however, the parallels do exist.
