There’s a popular character analysis video that interprets Isolde from Reverse:1999 through the lens of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, specifically the dynamics of the Persona and the Shadow. While the approach is interesting, I believe it ultimately misrepresents the core theme of Isolde's character.
Furthermore, it serves as a cautionary tale about how misapplied psychoanalysis can reduce a complex, symbolically rich character into a psychological case study. Flattening her tragedy, misdirecting empathy, and ultimately missing the story’s deeper critique of the external factors around her.
The core argument of the video is that Isolde’s collapse stems from her failure to integrate her "Shadow", the repressed aspects of her personality she denies in order to maintain a socially acceptable Persona. Her Arcanum, which allows her to channel ghosts, is seen as a literal manifestation of this repression. These ghosts, or personas, fracture her identity and slowly consume her.
I always believe that you can’t accurately psychoanalyze someone who doesn’t exist. Characters are written to serve stories, not clinical accuracy. Especially in Isolde’s case where factors like arcanist bloodline, and arcanum play into shaping her mental state, it is rather reductive to use a real world psychology model for her character.
Characters like Isolde are not built to mirror real-world psychology. They are constructed to explore themes, often through abstraction, contradiction, and symbol. Treating them as though they function like real people with an inner world of their own for you to explore not only introduces methodological issues, it often obscures the “point” of the story being told.
Jungian psychology is a tempting framework for character interpretation. It provides a neat structure: conscious vs unconscious, Persona vs Shadow. But when that structure becomes the primary mode of reading, it can “displace” the actual narrative context that defines the character’s experiences.
In Isolde’s case, this misplacement is especially damaging. The video suggests that her tragedy is internal, that she succumbs to her Shadow because she cannot reconcile the parts of herself that she has repressed.
First and foremost it is a misreading of her character, Isolde’s outburst at the end of the story comes from fully embracing her repressed self. However, the bigger issue here is this analysis almost entirely omits the “external” conditions of her repression:
- She is a noblewoman raised under intense expectations to be "perfect," dutiful, and silent.
- She is an arcanist in a society that views arcanum as pathological.
- She is a young woman in a patriarchal structure that conflates female autonomy with madness.
- She is punished for both expressing emotion and for hiding it.
Her fracture is not just purely psychological. It is “social”, “political”, and “gendered”.
In the video, the youtuber states that Isolde’s perception of the world as a stage is interpreted as a Jungian sign of total detachment, a defense mechanism arising from her inability to reconcile persona and shadow.
But in the story, this metaphor is literary, not clinical. It critiques a society that forces people, especially women, to live as performances, to constantly inhabit roles they didn’t choose, to wear masks so convincingly that they forget they’re wearing a mask at all.
Isolde is not "crazy" because she sees the world as a play. She’s tragic because she’s right, her world does reduce people to roles. And when she reconciles with her shadow, she tries to break the script by attempting to fulfill Kakania’s dream.
Her ghosts are not merely psychological figments. They are both literal ghosts and symbols of “every self she had to become in order to survive”, selves that eventually overwhelm her true self.
The video ends with a visual metaphor: “Isolde’s Shadow is defeated, but not integrated. She survives, but emptied, a husk without cohesion, doomed to repeat the performance endlessly.”
I have two issues with this reading. First and foremost, Isolde was happily embracing her hypnotized stage because it is what Kakania procured for her. Initially, she resents Kakania and lashes out at her but eventually she comes to accept it as her only viable form of salvation:
“If this is the only salvation you brought… I will … Embrace it with joy”
Furthermore, What’s chilling is that this conclusion is framed as an inevitable result of her personal failure.
But what if the real tragedy isn’t that Isolde failed to “integrate”?
What if the tragedy is that “she was never given the space to integrate anything at all”?
From childhood, her emotions were pathologized. Her identity was restricted. Her needs as a human being were reframed as flaws. And every step she took towards autonomy, or even just honesty, brought her closer to destruction.
Her final collapse is not the result of a failed inner journey. It’s the result of a life spent being told that wholeness is dangerous, and that death is the only form of mercy.
To read Isolde properly, we must begin with questions that move beyond psychological diagnosis:
- What does it mean to survive through performance?
- What role does silence play in her story?
- Why is death interpreted by her broken self as mercy?
- And lastly, what does she represent?
These are not questions that psychology alone can answer. They are literary, social, and political.
Psychoanalysis can help illuminate meaning. But it should never replace context, empathy, or narrative awareness. When it does, it risks framing structural violence as personal weakness, and turning tragedy into a diagnosis.
Isolde doesn’t need to be understood through “Jung”. Her story needs to be listened to as a voice for every person who is forced into silence. Her tragedy is not a matter of her being unable to find her true self.
She is a woman raised to be silent. She learned to perform her way through repression, grief, and loss. And when she could no longer maintain the role, she was called mad, and made expendable just like any minority within that society.
There is something interesting that this youtuber does which I think beautifully illustrates his lack of understanding of Isolde. Possibly an attempt of trolling, he puts isokarl #1 as his nickname on Discord. Even taken as a joke, it shows exactly what happens when a complex character like Isolde is analyzed as a psychological archetype. Social commentary disappears, abuse becomes romantic fodders, queer readings become targets for ridicule and empathy is replaced with detached irony.
The framework of the analysis is not to listen to Isolde’s voice but to explain her, pin her down. That kind of analysis, even when seen through the language of psychology that was used to understand people like her, ended up replicating the very silencing that the character is written to expose.