How To Create A Yandere (+ free characters)

Step Four - Limits & Modes

Step Four: Establish your yandere's limits...and then their actual limits.

Your yandere has a comfort zone, no matter how vast it may or may not be. The previous step should have shown a minor amount of weakness in your yandere, particularly their behavior when not in control. This step will reveal more weaknesses to really give a well-rounded feeling to your yandere. Being a yandere already demonstrates a deranged mindset, but your character should still have a Hinged and Unhinged Mode. Like any regular person, we have our comfort zone and then we have our most raw behavior in serious, dire situations. You want to confirm and elaborate how far your yandere is willing to go with their love interest, as well as with others. You want to do the same for when they're in Unhinged Mode, which is likely to be when their love interest is gone and to be a more severe version of their behavior.

Read this paragraph if you need me to go more in-depth; In Hinged Mode, your yandere doesn't feel too threatened by the possibility of losing their love interest for good. Basing off of the information you compiled in all of the previous steps, you should be able to establish limits for your yandere. Maybe your yandere wouldn't go as far as kidnapping their love interest, but they would slice their tires in an attempt to get asked for a ride. Maybe your yandere wouldn't go as far as giving scars to their love interest with sharp objects but would give them bruises from blunt force. Maybe your yandere wouldn't go as far as killing their love interest but would kill their loved ones. The range of your yandere's modes depends on how deranged they are at the start and how far you want to stretch their range of behavior. You should know your yandere's limits when they're dealing with their love interest versus when they're dealing with other people. Maybe they're willing to cause immense harm to others but can't bring themself to hurt their love interest. Perhaps once they're in Unhinged mode, feeling seriously and desperately threatened, they do cause harm to their love interest. Overall, you have your yandere before their trigger, after their trigger in Hinged Mode, and in Unhinged Mode. This gives you a total of three levels that will keep your yandere from seeming stagnant to the reader, and it might even provide a shock when a new level of derangement is revealed.