Predator

Four methods are named and they are the four ways of releasing anima from another source. Stress and pain make a body release its own stores, obstruction blocks a conduit so that the energy going through it can be taken and destruction releases everything at once. Marsh divides predators into three types by method rather than by character. A parasite drains energy by exhausting open anima conduits and leaving no reward for the initiator of interactions, taking from between two sources rather than from one. A sublator dominates the will of another and consumes the anima that will produces. A violator attacks an animus directly to extract anima by force. The three are distinguished by what they take control of, the interaction, the will or the animus. What the definition leaves out is as important as what it includes. Nothing about enjoyment, intent or cruelty appears, because the category is defined by where the energy comes from. A predator is someone whose supply depends on other people losing, and Marsh consistently treats that as a condition produced by blocked access to primary anima rather than as a disposition. The endoself is the general case, a predator who can only exist, or prefers to exist, through acquisition of secondary anima. The corollary about vulnerability is the uncomfortable one, since endoselves are extremely attracted to vulnerability and even people who are not otherwise predatory may become so in its presence.

The predator label in ordinary and legal use marks a person as a persistent danger, and sex offender registries and dangerous offender designations institutionalize it. Psychology studies instrumental aggression and the dark triad traits, treating predatory behaviour as dispositional and relatively stable. Criminology's routine activity theory locates offending in the convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target and an absent guardian, which is closer to Marsh's situational reading. She goes further than any of these by making the state produced and reversible, since her predator is created by blocked conduits rather than born with a disposition, which is a claim the forensic literature would largely reject.