Prey

Two very different groups are named as typical prey and the second is the surprising one. The first is expected, people with damaged personal membranes and existing deanimation, who are already depleted and cannot defend what remains. The second is the opposite condition. Channelers of primary anima, people with unusual access to it, are often prey precisely because of that access and because they lack a method of protecting themselves. Marsh makes the point elsewhere in the same terms, since someone who can access primary anima and does not exert unequal force is more likely to be prey than powerful, and their ability does not usually produce a desire to hoard, so they seek outlets to release the excess instead. Egalitarian forces appear alongside predatory ones in the definition, which places the crabs in a pot behaviour on the same list as predation, since a levelling impulse aimed at a person drains them as surely as a predator does. The last sentence is a structural claim rather than an observation. Prey either is or becomes the negative image, which means depletion and the role are the same thing arriving in either order. Someone cast as the negative image will be drained, and someone drained will end up cast that way, since guilt has to go somewhere and a depleted person cannot refuse it.

Victimology studies patterns of victimization and has long documented repeat victimization, with a small proportion of people experiencing a large share of incidents. Research on perceived vulnerability finds that offenders select targets by cues of weakness. Just world belief research accounts for the tendency to attribute victimization to the victim. Marsh's second category has no counterpart in this literature, since nothing in victimology predicts that unusual capability would attract predation, and her structural claim that prey and the negative image are the same position reached from either direction goes beyond the observation that victimization and stigma correlate.