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It Belongs to a Museum

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The Phoenixian said:
It's just a thing where the protagonist will be a guy putting on an act at every moment. Since on a certain level that's all his body is capable of.

It's deliberate in the same way that, for instance, every word written in a forum post is deliberate. Some of it is true, some of it is performative. Some things are harder to hide or lie about than others, and some things like one's own perspective, how one sees the world, is nigh-impossible to keep out of it. But it's still all deliberate.
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Mmm... I'd extend that. I struggled with this for years, wrestling with the question of how anyone could ever know and understand you if you never showed your true self to others, only the masks that are convenient at any time. After all, it's impossible to be totally, perpetually authentic; a person is too complex to ever convey themselves fully to anyone else in any given moment and with the influence of social dynamics and persistent relationships it's impossible not to pick and choose the pieces that you share and don't share.

I once asked a dear friend about this and she offered a different framing: that the masks are, if not wholly so, nonetheless and still each authentically yourself. Who else could they be? That framing helped me find a great deal more peace.
 
You don't have to be a Liche Priest to have to make a conscious effort to deliberately mimic all of the exhausting rituals of body language and emotional expression that 'normal' people don't have to think about. A philosopher might muse over whether it might be truer to not, but Pahtsekhen could tell you that when you don't, the way people respond to that will pretty severely taint a lot of one's efforts to communicate.
 
Yeah, speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I do pretty much exactly that in all my day to day interaction, including with close friends and family. I'm not being deceptive, either, I'm aggressively honest for the most part, but I mimic what neurotypical people would act like if they were feeling what I'm feeling in order to properly communicate those feelings.

It's like speaking a foreign language...you're not lying just because you have to translate it internally or phrase things differently to be understood.
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Yeah, speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I do pretty much exactly that in all my day to day interaction, including with close friends and family. I'm not being deceptive, either, I'm aggressively honest for the most part, but I mimic what neurotypical people would act like if they were feeling what I'm feeling in order to properly communicate those feelings.

It's like speaking a foreign language...you're not lying just because you have to translate it internally or phrase things differently to be understood.
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Mmm. The ideal would be neurotypical people (and, indeed, other non-neurotypical people - we're hardly homogenous) meeting us in the middle, of course. Sadly, people at large are too much of a mixed bag to count on it more generally... Hopefully some day, if we and others keep making our voices heard.
 
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Nimbus said:
Mmm... I'd extend that. I struggled with this for years, wrestling with the question of how anyone could ever know and understand you if you never showed your true self to others, only the masks that are convenient at any time. After all, it's impossible to be totally, perpetually authentic; a person is too complex to ever convey themselves fully to anyone else in any given moment and with the influence of social dynamics and persistent relationships it's impossible not to pick and choose the pieces that you share and don't share.

I once asked a dear friend about this and she offered a different framing: that the masks are, if not wholly so, nonetheless and still each authentically yourself. Who else could they be? That framing helped me find a great deal more peace.
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to throw some metaphor in here: the facets of a cut gem are all still OF the gem, no matter which one you are looking at
 
As someone who needs to actively mimic "normal" behaviour, and usually fails at it, i don't really buy the idea that Uncle Paht having to consciously act out all the normal body language makes it dishonest.
He is communicating, he is just better at it than most.
Wether or not he chooses to do so dishonestly is separate issue, and one almost every person ever was subject to.
 
[X] [ACQUIRE] Awakening Armoury - Ranged
[X] [ACQUIRE] The Dread Abyssal
[X] [ACQUIRE] Awakening Armoury - Artillery

Not sure about grief etc.
I do look forward to showing off the variety of booty obtained by the Coast
 
Nimbus said:
Mmm... I'd extend that. I struggled with this for years, wrestling with the question of how anyone could ever know and understand you if you never showed your true self to others, only the masks that are convenient at any time. After all, it's impossible to be totally, perpetually authentic; a person is too complex to ever convey themselves fully to anyone else in any given moment and with the influence of social dynamics and persistent relationships it's impossible not to pick and choose the pieces that you share and don't share.

I once asked a dear friend about this and she offered a different framing: that the masks are, if not wholly so, nonetheless and still each authentically yourself. Who else could they be? That framing helped me find a great deal more peace.
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Mhm. A line that came to mind after that post was:

I show you now my calmest side.
My heart clear of the storm inside.

There's a whole bunch of layers to this sort of thing. Showing yourself and not, but it's very difficult to say it all at once.

The flipside of it all is that for all I play up the deliberation, an immense amount of someone's thoughts and background go into their words, however carefully chosen. Even if it cannot all be seen, it's all there. Even someone deliberately trying to hide and skilled in doing so will show fragments of their true self. And not small ones.

One could say something like... When being genuine, you cannot help but notice the ways you are inevitably dishonest. When being dishonest, you cannot help but notice the ways people are inevitably genuine... I'm not sure that's relevant to the character analysis, but it felt like a good thing to say to the whole issue of masks and authenticity part of it.

Trying to drag this back on track, it's just that I would expect Pahtsekhen's body language and so on to have as much or more in common with writing or acting than unvarnished emotional expression, and forum posting is a form of that (my assumptions felt) everyone was familiar with. Along with the suggestion, in the way that, those familiar with the game, would read a mafia post. Or an unreliable narrator. It's the forms of these things I'm most familiar with (And which, my perspective being what it is, inevitably bleeds into my writing and the assumed background knowledge of others without immense care.)

But it is a bit difficult to unpack everything I have to say on the topic and what it means for reading Pahtsekhen's character and motives all at once. Especially when I'm pretty tired right now and it's clearly hampering my ability to drill down into all of it and condense it coherently.

If there's a point to sum it up I think it's: Pahtsekhen struck and still strikes me as someone who should be read carefully. Not in the sense of "with judgement and suspicion," as I feel like my earlier posts may have implied, but in the sense that there's a lot of interesting parts to the character, and he's someone who's nature is going to show up in unusual ways, especially when he means it to.

"Look at this guy. It really feels like you could take him apart and see how he ticks, and I think doing so is both a fun time and a way to understand him as a character."
 
Speaking as a system here, I actually have a harder time understanding the others precisely because we share a brain, and thus emotions.

Everyone puts on a mask in order to be understood, Pahtsekhen is simply unique in that essentially all of his reactions are conscious rather than simply most of them. If anything, that might make him even more clear, without being muddied by involuntary emotional reactions.
 
Nimbus said:
Mmm. The ideal would be neurotypical people (and, indeed, other non-neurotypical people - we're hardly homogenous) meeting us in the middle, of course, and I'm fortunate that my close friends do and, more often than not, my family do as well; much more relaxing than it would be otherwise. Hope the same is true in your own case! (Boney's too, possibly? Appreciate the affirmation even if not!)
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Yeah, this isn't just a theoretical exercise for me. My much younger self was convinced that nonverbal communication was all noise and therefore text-based communication was more 'true'; then my slightly older but still very young self believed that there was a bandwidth of communication available to neurotypicals that I'd never be able to tap into and the best I could hope for was to be able to convincingly mimic 'nothing to see here' signals. These days I look at entire industries based on teaching supposedly neurotypical people to more deeply decode other peoples' body language and re-encode their own and think that it's all just a big tangled mess arising from trying to cludge together a human GUI on a caveman OS that's running on monkey hardware, and there is no 'normal' brain, just more typical ones, and if we're ever going to figure it all out we're going to need a lot more empathy and kindness than is currently in circulation.
 
Boney said:
Yeah, this isn't just a theoretical exercise for me. My much younger self was convinced that nonverbal communication was all noise and therefore text-based communication was more 'true'; then my slightly older but still very young self believed that there was a bandwidth of communication available to neurotypicals that I'd never be able to tap into and the best I could hope for was to be able to convincingly mimic 'nothing to see here' signals. These days I look at entire industries based on teaching supposedly neurotypical people to more deeply decode other peoples' body language and re-encode their own and think that it's all just a big tangled mess arising from trying to cludge together a human GUI on a caveman OS that's running on monkey hardware, and there is no 'normal' brain, just more typical ones, and if we're ever going to figure it all out we're going to need a lot more empathy and kindness than is currently in circulation.
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From the discussion and general responses to my posts, I feel like I might have stepped onto that topic in a bad way.

If you were hurt by that, (or if anyone here was) then you have my apologies.
 
The Phoenixian said:
From the discussion and general responses to my posts, I feel like I might have stepped onto that topic in a bad way.

If you were hurt by that, (or if anyone here was) then you have my apologies.
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I think it's okay. It's a discussion worth having, and we wouldn't be having it if you hadn't brought it up. And you have been talking about a millennia-old Liche Priest in the direct employ of a Vampire Pirate, I think applying a certain amount of scrutinization and suspicion is entirely fair, and I don't think it would suggest that you'd treat an autistic person the same way for masking.

It's actually a kind of common dynamic in discussion about fantasy and sci fi. Certain traits or reputations are woven into fictional peoples or species, making it so that they can be examined from a fresh perspective - often for better, as it can remove a lot of preconceptions and prejudices that could get in the way of understanding, but sometimes it can make things awkward when that degree of separation is abruptly removed and you find your initial musings about some fantasy race or alien species or mystical spirit or whatever suddenly being applied to a real-world group. Some corners of the internet treat this as a valid 'gotcha', but I don't think that's fair or useful.
 
I think part of why I dislike grief as a choice is that it makes uncle into an active tempter, who lures in vulnerable people. It makes him largely the cause of his students evil. I prefer him as a character that likes already enthusiastic students. Who doesn't see any need to deliberately push his students into falling to the dark side, but rather just provides them with knowledge, and leaves it to them what they do with it. While still supremely unwise to teach this way, I prefer that the evil in his students be their own doing and inclinations, rather than something he deliberately encourages.
 
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Lures in vulnerable people, seeks to help the suffering.
Can depend on motivation more than action.
All the options are levers, all of them are us luring them in with a promise of something, and all of them use a vulnerability we are seeing in the person in front of us.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
I think part of why I dislike greif as a choice is that it makes uncle into an active tempter, who lures in vulnerable people. It makes him largely the cause of his students evil. I prefer him as a character that likes already enthusiastic students. Who doesn't see any need to deliberately push his students into falling to the dark side, but rather just provides them with knowledge, and leaves it to them what they do with it. While still supremely unwise to teach this way, I prefer that the evil in his students be their own doing and inclinations, rather than something he deliberately encourages.
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This works on the assumption that keeping people's souls from passing into the afterlife and building them a working body is a bad thing.

Giving nobles a vessel that can house and preserve their souls after death and later ressurection was literally a major part of Pahtsekhen's job description. It is no more a temptation of the vulnerable than offering a high paying job to someone in need of money.

Basically the equivalent of a former interior designer offering to redecorate someone's home in lieu of payment.
 
Omegahugger said:
This works on the assumption that keeping people's souls from passing into the afterlife and building them a working body is a bad thing.

Giving nobles a vessel that can house and preserve their souls after death and later ressurection was literally a major part of Pahtsekhen's job description. It is no more a temptation of the vulnerable than offering a high paying job to someone in need of money.

Basically the equivalent of a former interior designer offering to redecorate someone's home in lieu of payment.
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Exactly!

Also, regardless of what temptations we offer, the final choice will be hers.
 
I understand that Grief is the most direct route to making Fallenstar our apprentice, which is what many people who voted for her were going for, but I personally feel like it places too much emphasis of being a tempter rather than a tutor than I'd enjoy

[x] [LEVER] Prestige
[x] [LEVER] Power
 
Blackwing said:
I understand that Grief is the most direct route to making Fallenstar our apprentice, which is what many people who voted for her were going for, but I personally feel like it places too much emphasis of being a tempter rather than a tutor than I'd enjoy
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It is really temptation? Like, in a significant way?

Because Prestige and Power also both offer Aelsabrim something that she wants and needs, that's why we can use them both as levers to get her to help us.

I get that "bringing your loved one back from the death" is very deal-with-the-devil coded, but for someone of the mortuary cult it really isn't a more supernatural part of Paht's skillset than his millenia of experience navigating courtly drama or making the common folk love him. The wnds of magic have been a part of this world longer than both elves and humans, so it isn't even significantly more supernatural than everything else going on.

I suppose the thing I am wondering is why "I can teach you how to bring your husband(Grief) back" is being a tempter but "I can help you boost the fame(Prestige) and glory of the Fallenstar name" and "I can tell you how to navigate the world of politics(Power) to your advantage" aren't.
 
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