As someone who is pretty crap at making friends, but at least decent at not offending people, I'm honestly really curious about meeting you and talking with you just to see if I can tell what the heck might be setting people off, or if I'll even notice it. I think I spent most of my primary school trying to figure out why everyone seemed to hate me, only to realise in secondary school that not all of it might have been my fault. I like the online medium of interaction because then one only has to analyse words instead of body language or whatever else might set people off when engaging in actual face-to-face conversation with them.
I have a collage of working theories of varying degrees of helpfulness, some of which I've previously mentioned, others of which I've developed since starting to write Exploding Canon.
One of the more recently-developed ones was learning of '
resting bitch face', as it was exceedingly consistent in a non-obvious way with a childhood oddity -that it was a semi-regular experience for teachers to carefully approach me and ask me if I was upset about something, or angry with my fellow students, or if something had happened. Whatever the exact wording, they thought I was upset, and I thought I was expressionless. (Naturally, I doubled-down on making my expression as neutral as possible in an attempt to stop this, which in retrospect probably made the problem worse) This was all in my prepubescent years, and I was consistently viewed as a cute kid -so much so that up until I was five or so, it was a semi-regular event for people to see me and squeal '
she's so cute!' To try to minimize drama (People were invariably embarrassed if they were informed I was a boy), my mother responded for a time by aggressively dressing me up in eg a blue shirt with a football upon it, in an attempt to signal 'this is a little boy'. It did literally nothing to stop people from interpreting me as an adorable little girl. Even once people stopped immediately assuming I was a girl, they still thought I was adorable.
The relevancy of all that is that once I was hitting my adult frame, the 'what a cute kid' stuff stopped and the 'I hate your guts for no clear reason' stuff became very much the default. In conjunction with the 'are you upset about something?' stuff, I suspect that, essentially, a cute kid seeming to scowl or glare with contempt was adorable or at least viewed as not worth getting angry over, while A Man doing the same was -and remains- a reason to get angry. I now make an effort to
not fall into my habit of deliberately wiping my expression, which does seem to have helped.
A different one I read years ago and unfortunately have never been able to find the article for, nor an alternative article making similar enough assertions, was the consideration of tone matching -that this article indicated that when you get a group of people together, they will all unconsciously match whoever the group agrees is the boss... which didn't necessarily match who was nominally the boss, interestingly... but it struck me because it jived with my auditory processing issues and how people -particularly people who consider themselves to have authority over me, such as police officers- tend to get visibly more hostile in response to me speaking regardless of the actual contents of my words. In particular, it explained why service industry people are generally a major exception -because the default social model for such a case would be them matching the customer and not the other way around. (It helps that I'm not an atrocious customer) As this is wholly unconscious -both the act of performing it
and the reaction to it- this is one of those 'not very helpful' theories. I'm not deliberately rejecting a subconscious acknowledgment of my fellow human's dominance, I just don't have the brain bits working adequately to even know this is a thing at all, and so am unlikely to ever fix this issue. It's one of many reasons why I'm pursuing the Patreon etc route, because one solution to this particular issue is to just... not have a boss, so they can't subconsciously decide I'm deliberately disrespecting their authority.
It's also a big part of why I've stuck heavily to online interactions, which I've
always found to involve less inexplicable hostility toward me, and this would help explain why: because this mechanism literally doesn't exist in eg a forum. (I've never been interested in eg Skype, and reading this just reinforced this preference)
Of course, this connects to theory three: Actual Social Shit. It's possible I
am subconsciously rejecting my fellow human beings' dominance over me, because I sure don't follow social norms in general connecting to such hierarchies. I bash my way into communities who have no idea who I am, immediately expect them to take my opinion seriously instead of expecting to work my way up to being respected, and just generally act as if I am an established peer when I absolutely am not established. This pretty consistently results in me either leaving when it becomes clear the community has zero interest in listening to me, or a period of intense drama and people being weirded the fuck out by me, and then enough time passes people become comfortable accepting me as an established peer, or even treat me as Old Guard, and the drama largely fades. Notably, one of my first overall positive online social experiences involved an essentially unmoderated section of a forum. (Due to UI considerations, it was semi-hidden, and the moderators assigned to it were gone or basically-gone when I showed up) So there were no authorities around to get mad at me for daring to treat them as equals.
I probably could make a concerted effort to change this issue, but I have actual philosophical reasons for doing this (In addition to whatever brain chemistry makes it particularly natural behavior for me), so it's technically under the Helpful Theory category but in practice since I don't live in, say, a military dictatorship where failure to bow and scrape can readily result in a bullet through the head, I'm reluctant to actually alter this behavior. I've curtailed some bits as it's become clear some components of the 'ignore the stupid newbies' behaviors aren't actually unreasonable, but just dropping it so people stop getting mad at me? Not likely with my current life trajectory.
Though it's at least gotten better on its own as I've gotten older: adults usually did
not like having a twelve-year-old condescend to explain how their physics explanation was misleading or flat-out wrong. Once I was firmly in my twenties, being smarter and more knowledgeable on
any topic stopped being a reason to hate my guts, requiring they considered themselves an experienced expert before it would spawn hatred. (Fortunately, I never ended up moving in circles with people with the relevant training to become offended, and at this point probably never will. Not in a context where they just
assume I should be less knowledgeable than them, at least)
Theory four is my assorted sensitivities for medical reasons: I hate sudden loud noises, find cigarette smoke unimaginably foul, and myriad other things. This is too strong a response to completely hide, and when people notice me holding my breath to avoid breathing their smoke, or reacting badly to their smoke, there is a strong tendency to make me the bad guy for daring to have a bad response. You know, to known carcinogens and whatnot. Totally unreasonable, how dare I cough or similar. (Thankfully, smokers are astoundingly rare in my current city. Back when I was in California, they were
everywhere, and routinely blatantly ignored No Smoking signs)
Then there's a whole bunch of sub-behaviors, some of which Exploding Canon has alluded to. Eye contact is a good example: I had multiple teachers throughout public school who insisted I should look them in the eye when they were talking to me. I can't do it. I
hate making eye contact; it actually bothers me more than
actual pain from injuries. Even with close family I actually
like, I tend to look around me, not directly at them. There's probably a bunch of interactions I've had where failure to make eye contact got taken as deliberate disrespect, or as a sign of a guilty conscience, or some such nonsense, when the actual answer is that I have
too much gorilla blood in me. (This is a joke. Mostly) Or my hatred of holding still; I had two separate teachers who wanted me tested for ADHD because I would rock in place in my chair and the noise drove them up the wall. Well, more precisely one just straight-up wanted my parents to prescribe Ritalin without bothering with testing. (I don't have ADHD, incidentally. Not according to the tests, anyway) And there are a
lot of contexts in which it's very rude to not hold extremely still, extremely quietly; I've gotten better at channeling this in ways that other people don't notice in general public conditions, but if you stuck me in a meeting room and dimmed the lights for a presentation, I would be seen and heard and assuredly considered disruptive, exactly as I was in public school.
This is all the stuff I remember off the top of my head and deliberately juggle on a constant basis. I know there's other stuff where I learned a behavior and don't actually remember it was to make people less prone to hating me.
Meatspace people still default to hating me, just less than when I was, say, thirteen.
Actually, I wonder... As you call yourself Ghoul King, and I'm pretty sure SI-Bakuda has mentioned it, I'm going to assume you are male. I am female, but I have a male friend who is almost as socially awkward as I am, and I've noticed he has much greater difficulty fitting into society compared to me. I think society might be more forgiving of quirky females compared to quirky males, or at least they come off as less off-putting.
Yes, I'm biologically male. (Though honestly I picked 'Ghoul King' because of the linguistic/social crap where a queen is assumed to have a king who is her social superior, instead of being accepted as the apex of her social group. And because my first several choices were already taken: I'd just be 'Ghoul', no modifier appended, if only somebody hadn't grabbed that screenname on Warcraft III's Battle.net before me) Psychologically, I'm 'why the fuck do you assholes put so much emphasis on this shit, god'. (I've not bothered to specify a pronoun once SV implemented that feature because I seriously do not give a shit. If some people used female pronouns for me in this thread because the Bakuda thing got them thinking I'm female, I wouldn't bother to correct them. I think I
have skipped such corrections before, in fact) And in terms of character relatability, I tend to identify much more with the trials and tribulations of female characters than male characters, all else being equal. (I used to blame this on how male characters get much more representation and yet a much greater tendency toward eg vapid power fantasies. That's... not irrelevant, but it's not the entire explanation) Pregnancy is the only thing I go 'yeah okay I dunno what you're experiencing there, I am completely excluded from this club and will shut up'. (Most people would include menstruation as a Foreign Female Thing. I'm sure I'm missing
nuance, but as far as 'intermittent, regular agony I can't do much but grit my teeth and bear it, looking forward to the day this shit stops'... very relatable! Albeit for different reasons)
As far as social acceptability goes, one thing I've observed is that men are by default expected to have a public face they manage, while women are by default assumed to, you know, marry a husband and then drop off the face of the planet as far as much of society is concerned. A quirky stereotypical working husband has to be able to hide his quirks from his bosses and coworkers, or go into a job where he gets to flaunt it as "I'm a
creative soul, maaaaannnn'. A quirky stereotypical stay-at-home wife just has to find a man who goes "Your bizarre behavior is hot/adorable/cute/otherwise appealing or at least acceptable" and there you go they just have to remember to minimize the quirkiness in, like, parent-teacher meetings or whatever.
I actually think this contrast is the foundation of mainstream American superhero fiction and magical girl anime, respectively: that Clark Kent Who Nobody Knows About This Hobby Of Fighting Crime He Has is an exaggerated version of 'working husband presents one face at his job, and then an entirely different face in his private life', and 'Sailor Moon secretly solving social ills by vaporizing literal manifestations of metaphorical evils' is equally an exaggerated version of a stay-at-home wife helping friends and family solve private problems. Literal Real Life Ami Mizuno teaches a young boy more self-confidence, not to mention some math, and though nobody can
see it the boy's life is much-improved. Magical Girl Ami Mizuno chases down the demonic manifestation of his psychological issues and vaporizes it with magic, causing him to stop struggling with
depression the magical demon in his soul.
And then I've always related
much more to magical girl anime characters than to superhero fiction characters. (Superman: The Animated Series was pretty good, but I never related to Clark) Taylor is
very anomalous in this regard.
Which part of why I'm rambling about all this is to set up for a response to...
I wonder if SI-Bakuda was made to interact in semi-normal society, she might get along better with people purely because they are more willing to forgive her social-awkwardness as a female?
... this.
Basically, I suspect it would depend on the exact definition of 'semi-normal' one meant. A SI-Bakuda who magically escaped the whole 'literal supervillain' thing -maybe we're assuming the SI happens
before the Cornell Bomber stuff- and then tried to enter the mainstream workforce would, I suspect, have many of the problems I already have, and additionally gain even more problems from sexism and racism. People take me as Generic Whitebread American (Which is actually pretty bizarre, but sure, whatever) and so I quietly benefit from a lot of American sexism and racism -when I was homeless, one set of cops pretty clearly thought I was a rich kid whose daddy had taken away the keys to the yacht, never mind that I'd been homeless for multiple years at that point. (This incident also ties into a lot of my theories: they seemed to think they were humoring a harmlessly stupid asshole, like it was funny for me to be sneering at them... even though I wasn't sneering) If I could keep my eccentricities on the downlow in reality, I wouldn't have to worry about nonsense like 'this Pizza Hut's best driver is a black kid, and the cops conspicuously stop him in particular
way more than the other drivers'. (This was a complaint I overheard while homeless, not a hypothetical example) SI-Bakuda
would be dealing with all that nonsense.
Conversely, a SI-Bakuda who settled down with someone and did the out-of-sight homemaker routine probably
would go over a lot better with society. Even if all the resting bitch face and whatnot still applied, I rather suspect this would actually feed into shit like the whole 'haughty women can be hot' thing, among other things, instead of being pure 'get other peoples' hackles up'. Or if she married someone well enough off, people would blithely assume this was pure social position crap and not take it personally, like I've literally seen people do with upper-class married women who were less-than-great to cashiers and whatnot.
I don't have enough data to guess how people might react if she tried to go into more of a creative industry. How people respond to women doing creative work is so thoroughly variable I've never been able to meaningfully isolate variables, and my impression is that it's rapidly evolved in my lifetime to boot.
In short: You cannot solve problems with talking if the problems you are trying to solve don't actually exist, because the people causing said problems are not being honest with themselves, as people often are.
Pretty much! Can't be 'adequately respectful' if the actual issue is that some quality outside your control has the individual biased against you as the real reason for their dislike, where the disrespect they're claiming is wholly imaginary/made-up.
Yeah, I pretty quickly learned that politeness is not the correct approach. Politeness is, actually, off-putting and vaguely alien. In fact my personal experience shows that carefully applied informality and irregular intrusion into other's 'personal space' is key to forming positive relationships.
Well, I really should've also mentioned in that prior post that I've had some pretty strong practically-a-control-group experiences that make it clear my word choice is not the issue. (As in, I meant to, then forgot before hitting 'post reply') Like, one time I went to a deli to order something in specific: I was promptly told they didn't have it. I objected that I ordered it just yesterday, and he told me 'well, we don't carry it anymore', and that was that. I happened to be shopping with my mother, who is generally received much more positively by most people, mentioned the situation to her, and she went to try to order. She said literally the exact same stuff I did, and for the first part his response was the same, but for the second part he (However grudgingly) said he'd check in back. (Where of course it turned out they were still carrying the food in question)
One could argue it was the repetition or something, and maybe it even was in this particular case, but this
kind of contrast is the default: people find my mother likable well beyond anything that can be explained entirely by word choice and whatnot, and find me unlikable well beyond such, with these trends crossing gender lines, only being partially influenced by social position (eg cops are particularly stark of a contrast, whereas service staff are less stark, warming up to either of us eventually, though quicker with her), and so on.
I'm saying this to ground the following: I experimented in public school with being more personable. This was a brand-new school, in a new state; nobody knew what I was normally like, so nobody would interpret this as a change in personality. It produced worse results than being polite did, regardless of whether I initiated or they did. I never developed any friends in that school, where I'd had a single friend at any given moment in prior schools (And gotten along decently with three different teachers), and I'm reasonably confident I developed a reputation as The Creepy Kid, like in a stereotypical manga about the class loner being shunned.
(It probably didn't help that this was the school where my Halloween costumes were Batman, when this was before he was all that strongly mainstream, and a somewhat-homemade ninja costume that had teachers thinking my plastic sword in its plastic sheath was a
real sword, and my plastic sai were Dangerously Pointy and got confiscated)
I dunno, maybe I'd have been able to make personability work if I'd made it to high school and there'd been goths or something to embrace creepiness as a desirable quality. I kind of suspect they'd have ended up not liking me, too, though, simply because I've never taken to identifying as part of any given social group in general.
-----------------------------------
I'd wonder if maybe I shouldn't natter on about myself this much, but hey! It's a SI!
This is story-relevant content!
Though I do hope I'll have another
chapter up before too long...
