#(I am coming to this with the POV of a former homeschooler who wasn't let out of the metaphorical lab until starting community college

[isfjmel-phleg]

Thad spends hundreds of years learning through VR and the information his sentient computer provides him. Kon spends the first few months of his life skating by on an implanted incomplete high school education. But eventually neither can escape the mortifying ordeal of actually having to go to school--real school, with other kids--and face the fact that neither of them know anything about interacting with their peers.

Despite their very different personalities, they fall back on the same socialization strategy, i.e.

bragging.

(Impulse #63, 65)

Thad functions very well academically in middle school; his training and his personal inclinations give him a scholarly bend. Unfortunately, that's really the only real-world thing he's good at, so it's what he applies in social interactions too. His response to congratulations from "his" friends for good grades is to lecture them on how he pulled it off and how "it was simple." On one level, he is showing off. On another, this is just how he has grown up interacting. He and CRAYDL spend a lot of time analyzing and dissecting methods and strategies and behaviors. Is this not what people talk about regularly?

When Bart's friends assume that this kind of talk is meant humorously, Thad adjusts accordingly and switches to making jokes, which for him is another form of showing off, in this case with his way with words. Except his mean-spirited sense of humor is socially inappropriate, which casts further suspicion on him from Bart's best friend, who is not impressed.

Elsewhere...

(Superboy 1994 #16, 18)

Kon shows up for his first day of high school wearing the super suit and accompanied by his manager, a reporter, and a camera crew, who are there to publicize this significant step in his personal life. He's spent most of his life in front of a camera, so that's the set of behaviors that he brings to interactions with his classmates. The only thing he's really equipped to talk about are his heroic feats, and he expects to be the center of attention because of his fame. Even in smaller, one-on-one interactions, he's constantly showing off.

Can you imagine going to high school with someone like this? He's got an adoring crowd the first day, but look at those kids in the booth on the right in the top panel. They are not impressed. Neither is Robert Lai, who only shortly into his acquaintance with Kon is already sick of hearing about tactile telekinesis. This inability to connect leaves Kon with very few friendships from school, and none on a very substantial level.

Thad, meanwhile, makes no friends at all on his own account. The only one who knows that he was a separate person and not Bart has no kind words in his memory, and the others are all relieved to have Bart's usual self back.

It's not their faults. Thad and Kon were both created to perform, and that's all they know how to do (at first, in Kon's case--he gets better at making friends when it's with people he has more in common with). But it's near impossible to learn social skills in a lab, and the skills these boys do have have the unfortunate effect of making them rather insufferable, which impairs their social abilities even further.