#I feel like he lacks empathy

[knifearo]

this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...

[octoir]

in the politest way possible, I disagree!

1a. Let’s go back and talk about SPEW.

It’s in their nature ter look after humans, that’s what they like, see? Yeh’d be makin’ ‘em unhappy ter take away their work, an’ insultin’ ‘em if yeh tried ter pay ‘em.

Wow. How incredibly annoying, Hermione is, for trying to free Elves when they don’t even want to be freed! How desperate, how cross, how naive and stuck-up she is. Doesn’t she know how to actually help house elves? Doesn’t she know that they actually like being mistreated? (what a weird parallel between SPEW and liberalism, that must just be coincidence)

Throughout GoF, Hermione and Ron bicker back and forth about SPEW. Ron finds it hilarious and mocks her relentlessly. What about Harry? What does he think? We don’t know. It’s oddly absent of opinion, except for moments like this,

“Yeah, right,” said Harry. He took a swig of butterbeer under his cloak. “Hermione, when are you going to give up on this spew stuff?”

when he asks when she’ll give up, like an exasperated parent asking their child when they’ll give up on their new phase, as if trying to abolish slavery can be portrayed as a ‘phase.’

I don’t think Harry is necessarily internally moralistic at all. He seems to depend on other people telling him what the right opinion is for marginalized groups, otherwise, he doesn’t care much for politics. Centaurs? Goblins? Meh. They’re not people, after all.

1b. I also think Harry isn’t really capable of moral nuance— for example, Marietta. Harry is absolutely furious at her. Cho tries to explain that Marietta’s mother was in danger of losing her job at the Ministry, yet Harry still just does not care, claiming she’s an “unforgivable traitor.” He even describes her (canonically) permanent disfigurement as “brilliant.”

And this doesn’t change. I know everyone hates the epilogue— fuck it, I’m citing it. He names one of his kids after Dumbledore and Snape. What does naming a child mean?

In my experience, people usually name their children after people or things they greatly like or admire (think of Grace, Hope, Noah, etc) as a form of hope that their children have similar qualities. Yikes!

Dumbledore and Snape are both teenagers trapped in adult bodies, unable to emotionally mature beyond key moments in their formative years (Ariana/Grindelwald, Lily, etc) and thus absolutely fuck Harry and the Trio over in almost laughably horrible ways. But Harry still respects them, feels positively towards them, names his son after them. There’s no moral nuance here. They’re not even morally grey characters— it feels like all of Dumbledore and Snape’s actions have been, somewhat ironically, excused for the “Greater Good,” excused for what they did in the end.

2. okay…so he calls TMR handsome. Euphemia’s point, however, was that Harry “called people ugly with no remorse.” I’m not dying on this hill, but there are a few quotes that I think are pretty interesting:

“Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large pink face, not much neck, small, watery blue eyes, and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head.”

“Dudley hitched up his trousers, which were slipping down his fat bottom.”

“The lighted dial of Dudley’s watch, which was dangling over the edge of the sofa on his fat wrist…”

“…and watching Dudley tearing out of the room as fast as his fat legs would carry him.”

“Behind him walked a Slytherin girl who reminded Harry of a picture he’d seen in Holidays with Hags. She was large and square and her heavy jaw jutted aggressively.” (Millicent Bulstrode)

“Her hair was set in elaborate and curiously rigid curls that contrasted oddly with her heavy-jawed face.” (Rita Skeeter)

“‘How are you?’ she said, standing up and holding out one of her large, mannish hands to Dumbledore.” (Rita Skeeter)

“Once or twice she had turned squatly in her seat to look at him, her wide toad’s mouth stretched in what he thought had been a gloating smile.” (Umbridge)

“‘Thank you very much, Professor.’ ‘You’re a good boy,’ said Professor Slughorn, tears trickling down his fat cheeks into his walrus mustache.”

A particular scene:

"Oh yeah, you were staying with them this summer, weren't you, Potter?" sneered Malfoy. "So tell me, is his mother really that porky, or is it just the picture?"

"You know your mother, Malfoy?" said Harry — both he and Hermione had grabbed the back of Ron's robes to stop him from launching himself at Malfoy — "that expression she's got, like she's got dung under her nose? Has she always looked like that, or was it just because you were with her?"

Malfoy's pale face went slightly pink. “Don’t you dare insult my mother, Potter.”

"Keep your fat mouth shut, then," said Harry, turning away.

Very thought-provoking, awfully similar situations. I wonder what the key difference is 🤷

3. Okay, Draco. I’ll give you that— he did try to cast the cruciatus. However, I’m not trying to focus on whether or not that was justified. Justified or not, it gets brushed off way, way too easily. He does feel regret…but I don’t think it’s genuine, long-term regret. He tells Hermione that he does genuinely feel bad about it…

He was having a bad enough time without Hermione lecturing him; the looks on the Gryffindor team’s faces when he had told them he would not be able to play on Saturday had been the worst punishment of all. He could feel Ginny’s eyes on him now but did not meet them; he did not want to see disappointment or anger there. He had just told her that she would be playing Seeker on Saturday and that Dean would be rejoining the team as Chaser in her place. Perhaps, if they won, Ginny and Dean would make up during the post-match euphoria. … The thought went through Harry like an icy knife. …

But damn if his internal dialogue doesn’t reveal something different. And this is taken from literally the moment before he says that. Seriously, check page 594.

Everything just gets glossed over in favor of the Prince, of the shock of Snape as the Prince, and Harry’s attempted murder just gets…quietly hushed up. He doesn’t get expelled, he doesn’t even have to say sorry— maybe he serves a few detentions, but what the fuck is a few detentions in the face of a life? Harry has literally almost MURDERED someone and yet he faces ZERO consequences and appears to experience NO regret (which, hm, like father like son right? LMFAO)

4. Carrow. Oh, Carrow. The cruciatus curse is interesting.

“Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?” she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. “You need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain - to enjoy it - righteous anger won’t hurt me for long…

Harry wanted to cause pain. Not just pain— unimaginable, excruciating pain, pain that he’s personally experienced. And he didn’t have to just want to cause pain—he also had to enjoy it. You can’t dismiss it as a moral outburst of “righteous anger,” because wanting to cause pain so severe it has literally driven people into insanity is not something you push past and sweep under the bed.

You mention that what sets Harry apart from someone like LV is his forgiving nature. Frankly, I think what sets him apart is that he’s been groomed. His attempted suicide shouldn’t be seen as this awe-inspiring, tear-jerking thing. It should be seen as what it really is— a culmination of (intentional or not) 7 years of consistently rewarded self-sacrificial behavior by literally every adult in his life.

it's so funny to me when harry's portrayed as a saint in tomarry fics. like, i get it, compared to tom, harry is a saint, but just because of that, it doesn't mean he's the nicest, purest little bean.

harry's literally fatphobic, unless it's towards people he likes. he calls people ugly with no remorse and he's side-eyeing someone 90% of the time.

he's against hermione's dedication to at least try and free the elves (which is basically being neutral on slave labour)

he idolises questionable people (dumbledore and snape)

he uses the cruciatus successfully. he nearly kills someone and barely feels any remorse for it (draco in hbp)

no matter how much you want to believe, his moral compass isn't the best

[gutfaced]

yes i am the biggest advocate of surrogate father haymitch & adopted daughter katniss but like. they're so Awful. they've not got a mother/daughter relationship, they've got that father/daughter relationship where the dad is both reaching for a connection and rejecting the thing that he made because she's too much like him, too close to what he is and far away from it because of her potential and the daughter rejects because she doesn't understand him. understanding him is understanding herself. caring for him is caring for herself. and then she's awful to him because she doesn't understand and doesn't want to understand. and he's rejectful of her because she's got so many traits that are for the worse and not for the better. their similarities don't hurt nearly as much as what their differencee impale them with. it will always be what katniss could be (haymitch), and what haymitch prevented/could've been (katniss.)

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[yujeong]

oh. by tonkla’s "it'll get better" (tapping win’s cheek) what do u think he meant by it. is he completely out of korn’s life now? watchuguysthink?

Anon, I'm afraid Tonkla cannot get out of Korn's life without facing some serious consequences, the most severe one being.... becoming homeless.

(In case it wasn't obvious to some fans, Sammon confirmed that the house Tonkla is living in is Korn's, although I personally had figured it out on my own.)

But other than that, I don't think Tonkla wants to get out of Korn's life. He still loves him and wants his attention and affection. He just got justifiably upset by Korn's behavior and kicked him out.

Now, in my opinion, what he meant when he said "It'll get better" to Win was their own relationship - Tonkla and Win's. Meaning that Win will get used to Tonkla's situation and there won't be any problems in the future for them. Let's not forget that he said it as a response to Win's "What should I do now?":

"Should I leave? Should I stay?"

Tonkla essentially told him to not think too much about it. I don't trust Win to do that, though.

I love it so much when the dialogue is subtle and BOC has produced so many shows with scripts that contain a bunch of it. I couldn't be happier about that, to be honest.

[zerodaryls]

it's so funny (read: sad) that if bigoted fuckheads didn't insist i was a woman simply by virtue of my body at birth, i'd probably be chill with she/her pronouns in addition to he/they. if my mom didn't insist i was her daughter, i'd probably let her call me that, and we could still have a relationship.

i'm nonbinary and 'gendered' words are hypothetically meaningless, but because there are so many people who are more interested in telling me who i am rather than lovingly and curiously letting me express my own sense of self, those words carry trauma.

there's no reason a nonbinary person like myself can't be a son and a child and a daughter. there's no reason a nonbinary person like me can't go by he, they, and she.

'she' is not a slur. 'daughter' is not derogatory. 'beautiful' 'pretty' 'gorgeous' 'feminine' are not insults.

to the contrary, they're parts of language that express certain facets of a multi-faceted human existence, like mine.

and i have this sad, mournful feeling that if it weren't for unloving, condescending people, i'd probably be down to be called any of those things alongside my usual masculine/neutral terminology.

but i'd rather die than let anyone tell me what i have to be called.

[a-couple-of-notes]

hey sorry i wanna talk some more about no one mourns the wicked.

when glinda's introduced, her first celebratory lines slide into a question:

Isn't it nice to know that good will conquer evil, the truth we all believe'll by and by outlive a lie for you and - [I]?

and in a song full of double meanings, glinda isn't asking that question (only) to the ozians. she's asking it to elphaba, who has always been that other half of "you and i." even though glinda has promised not to reveal the truth, she's still hoping that it will come to light someday for her and elphaba. and it's also a heartbreaking call-forward to defying gravity, because just like that moment where glinda almost gets on the broom, there can't be a "you and i" here--it's cut off by the world they exist in.

[the-monkey-ruler]

would you say macaque is something like a necessary evil in the novel?

I would say you are talking about the Six Eared Macaque right? There are a few Macaques in the story. I mean I wouldn't really say he is "necessary" as that isn't really the role he plays within the novel.

When I think "necessary evil" I think more like a force in society that is kept in order to keep the peace or to preserve other social forces that are considered more important to keep than to lose. A necessary evil is an evil that someone believes must be done or accepted because it is necessary to achieve a better outcome—especially because possible alternative courses of action or inaction are expected to be worse.

Which I do not believe the Six-Eared Macaque plays at all.

He is to play the role of the mirror to Sun Wukong. He is supposed to represent the absolute worse of what Wukong is capable of, not really being the opposite of Wukong but rather more of a foil to show Wukong what he could have been (I actually think another great foil character is Erlang Shen for different reasons). A version of Wukong that if he continued to be a warlord, continued to kill without regard for the value of life or consequences that the would turn into him.

The Six-Eared Macaque is not given a backstory so it's hard to say if they have similar backgrounds but rather it is that they are the same species and have the same drive that Wukong had at the start of the novel. Both being of immense power and, like Wukong, The Six Earred Macaque's greatest desire was to get fame and glory and to be recognized for it, despite the consequences.

Personally I believe that the Six-Eared Macaque was inspired by the Buddist saing “The dharma is not to be transmitted to the sixth ear" which means that there isn't a third person around to easdrop, usually between student and teacher. This is only used once when Wukong was speaking with Master Puti and this is where I think that the Six Earred Macaque learned the same skill that Wukong did.

Of course, this also means that he doesn't have a complete understanding. He would always be slightly off with his own teachings, always a step behind, and only be able to imitate what they were eavesdropping on as they were never told directly.

Kind of like how Wukong is supposed to be a master of transformation when he fought Erlang Shen and still lost the SIx Earred Macaque is supposed to discern and have knowledge but he is still just eavesdropping. He is never going to have the real thing.

Wukong is meant to represent Nothingness or emptiness, literally in his name meaning "Monkey Awakened to Emptiness" and how he and the Six Earred Macaque are meant to be of one mind but they are "two mind" that are fighting each other. One being one's natural impulsive thoughts and the other is the self-control people practice to think ahead. They are both inside a person's mind but only one can have full control of the body so to speak. I think a good western example of this would be like Ego vs ID but please don't take that as a one-to-one, it's not!

It is connected to how Wukong is the mind monkey and in order for him to reach his namesake that state of overcoming uncontrollable thought he needs to fight the worst version of himself, which is what I think the Six-Eared Macaque is supposed to represent. This actually goes with how I think Wukong and his connection with Bailong being the Horse of Will show how Wukong has gradually started to overcome his own thoughts and practice self-control though his dedicated willpower. (Bailong is an important allegory yet again.)

Long story short I think that the Six-Eared Macaque is to more represents Wukong's character growth. Rather than be a "necessary evil" he is another milestone to show that Wukong is about to look at the worst traits of himself and through fighting himself and wrestling with who he is, he is able to come to accept himself as well... and by defeating his doppelganger he shows that after battling himself he comes out the victor. Him moving on and changing throughout the journey shows him to be stronger and more sure of himself both mentally and spiritually.

[mad-hunts]

barton flirtatiously changing the subject™ to stop anyone (particularly level 2 friends and up as well as people he has a crush on) from bringing up his cannibalism is definitely something that he would do. like, do i want to talk about it? NOPE. am i going to express that to you by saying ' oh, UHH, actually... can we not talk about that right now? ' instead of paying compliments to you like ' hey, so totally random thought here, but have i ever told you that you have a really great smile? ' also nope LMAOO

[no-empathy-culture-is]

No/Low empathy culture is seeing the comment section of short film, 'Horacio' being a whole bunch of anti low empathy/sympathy idiots and being so exhausted. People do not need empathy in order to not kill someone!! We just Choose not to kill others, is that not what everyone is doing??

Like low empathy is not why that guy killed Horacio, he needs work on his impulse control and noise suppression headphones.

no/low empathy culture is

[happyk44]

It's kinda funny because w/ my Zeus kid OC (who I've been thinking about renaming as Araceli, 'cause it means altar of the sky, apparently, which I like 'cause sky-themed-ish but also like. A little bit I wanted something that meant cloud the way Coral's name means... Coral) the implication is that she takes after her father to an almost mirroring degree because I developed her and my other PJO OCs (who also all got retconned into an OG work) at the same time I was playing around with my ideas on the Big Six, and the gist at the time was supposed to show how the Big Six could've turned out if they weren't so weird.

So the dynamics of the friendship was supposed to be very similar to the dynamics of Big Six's relationship to each other (e.g. Mary having a major crush on Hera's "representative" but also being attracted to literally every other person that walked by, Nico being the soberminded big brother figure, etc). It's also one of the reasons Mary would get angry whenever someone would compare to her dad, because similarly I think Zeus would get angry if someone compared him to his dad.

And then eventually as I got older and the daydream moved around with whatever obsession I had at the time, the characters and general storyline began to change away from that in some ways but core features sort of stayed and so I ended up with a version of Zeus that ignores his daughter's pleas for help because he loves her but her pain hurts him because he can't do anything about it and it's his fault she's suffering.

She got this intensity from him, it's ingrained into the way it's ingrained in him. But he was able to rebuild the world according to his own needs and wants and beliefs. And she can't really do that. So he doesn't have any advice he can give her when she's on her knees begging for help with all the noise and pain in her head. He doesn't know what to do! It's like he can just go and rip it out of her.

But she's suffering because she's different and she's weird and she knows it and she knows it's his fault which is why she's asking but he just doesn't know and he can't handle watching her suffering and listening to her cry when there is no helpful answer to give her because "I don't know" isn't going to fix it.

He's supposed to fix things, he's supposed to have the answers. He's king of the world, by damn! He's a problem solver. He supposed to have a solution, and a million backup solutions. But he doesn't! There's nothing he can do to make the noise stop because truth be told, the noise never really stopped for him! It just got easier and quieter. So he turns away from her because he loves her and he's failing her and he can't handle that.

But also in the same breath, I think he recognizes similar aspects of himself in Jason, who isn't even asking for help, and fucking despises him for it, lol.

✨ Girl Dad ✨

[grimalkinmessor]

I think that I struggle to write L because I don't know who he is beneath his masks.

Light is the protagonist, the main character, we see every decision he makes and get the reasoning behind them—his personality and mental facilities are an open book to the audience, even as he's shown to be someone who hides himself away constantly.

L is the same in that way, but we don't have that glimpse behind the curtain we do with Light. L being unknowable is what makes him so intimidating as an antagonist; you never know what he's going to do next, and you never know his true reasons for doing what he does unless someone else figures it out first. He's a big fat liar, just like Light, but unlike Light, we never get to see him be completely honest with someone.

I can write L's masks with ease, but ask me to get inside his head and give you his thoughts? I have NO fucking clue what's going on in there man.

Just like I feel like I can write Light's honest thoughts and personality with ease, but struggle a bit to write his false faces seen by someone else—it's a matter of perspective.

[crimeronan]

there's this girl on tiktok/youtube shorts who talks about being a 'diagnosed sociopath' (which afaik isn't a thing anymore and she's too young to have been alive when it was a diagnostic thing -- i assume she just means ASPD and is using buzzword language, but it doesn't really matter either way because...... psychiatric classifications are a farce) & she'll discuss what makes her angry, how she gets revenge and/or protects people, how she forms attachments, n how she prioritizes different aspects of her life, and i keep watching some of these shorts like "this.... isn't sociopathy??? everyone with sense does this???" and then i look in the comments and everyone's going "GOD this is such good advice i wish i could do this so easily but i feel sooo bad about it 🥺🥺🥺🥺" and i'm like. huh. girl you either gotta stop being so relatable or i'll have to acknowledge a very obvious thing that i've known about myself for ages,

[diseaseriddencube]

"you can't ship Alastor with anyone because he's a narcissist and a psychopath and clearly he could never be in any sort of relationship, even platonically, because he feels no empathy and is incapable of feeling affection for anyone"

like that is... that's a take-

[seilon]

kinda wild how you can have almost every aspect of your life deeply intertwined with someone else for years and then have all of that thrown in your face when that person decides none of it meant anything and, in fact, was toxic and purge-worthy

[unimportantweirdo]

⚠️TW⚠️

had the wrong reaction to someone i know being 15ft away from getting shot and i know that but also i don't care and i don't know if i should be worried