#anything i’ve seen more than like twice just becomes part of my background. i cease to notice it

[fingertipsmp3]

Have we learned nothing. Have we truly learned nothing.

[sol1056]

This is a continuation of a previous question, and both are worth reading for the discussion of mindsets in regards to pain (especially self-inflicted). Although the question is in regards to Kylo Ren and the Sith/Jedi, it does have real-world equivalent. As someone who developed this mindset through life experience and an intensely difficult sport (we used to tell each other, “the pain means you’re doing it right”), this part especially spoke to me:

[This] determination [that] goes up in conjunction to the number of injuries they sustain ... is an outgrowth of a real world philosophy regarding pain taken to extremes, which is: the more you beat on someone, the more painful their situation gets, then the more determined they get and the more motivated they are to succeed... this is a natural outgrowth of someone who has had a very difficult life and experienced a great deal of emotional/physical pain. The more pain you experience, then the more you adjust to it, grow comfortable with it, and start shaking off injuries other people would find incredibly debilitating. Often, this happens without the individual even realizing it because their base state for “normal” is skewed beyond recognizable and they adjusted to meet that state of pain in order to survive. This is The Determinator. You can rip them to pieces and like a human terminator, they. just. keep. coming. This occurs on sheer force of will alone, because your mind is more powerful than your body. (emphasis mine)

Probably because of that personal background, I do tend to gravitate towards characters who display the same trait: Edward Elric, Naruto, Shiro (VLD), Yato (Noragami), Kenshin, Heero Yuy, even Yuuri (YoI) to some degree. (Oddly, it’s harder to find female characters who show the same.) Of those whose backstory is known in part or whole, none had it easy; yes, I would count Yuuri’s near-debilitating anxiety as an equivalent kind of emotional pain that required he fight -- and keep fighting -- to achieve anything, let alone win. 

This is why I roll my eyes when VLD fans (or the EPs) argue Shiro was some kind of a Golden Boy. You wanna know what golden boys really are?

Weak. 

They’re golden because everything they do turns out right, turns out well, with no seeming effort from them. Oh, sure, they run the hills and lift the weights and do their part, but there’s practically a chasm between giving it your all when that’s always been enough -- and giving it your all and then some when you know it still might not be enough. 

A Golden Boy, by definition, has never had to fight for the small space they’re allowed to occupy; they exist as though entitled to the air they breathe, the space they claim, the attention their receive as their rightful due. I've seen golden boys knocked flat on their asses by their first race, their first fight, their first major failure. An awful lot of them will walk away. When everything’s always come easy to you, easy is all you know.

The difference is that golden boys judge success by winning. To them, near-constant pain doesn’t signal survival, but loss -- and the very state of being a ‘golden boy’ implies a lack of experience with loss. Especially of the nature required to create that twisted relationship with pain, whether emotional or physical: where survival is victory. 

That’s the key, I think: there are people who fight to win, and there are people who’ve learned to fight because the alternative isn’t loss, it’s ceasing to exist. 

In this respect, golden boys are just a more fortunate version of any other regular person: pain means something is wrong. That’s basically the opposite of what the ‘determinator’ concept means, just as my team used to tell each other that pain meant we were doing it right. Wrong, to us, was a lack of pain. 

Ironically, it’s taken me years to work my way out of that mindset, and I’m still not there. Only in the past few years have I tried to stop and say, hey, maybe I shouldn’t be okay with being in pain. A caveat: I have no idea if this applies to chronic pain; I have no personal experience in that area. This is avoidable pain that began as unavoidable, until your only options were to be crushed by it or to make it yours. 

Do the second, and soon enough, pain validates you. Pain means you went down, got up, and kept going with a grin. It means the blood on your knuckles or splattered on your shirt is a point of pride. It means you took that hurt thrown at you and made it a strength so you could hit back twice as hard. In some strange way, the pain itself is a victory. 

And yeah, it’s not even close to sustainable, especially as years pass and you start to realize the aftermath. So while I’m simpatico with such fighter-type characters, I can also see what lies ahead, and wonder how (or even whether) they’ll recognize what they’ve become. 

For as long as it took to learn this mindset, it takes a lot longer to unlearn. I’d like to think that unlearning also means recognizing not everything has to be a fight. I haven’t found that to be true, myself. I just have different battlefields these days. So I don’t yet have the answers.  

But that’s something a golden boy would never understand.