#communication is hard work

[gofancyninjaworld]

No one is born knowing how to communicate

A: And that's okay...

Dr Kuseno made it look so easy. He just swanned into Saitama's apartment, proferred him a gift of beef and the hero's hostility melted away.

Fubuki felt positively foolish, and yet encouraged.

Since then, however, she's found that the only thing meat bribes pull in are dogs. Literal dogs:

And even dogs need more than meat to be loyal.

What gives? Well, it's obvious that Fubuki mistook Dr Kuseno's gift for a bribe: more on that later. Probably. And yeah, it's funny, but it's more interesting than that.

Learning how to communicate is complex. There are a ludicrous number of unspoken conventions and rules in every human society, so much so that we don't fully learn how to smile socially until we're in our forties. Dr Kuseno carefully judged his gift: he had a legitimate reason to offer Saitama a gift in the first place, out of gratitude for Saitama going out of his way to mentor Genos. Then he chose a gift Saitama would be sure to appreciate and presented it at a time when Saitama would be thinking about dinner. The worst that could have happened is that Saitama took the gift but insisted on the doctor going home (and taking Genos with him) -- it would still have left the desired positive impression. And things went really well. Kuseno made it look effortless.

Fubuki is only in her early twenties and her experience to date has been far from typical. She's learned that either she can intimidate people or she can flatter them into doing what she wants. With Saitama (and later Bang, Bomb, and Kuseno), she has to learn how to talk to more powerful people whom she cannot overpower, over whom she has no leverage, and who are unimpressed by her looks, simpering, or flattery.

Fortunately, Fubuki is nothing if not astute. She's worked out that she needs to develop complementary skills if she's to make herself useful to the S-Class heroes she wants to hang with. How to talk to them to get the help and cooperation she desires? Ah, that's a work in progress.

B: ...Unless it's not

Let's move onto another miscommunication.

Something that I hadn't before was that, unlike the webcomic version where Saitama only thinks to himself that Genos seems depressed, in the manga, Saitama out and out asks him if this is the case. He wants to know.

It mirrors King asking Saitama that very same question and getting Saitama to open up and be vulnerable for the first time (ever, in any version of the story). So it is very appropriate to see Saitama trying to do the same for Genos, particularly as he is openly fond of the guy.

However, it goes wrong. Saitama feels himself under pressure to say something wise to make it better. So he puts on his best 'confident' face and inadvertently makes everything much worse. Oh dear. What makes this particularly painful in the manga is that Saitama is much more invested in trying to reach Genos, and it's made Genos think that Saitama saying that he doesn't see what he's doing must mean that earlier times when he's praised him must have been just Saitama being nice. For sure, Genos could have pushed back and made Saitama clarify what he meant, but he's even worse at communicating: and Saitama's glib remark about being bright struck him square in the insecurities.

I'm going to come to something that I only realised once I started typing this up. Even though I've pointed out their abilities to communicate, neither King nor Kuseno have the perfect words to say. Kuseno started out by first committing a faux pas in bringing his great big outside boots into Saitama's flat, then nearly boring Saitama to death with a long-winded explanation. King started out by trying to guess what was bothering Saitama. Both, however, did the most important thing about effective communication: they picked up on their going wrong and changed tack.

It's not about saying the right thing: it's about responding to the person you're talking to.

The thing that King did that Saitama was trying to do for Genos was to ask Saitama open questions, and shut up in the interim, letting Saitama talk to fill in the silence. He'd only speak to ask more open questions when Saitama ran out of things to say, and through that, gently started to challenge Saitama's thinking.

But doing so means being comfortable with several seconds of silence. And that is excruciating. It is almost irresistible to jump in and say something, anything. And it would have been a longish wait, for Genos to slowly sit down and decide to start speaking, which might well have started being about something only tangentially related to his worry. King did that for Saitama: Saitama started out talking about what was bothering him on the surface -- being too strong -- before eventually coming to what was really bothering him, feeling lonely and profoundly isolated from everyone around him. Saitama does not yet know how to wait a person out.

It's a problem in this case because it's introduced a big barrier between those two, not an insurmountable one for sure, but one that could easily compound later.

Ah well, no one is born a communicator. We just have to wait and see if they work out a way to open up and be honest with each other. So it goes! There's more ways to introduce conflicts than to have a monster trample Tokyo, after all!

And so help me, the struggle to learn how to communicate is 1000% worthwhile.

[qoldenskies]

i think its so funny when people take the way donnie acts at face value even though its a horrible lie because he's a horrible liar, while understanding leo is bullshitting very well despite him actually being GOOD at bullshitting. many such cases

[confettishake2]

UGHH TPOT 14 KILLED ME i love twogaty & now theres angst... great 💔

[saragrosie]

I have been sketching. So much tma. Here's some expansions on my Jon and Martin designs I've been doing.

Another note I forgor to mention is I love how after hearing Simon go "it's enough to make your hair turn white" about Martin's office in s4 many of us collectively agreed his hair turned white because of his association with the Lonely. The shared consciousness is real and we use it to play hot potato with the communal brain cell dedicated to the sillies.

Closeup of apocalypse boyfriends (also to the person who said they love my s5 Jon's fancy white girl updo: I think about that every day)

[reasonsforhope]

By the way, when I say that I really do believe that we will make it, I am 100% saying that as someone who has been following good news extensively + basically daily for over two years now, and has come to that conclusion slowly and deliberately, based on extensive available evidence. It's not a platitude. I genuinely do mean it, and I could write you a whole dissertation on all the reasons why.

(you know. if I had the time and an in-progress doctorate. rip.)

[farshootergotme]

Batman 'firing' Robin will never sit well with me because having the authority to fire someone implies they applied for a job, and a job includes payment.

So, Batman firing Robin is like saying he's paying Robin for doing his job. Except, is he paying? The simple answer would be no, but then the next logical option is assuming that the payment comes with everything he does for a Robin.

Since Batman provides the equipment he has the right to take it back and that's not the part that bothers me. What bothers me is that there's another crucial thing that Batman does for Robin: provide a home.

And while, yes, Batman's intention isn't to take away the safe space of Robin or to make him believe he's making him leave his house, intentions don't matter in miscommunication.

Firing Robin means not 'paying' him anymore. It means taking away what he's giving him because he isn't doing his job correctly.

For Robin, it means losing his home.

[kl0ud69]

“more daddy”

[p-s-yokubo]

I love how basically the entire ninjago community is in agreement that Arin shouldn’t get powers bc that would ruin the point of his character but the nexo knights community is just totally chill with clay getting powers even though that also ruins the point of his character

[gt-ridel]

Sharing valuable resources is one of the most important ways borrowers show that they have bonded with another individual/family/clan.

You are a human who has recently discovered the borrower living somewhere in your home.

You have been as gentle and reassuring with them as can be. They still seem skittish, preferring to run away than have a conversation. But at least they've started accepting the food you leave out for them! You were worried about their diet.

Then one morning, when you stumble into the kitchen for breakfast, in place of the food you left out, you find a perfectly butchered rat. Gutted, cleaned, skinned and presented to you on the once clean plate.

It's a valuable gift. Clearly a lot of time and energy went into this.

But you're not a borrower, you're a human. And there's a dead rat on your counter. What do you do when the (still skittish) tiny person starts bringing you cat gifts?

[blushedtrait]

The Valentine kitchen ᡣ𐭩ྀིྀི₊ ⊹

[bonnibellexox]

Writing: Things I Learnt the Hard Way #5

If you can’t seem to figure out your plot, you might be making it too easy for your characters. Make more people hate them, take away their resources and limit their initial knowledge. This will also help your exposition come naturally over the course of the story instead pouring everything out on page one.

Your characters have to want something.

Interested in the story of a biologist from an underground bunker falling in love with a vibrant, mutated girl the surface? Check out my new book, Status Quo (coming this year) here: @status-quo-book

[thepeacefulgarden]

[silverlining-ships]

I feel like she'd get a kick out of watching me play Skyrim, considering how awful I am at it

[razzek]

One thing that's starting to really get to me with the James Somerton stuff is a real strong undercurrent of disdain toward his fans. And yeah, I was one of them. A good scam artist isn't as easy to spot as y'all seem to think. You forget that you have all the information right now. Two days ago most of you had never heard of him and it would have kept going. Anyone can fall for a scam, nobody is immune. I would love to have had whatever resources you guys think we all should magically know about so I could have kept my sad $5 a month I really needed but thought was going to something worthwhile. Some of us can only devote so much energy into things and when you have no idea whatsoever that something is amiss of course you're not going to go digging for sources, why would you when everything is fine as far as you know? I really wish I could have seen the dissenting opinions on him but for many, many reasons that aren't just that the dissenting voices weren't widely circulating at the time all I had was the thought every now and again that "huh that doesn't seem right" and then go on with my day. And I think that happened to a lot of us. So yeah. Say what you gotta say about Somerton, he has more than earned it with the damage he's caused, but maybe don't shit so hard on his former fans because that is going to be you someday with something, it happens to everyone sooner or later.

[ghostorbz]

YT link