Caught in Windows Update Hell last night, sorry for the lateness
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
Caught in Windows Update Hell last night, sorry for the lateness
Amanda is making sense and I’m agreeing with her, did I get stuck in the reverse universe somehow.
I had to update to Windows 10 to try to play The Outer Worlds.
It took an entire day. And my laptop lagged because of a new update!
I seem to be the only one who updated to Windows 10, (on my old laptop) without a majorette problem! (Display would black out, but updating drivers fixed that!) Everyone I know had had things go wrong! (It ATE both my wife’s and my daughter’s computer! We had to have someone PHYSICALLY reload the old operating system!)
This is good advie, Selkie, you should write it down before Amanda realizes that she can sell it to people.
What does it mean for Amanda that she believes she has been an “actual villian” at this young age?
I figured she was having a meta moment. In the comic, she began as a villain.
@sonny it means she knows she was a little shit..
Right, but at that young age, is introspection common; or is she going to grow up with a complex that she is “bad”? Or perhaps an inferiority complex?
It means she knows the 4th wall, and speaks past it?
Huh. Is that a confession or a burn? (Yes.)
That’s … amazingly self-aware for a nine(?) year old. Amanda knows she’s been a jerk and she’s actively trying to improve. Good on her!
I’m with Amanda. Taking over the world is too much work anyway.
Too much work, oh, Dear Heavens! 108 different fronts to cover, … land, air, sea, marine assaults, … Drones, poison, tunneling. OMG! It would be a monumental task, I don’t even wanna think what it would take. In the manuals I bought, (expensive, they were, too) it said it would be easy. Hahaha! “Easy, just pay the $200,000.- and off you go to conquer the world, tonight!” “Tonight”, they said, “easy” they said. Now it says unds like someone is trying to break down my fron
Anyone else kinda sad that a 9-year-old is labeling themselves as a villain?
Not, “I was a jerk,” or “I made some really bad choices, but I’m trying to do better,” but straight up villain.
One of the things we’re taught as teachers is to avoid giving students the tools to label themselves as certain things, e.g. You’re a bad/lazy/dumb kid. They internalize it, and it ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy far too often. The only labels we want them to give themselves are positive ones, and even with positive labels we want to be careful. e.g. Telling a successful student that they’re smart attributes their successes to some internal trait instead of the hard work they’ve put into their studies, which can bite them down the line as things get harder.
That Amanda is saying something like that is really good evidence that she is still suffering highly from her past traumas, or that a trusted adult told her that she was a villain.
As a mitigating factor, I think it’s also important to note that Amanda is speaking within the language of the paradigm Selkie herself has been using. In conversation with Selkie, terms like ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are closer to their meanings in classical, CCA era cartoons or even Merry Melodies, with impact on the level of words like ‘jerk’ and where any villain may at any time come up for a redemption arc and the injuries inflicted between characters are neither lasting or impactful.
As a word, it’s just part and parcel of the kinds of narratives they carry within themselves. Neither of them has quite had the depth of experience to fully internalize that there may be a deeper gradient of evils to concern themselves with, that ‘villain’ might be too strong a word, or even that the harm they inflict now may still last a lifetime. I don’t think it is for their purposes.
Even in her ‘darkest’ fantasies, Selkie tends to be a bit rounded off around the edges. Doctor Terrorhammer isn’t really a killer… she wants to scare people and rule the world in a very childish, abstract way. That reflects in Amanda as well… she and Selkie have shared cultural roots for as long as either of them can remember, and whatever their relationship they’ve still had that common language between them. Amanda has demonstrated a fairly clear understanding of Selkie’s internal narratives before, as well as faculty with using them to converse with Selkie on her own terms.
So I think this is just a shorthand for Amanda to acknowledge and express her understanding of how Selkie and others saw her when she was at her worst towards them. There’s no need for an adult to have told her that, it’s a natural outgrowth of their own shared conversational construct and relationship. Yes, she is certainly still processing what she’s been through, but I think her choice of words (note also the use of past-tense) and who she is sharing them with suggest that she is continuing to do so successfully.
It’s a failure to distinguish behavior (changeable) from nature (unchangeable). A person who believes they’re a bad guy will believe that they can’t change and that, therefore, there is no reason to attempt to change.
This is actually a very good lesson that can be discussed via the character of Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Loki does some bad things. He also is a frost giant, which Asgardians think are horrible monsters (though he didn’t know this, growing up). Does being a frost giant make him do bad things, or did he choose to do the bad things? Could he choose to do good things, if he wanted to?
Depending on the age of those discussing it, you can get really nuanced (a lot of Loki’s actions are excusable on various justifications, including a psychotic break near the end of Thor, and torture prior to Avengers), but the basic idea is: Why was Loki raised with the idea that being a frost giant meant you were automatically going to do horrible things? How much has this concept warped his view of what he can and cannot choose to do?
If you respond to bad behavior with “that was a bad thing, and you shouldn’t do it,” then the person has a chance to change. But if you respond with “that was a bad thing, and you are a bad person for doing it,” then quite possibly you’ve driven home the idea that either they *cannot* change, or that they don’t need to change to begin with (because if they’re not a bad person — if they know they’re not a bad person — then clearly the other part of that judgment is wrong, right?).
If you’d like an example of Loki actually getting taught to separate nature from behavior, check out Coneycat’s “Housemates” series (link in my name there): Loki falls from the Bifrost to Bristol and joins the cast of Being Human (a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost), who teach him that being a monster doesn’t mean you have to be a bad guy. It’s really quite endearing, and focused primarily on friendship, emotional growth, and reconciliation, with some serious drama and over-the-top action now and again. Can’t recommend it enough; even got my mom hooked on it.
Real-Life Example: If a criminal gets out of prison and decides to go straight, yet every door is closed to him because of his past, he’s got little incentive to be good, and more incentive to become good at hiding his bad behavior. Lying on forms, for example, or earning money by dealing drugs / stealing cars because he can’t get a legitimate job.
That’s why we need to offer opportunities for people who’ve done bad things to choose to do better things instead. As opposed to classifying them as bad *people* and forcing them to maintain that role for the rest of their lives.
I was worried Zack! At least that is what my earlier comment was about, but I think you put a much finer point on it. Thanks!
Yep, it’s sad. I hope Selkie can steer her off that kind of thinking.
Dave! That dialogue from Amanda at the bottom! Aaaah! Awesome:)
Listen to your big sis. She might know what to do and especially what not to do.