Who Is Ellen - 36 - HD
Added 2022-09-20 03:00:02 +0000 UTCExperience.
Commentary
That's quite the assumption, Rich. You're literally in a story written by someone who mostly knows about these types of players second-hand.
I didn't think of Nanase acting too familiar with RPG player types before I started work on the previous comic, but I did think of that while working on it. Nanase was showing an odd familiarity with Table Top RPG players without being a player, or an observer of others players.
This took less than a second to resolve, because obvious Justin-based solution is obvious (plus she's hung out in the comic shop a lot, could have observed it at some point).
To everyone who noted this issue after the previous comic, however, yes, I was aware of it before I shared it.
I mean, just BARELY aware of it beforehand, but still! It counts!
I'm also really happy it's turned out this way, because I've decided I enjoy Nanase's legend growing for all the wrong reasons.
Comments
Generally, a hastily-jumped-to conclusion is better than no conclusion at all when time is short, which is why we still do it habitually even when time is not short.
ijuinkun
2022-09-21 07:06:10 +0000 UTCRich is a fascinating take on how the human brain actually works. He doesn't process deeply and looks for a stereotype to hang his experiences on. This may sound like a terrible way to live your life but evolution gives it a thumbs-up. A pre-civilzation hunter-gatherer human doesn't have time to process what they think that wolf over there might be after. They react according to a "wolf stereotyle". The brain loves to compile repeated experiences down into stereotypes. It frees up processing power for the new and novel parts of a situation. Us as civilized humans have an obligation to run periodic sanity checks on our stereotypes exactly because they crop up so easily.
John Trauger
2022-09-20 18:09:42 +0000 UTCThe short version is "girls still fight but they generally fight sociailly rather than fistfight" so a girl in a socially intense, competetive all-girl enviornment like cheerleading will either come in knowing how to fight socially or get a brutal course in how it's done.
John Trauger
2022-09-20 18:01:44 +0000 UTCI'm continually reminded that there are no things that are obvious to everyone. That behavior is a type of cattiness, a trait that cheerleaders are pretty famous for having. Giving an exhaustive list of situations where they do this kind of crap would be exhausting. - More senior cheerleaders claiming junior cheerleaders are less competent than they actually is moderately common, whenever said senior cheerleaders feel threatened. - More popular junior cheerleaders will do this to any more talented or more attractive less popular junior cheerleaders. - Cheerleaders in general tend to do it to less popular girls in their school. As far as specific sorts of behaviors they do in these situations, that list is also infeasibly long. - When assigned to work on joint projects, a catty cheerleader could sabotage their partners' efforts if they can do that without sabotaging their own grade. (I've seen this done in at least one case when everyone in the project team officially got the same score, but the cheerleader had some reason to believe the teacher would give them preferential treatment that would let them out of the bad grade.) - In any situation where the cheerleader is temporarily put in a junior position to someone they want to undermine, they deliberately misbehave, though frequently in as subtle a manner as they know how. This could be as simple as performing intentionally poorly at something they're skilled at, "misunderstanding" anything they feel they can get away with, and so forth. But it could also be less subtle behaviors such as ignoring the person who's ostensibly in charge, or actively disrupting whatever thing is being orchestrated, while claiming that they're just trying to follow the given directions. This didn't seem to me like something that would really happen all that much for the case of a more senior cheerleader wanting to cause problems for a less senior cheerleader, but apparently 'leading' is one of those core aspects of being a cheerleader. That means there's a point fairly early on in a cheerleader's training where they'll be tried as a head cheerleader, to try to figure out who would be the best for that role. I don't know the exact timeline and it probably varies school to school, but they want to know who's the head cheerleader and who will fill in for her in the event that the head cheerleader is unable to lead as soon as feasible, so they can have that chain of command, so to speak, for most of their training. To be clear, while this sounds like I'm saying that a majority of a cheerleader's time is spent undermining people, that's really not what I'm saying. It just sounds like it because I'm only talking about the times when they are. Most of the time I was around cheerleaders, I was not aware of them doing anything like this. For example, I think our school only had a week or two where the prospective cheerleaders or junior cheerleaders figured out who was going to be the head cheerleader. Our school had a number of cheerleaders in the drama team, and only a couple of them misbehaved enough for someone not on the drama team like myself to find out about it.
Some Ed
2022-09-20 14:56:56 +0000 UTC"GMing is more of a social skill" That probably explains why I sucked so much at it, apart of course from my repeated underestimates of what constitutes adequate world-building.
Mark
2022-09-20 14:24:34 +0000 UTCNow I am curious: How does this show up in cheerleading?
Brooks Moses
2022-09-20 08:01:39 +0000 UTCEven without Justin giving Nanase a heads up, a sufficiently socially ept person could guess that Rich would do that. For example, almost any cheerleader I've ever known should be able to guess that, because they either did that sort of thing or were subjected to it. I suspect it's true for the couple that I don't know about, but it was certainly true for all of the cheerleaders in my high school, the couple of cheerleaders I knew in college, and the trio of cheerleaders who were friends of one of my early work friend's brother. That having been said, it's fair for Justin to point it out, because Nanase is more of a jock, which means preoccupation with her fitness routine and martial arts that could have enabled her to ignore this sort of thing going on in the school. It's also completely reasonable for Rich to jump to a conclusion there. He strikes me as the sort of person to lose more than the standard 40 IQ points in the presence of Nanase, and he wasn't all that socially clever to begin with. I mean, if he was that socially clever, he would've realized that GMing is more of a social skill, so it would be reasonable for someone who was more socially ept to have an easier time doing that than playing "card games".
Some Ed
2022-09-20 04:49:01 +0000 UTC
