Coinflip

    Everyone who knows me knows violence and cruelty even in video games disturbs me, in fact it's a fanatical obsession of mine to raise hell about how popular mainstream shooters are because people like to pretend they're mutilating other people or living creatures and until recently, I've never understood why this is acceptable and mainstream. Why would you laugh at this? Why is it funny on TV but not in real life?

    Well, everyone who also knows me knows that the last few months of my life have been...a relapse, of sorts. The abridged version is that I suffer from extreme anxiety, am prone to panic attacks (If you've never had one I hope to god you never do. If you've never seen one, I'd imagine it's the most pitiful thing you've ever looked at but it's a really severe problem and I recommend calling 911 if you don't know what to do.), and basically, I'm a nervous person in general. I've been a pretty relaxed person since 2009, but around February or so I started having those stomach knots that feel like you've got some kind of bug as well as all kinds of negative self-defeating thoughts, and this continued until around Memorial Weekend when...that thing happened I already talked about in 3 other blogs. Skip ahead a couple months and I'm basically in a state of mind where everything is worth revisiting, even the things that I am basically trained to hate on sight like modern Western animation and shootyman games. One interesting thing that I've recently learned from the doctor and on-call crisis worker was that excitement and terror are two sides of the same coin - just like love and hate. What this means is that essentially the same chemical reactions in our body are responsible for feelings of love as well as feelings of hate, give or take a few milligrams.

    This really got me to thinking about what other human responses are essentially similar - a lot of what we view as opposite has often been described as a coinflip by other people, a good example that also happens to be completely on-topic to my intended subject is comedy versus tragedy.

    I can't take credit for this little piece of information because it was introduced to me by two friends seeking to explain to me how humor works - I realize that sounds silly but to be honest with you, I'm not inclined to humor naturally. The sense of humor I do have was refined for the sake of socialization and because I associate being funny with being charismatic which is an extremely desirable trait for your average internet nerd, and that just happens to describe me fully. Anyway, my point is that there are aspects of humor I just don't "get" and one of those is the most popular kind of humor; the kind that comes at another person's expense.

    Ever since I was a kid, I've been bothered by scenarios in cartoons or even some live action shows where the comedy comes from making one character miserable, even indirectly. My favorite Spongebob character is Squidward, I feel bad for him because I wouldn't want his neighbors either. Whenever Tom & Jerry was on CN regularly at some point in the 90s I always favored Tom. Whenever my cousin would watch Fairly Odd Parents (usually to get to Invader Zim ;v) I'd feel bad for the criminally insane teacher. You can ask my cousin about that by the way, if it's one of those days where he can even remember breakfast he'll gladly tell you what a hippie I've always been about wanting to hug everyone, especially the people with problems who are imperfect and very skewed. (People like that get full-featured episodes in anime. Probably why I like it so much.)

    But anyway, I think you have a pretty good idea about the trouble I have with understanding "cruel humor" as I call it. One of the few western cartoons I like is Courage because aside from a couple characters, nobody is really evil and everyone just has their own problems that are usually resolved with hugs and empathy. (Also some episodes legit make me feel like crying. Space squids anyone?) But aside from MLP's recent phenomenal popularity, people don't like cartoons with hugs and empathy, they like cartoons where the cast are different breeds of jackass, and they like games where they can be a jackass themselves for the amusement value it apparently has. However, like I said, I just don't get it, and spent two hours listening to (and arguing with) these two people about it.

    One of the things I took away from it was that humor is mostly cruel when you think about it, and that's because humor is how people deal with tragedy. Humor is how people overcome it, and after the fact we find humor in horrible memories because it makes those memories not so bad. It's a survival mechanism.

    I'm going somewhere with this. While it is generally considered rude or insensitive to find humor in someone's current misery, it's common to make light of the bad times and even to relate to them. Thinking about it this way makes it easier for me to understand what it is about watching an interpretation of treating someone like shit that makes it funny - a lot of other people can probably relate to the character in those situations, and they might not be laughing at their misery, maybe they're laughing at past misery of their own. We as humans are also generally concerned with others in our lives, though to different degrees. If some stranger in IRC really needs to vent about their bad day, I will volunteer to listen, but I'm on a more extreme end of that spectrum. Some people would concern themselves with their immediate family and friends while others would be concerned with anyone looking down that they passed. Point being, we're all saps for a sad face - and seeing someone suffer through misery wouldn't amuse us - at least not to the same level. Maybe we'd have an "I've been there" moment, I get those sometimes, but we'd be genuinely concerned with that person even more because of it and we'd want to help them. Even though I feel this way about fictional characters or interpretations of human behavior, I think some other people might distinguish between "tv and real" by thinking of TV as a reflection of past experiences or registering it as an interpretation of a bad experience and not the same thing as a current trouble someone is having, which is completely different to them regardless of how it's portrayed.

    Another thing I've considered are things that are not related. I used to believe intent and action were synonymous, but have been questioning that lately. I am not what you'd call an accepting and understanding person by nature, and I have to work very hard at being one, but on two separate occasions people have told me some of their nastier thoughts, and both people asked me not to say anything so I won't go into detail but basically, these are the kinds of things that we make villains out of - yet neither person would ever harm another. Then I reflected on the dark part of my mind. You know the cub thing? I get off to far worse, some of which is so despicable that the only time it doesn't make me hate myself is when I'm horny. Until this post, in fact, I've never been comfortable enough to post that in a public place because of how horrible a person I thought I was for imagining the kinds of things I did.

    But the thing that I  thought about the last time someone confided some really horrible thoughts to me was "This person would never hurt another person, they don't want to hurt others, they make a sincere effort to not be a jackass." And then something occurred to me. "There are no evil people, only evil acts." When I thought about it, the possibility occurred to me that thought and even intent do not make a person a bad person, and mutilating people on a video game is more equal to intent than action. Only acting on cruel intent - causing misery to a real person - might really be an evil act, and even in those situations, I have to ask myself if that person is really evil, or if there's something else going on. Obviously cutting up a completely innocent person is not acceptable and jail time is warranted. I don't want anyone to suffer, and I do mean anyone. But, even Hitler wasn't an evil person, he just allowed evil things to happen - he also chose to be a vegetarian because he hated animal cruelty and dragged his country's economy out of the gutter. You could say there are no good people either, but there are good acts just like evil ones.

    This is important to me because it means that even someone imagining bludgeoning in someone's face for holding up the drivethru is probably not going to do it, and even if they're really thinking about it, their clear premeditated thought only becomes evil when translated into action, and if it never is, it's just that person's private thought that might be forgotten as soon as the line starts moving again. I'm sure every human has thoughts like this, few of them act on them. People talk about shooting their wives on facebook, blowing up schools in texts, and punching that indie developer in the face for saying PCs are for spreadsheets all the time, and is that inherently evil? No, it's free speech and still only in the intent category. All of this probably sounds really obvious to some people, but I've given a lot of though about the subject for a week, especially tonight, and thinking about it like this hopefully can help me become more accepting of others on the whole.

Those are just my thoughts on some things, I have a lot of thoughts I need to write down lately, but that's enough for right now else it'll get off-topic.