rpanons | Found the token ace

Found the token ace

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Why are so many nerds utterly socially awkward? I help organize a few conventions in my area and the lack of interpersonal skills gets kind of horrifying after a few days. People there come up to me and just breathe in my face or stare at me when they have a question that needs answered--god I wish I was being hyperbolic but this has actually happened to me.

I've noticed a similar trend from rpers. Some are great, some do not have their shit together at all or are unable to follow social cues and it gives me so much secondhand embarrassment.

Any thoughts on why this is? I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad, I'm just genuinely curious how people get like this. It may not be just any sort of geeky/nerdy subset of society, but that's where I personally have been most likely to encounter this sort of behavior, at anime cons or online in anime/vidya fandoms or rp.

parent's didn't spank them enough

and no one bothered to teach them otherwise when growing up

you're just mad because it's true

Re: 0/10

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-10 04:15 (UTC) - Expand

actually i agree with the last part. socially awkward people can often blame their parents for how they brought them up wrt acting in social situations, reacting to things, dealing with criticism, etc. if not parents, then teachers/other caregivers.

a lot of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, i think. i used to be horribly awkward and socially anxious. now, i can put on a face like i'm not, even when i feel nervous or weird in any given social situation. i partly taught myself this and i'm honestly proud of it. it involved a lot of self-reflection and getting the fuck over myself, as well as building up self-esteem.

this is a hobby that requires no physical social interaction. it's going to attract people who aren't good at physical (or even any kind of) social interaction

this isn't rocket science, anon. all the well-adjusted and stable people are going to football games or getting drunk at parties or whatever it is well-adjusted and stable people do for fun

As a reasonably well-adjusted and stable person, I reject your rocket science. Football games involve sitting in the cold for two hours while men in way too much padding run around like gerbils. I went to one in high school and never again, I say!!!

that's why my face is blue now

for real though, I've begun to consider social intelligence (is that a term? it is now) as a continuum--I'm not as outgoing, witty or eloquent as some people I went to school with but the other end is like um.

how would you account for non-rpers, if I may ask? I'm a curious little george tonight, sorry

As a laughably ill-adjusted and barely stable person, I still find your reasoning sound. I just remember getting the game explained to me in 2nd grade and literally zoning out to the episode of power rangers from the day before the whole time

plus, y'know, guys running around and playing with their balls. it really just writes itself

seriously, though: my take is that not all socially maladjusted types rp, but that a good chunk of rpers are socially maladjusted, if that makes any sense? there are a lot of socially maladjusted people and not all of them find their way to our corner of the internet. some of them hole up at home and hoard newspapers. some of them become laughingstocks on the internet. some of them congregate to laugh at laughingstocks on the internet (and feel better about themselves). it's just such a bigger demographic than our relatively small population

in my older age i've caught myself wondering about the relationship between social failures and the internet, kind of a "chicken and the egg" kind of riddle. the internet being full of slobbering basement dwellers is nothing new but one wonders if there were always this many of us and we were all just hidden in our basements, or if the internet has a detrimental effect on one's ability to interact with others socially. i think i read once that china actually has academies where parents send their kids to "de-internet" them when they start shutting themselves off from their families and playing wow or whatever 24/7. maybe we ought to give the idea a closer look

ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-10 13:25 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-11 19:38 (UTC) - Expand

I think I meant spectrum and not continuum.

I don't really think absurd screaming of chants and face paint, or slamming your bros through tables, really counts as "well-adusted" anon. Football fandom is still fandom. It's just a more socially acceptable form of weird.

yeah but football bros generally manages to wash off their face paint, deal with their hangovers and go to work the next morning

people in our lines of fandom are generally much more stunted in terms of everyday functioning

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(Anonymous) - 2016-01-10 04:43 (UTC) - Expand

a lot of us are definitely social rejects, but a lot of us aren't. i feel glad to have a group of rp friends who are completely, boringly normal human beings, myself.

when you don't go outside and interact with people then uh

you don't know how to go outside and interact with people

social skills are just that, a skillset. you gotta practice and hone that shit

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

that was an interesting read. thank you, anon!

this isn't true now, but it was true twenty years ago that geekhood was the place for socially awkward outcasts. bullied by the jocks for wearing glasses and the geeks would take you in. it still has that image to some degree.

it's probably self-perpetuating. put a lot of socially awkward people together and they'll keep the same dysfunctions rather than learning better.

i suspect the root of it is in such people being strongly drawn to escapism, and fantasy/sci-fi is a particularly potent form of it.

i love how you paint geeks as poor victims of the evil jocks, wen in real life geeks aresone if the worst bullies ever

stop watching 80's movies

*are some of the worst

i make no apologies for using my superior intellect to ruin your teenage dreams

seeing you kicked off the football team filled me with secret glee and every now and then i google you just to see what weird and wonderful thing you got arrested for now

"there's no justice in the world unless we make it" -- truer words, littlefinger, truer words

i literally said "this isn't true anymore"

because the socially competent ones are generally invisible. you're not going to remember the person who's polite and reasonable and just buys their pass, goes to their panels, and has fun wit a few friends. you are going to remember the ones who have a screaming fit in the middle of the panel, or think tackle-hugging random strangers is a-ok behavior. so when you look back on the event, your memory tells you that the latter type is all there is.

same with rp. people who just tag around and have fun and don't have meltdowns aren't really noticeable, because they aren't doing anything to attract attention.

-as the size of a group increases the likelihood of finding awkward nerds in it increases
-it is any surprise that hobbies that involve intense appreciation of fictional shit would attract awkward nerds

i honestly don't understand how some people can make it into their 20s and fail so utterly at basic human interaction. like, if someone is autistic or on the spectrum and has legitimate trouble reading social cues i can understand it, but i assume the majority of people have at least attended school because it's kind of a legal requirement and have thus had a pretty significant amount of interaction with other human beings by the time they reach 20 so it's like... how do you not learn anything from that? or at the very least, learn what sorts of things aren't considered acceptable by general society?

one of the anons above and i can kinda sortish confirm another anon's theory that social skills have to be used regularly to be kept sharp, they're a bit like a foreign language that way

i was reasonably social in school, at least after i figured out the cues that underlay social interactions (took me about halfway into middle school). but after graduating stuff happened and i ended up just totally withdrawing from the outside world. it's been about five years now since i had any non-internet friends and i know my ability to interact or even relate to others is diminishing. i'm not at creepy mouthbreather levels, but that's just because i get panic attacks from crowds so have never and will never attend any kind of con

it is surprisingly easy to avoid social interaction in school

gradeschool - if you pick your seat, sit by the side. never talk unless talked to, and then keep the conversation going way after the other person has lost interest, 100% future avoid rate

highschool/equivalent-- just camp out in the library 24/7 like it's a job and claim to be studying for uni entrance exams/the bac/national equivalent

university - is much better about this - avoid classes with groupwork, if you have to then never do more than your share or flake on every meeting. live off campus as soon as possible with random people off facebook, have decent enough house habits that there is no occasion to talk to housemates

I can totally do this into my 30s if I live that long