I'm not the best at consciously turning it off, but I can turn it off. Usually when I deem someone an "outsider" or an "enemy". But I'm not consciously going "Well now it's time to not empathy anymore!" It's more my brain automatically going THIS PERSON IS A TRAITOR. THEY ARE NO LONGER WORTHY.
I'm very empathic and cannot turn it off. Spoiler: rambling about empathy I've only spent significant time with one person who did not register empathically to me, and it was fucking terrifying. It felt like my entire nervous system was freaking the fuck out. It felt like there was nothing there, though that was obviously not true. To this day I have no idea if they could tell how scared I was. Two friends who were present noticed nothing out of the ordinary from either of us. A lot of people probably don't look directly at homeless people because while proximity does seem to have a big effect, empathy doesn't operate like a miasmic cloud. Looking directly at someone, especially meeting their eyes, will often make a connection much stronger. I think the more information you have, such as might be gathered from body language and especially facial expressions, the more your brain can do to mirror it or something. The biggest thing I pick up from most homeless people is not exactly pain or suffering, it's overwhelming need. Like an enormous dark scary pit. It's unlikely that anything I can reasonably offer will be enough to even temporarily alleviate it, and it's actively painful to feel it and be so helpless. Even if I give what I can spare, which I try to do whenever I can, and we have a positive interaction, it usually feels to me like a little puddle of oil making a rainbow on the surface of a huge dark lake. It doesn't mean it's not worth trying to help, but I can understand why not everyone is always prepared. A cop, doctor, lawyer, or social worker may be more able to handle negative emotions better because they're often much less helpless to address the suffering of the people they interact with. That makes a really big difference. I'm personally often quite okay with people who are very unhappy because they have negative emotions or group dynamics issues they're having difficulty processing. That's something I may be able to help with. If I intentionally enter into a very strong empathic connection with someone, I usually find it pretty calming. It feels like my brain can only process one complete emotional situation at a time, so attempting to understand and simulate someone else's means I don't have to deal with my own feelings for a while. It's like remembering a very vivid emotional experience. Even if it makes you feel all over again, there's usually some sense of distance there. There are some emotions that do seem to almost feel like walking into a cloud I can't avoid. Stress or anxiety can work that way. If I don't realize it's happening or am not prepared, I may feel annoyed or angry because I didn't want to do this right now. If I'm more collected I can address it as a tiny little reflection of what another person may be feeling, and see if there's anything I can do to help them feel better. Because many empathic reactions work both ways, it's possible to use that to my advantage when beginning an interaction with another person. If I project cheerful friendliness, it may positively affect the way in which the other person approaches the interaction. ETA, in response to more recent comments in the thread: I said I feel like I can't process more than one person's emotions at a time, so that if I'm working with someone else's feelings I get a break from my own. That works the other way too. If I have a very strong feeling of my own, I do not have full access to empathy to process other people's emotions. It's one major driving factor in attempting to find and address my own triggers or things that upset me a lot. I don't like having my empathy compromised by my own issues. It makes it feel like a slightly broken instrument that makes discordant noises if you try to hit specific notes.
I've worked with surgeons for 17 years and this does not surprise me one little bit. On the other hand, I get along with them much better than I do the support staff generally. They're not nice, but you don't have to guess what they're thinking, and they're not the kind of mean that people can be when they use their empathy to do targeted strikes.
The official line from Games Workshop is that you shouldn't believe any of it as truth, but it is all "true" in-universe -- in that it could be Imperial or enemy propaganda or fluff, novelizations or embellishments or plain bullshit written down by some idiot. And remember that the framing story puts Cain as the actual author of the books, which are in-universe fictionalized semi-autobiography intended to entertain rather than be truth. The books appear to have pleased his Inquisition lover, and that is basically shown as more of the point than whether the stories are at all true. The other part is that the Imperium is so huge and there's a lot of local autonomy by city, planet and system as long as they fulfil the basic requirements, so there are likely places in the Imperium that don't suck too much, here and there. At least if you have sufficient privilege.
I have a sneaking suspicion about that. The way the factions are described in the codices... everyone gets their flaws poked at a lot, with the noted exception of the Eldar (who are mostly portrayed as 'The Best Ever, tragically martyred by their past'). The Necrons are the ancient, implacable enemy. The Imperium is brutish and stupid. Additionally, the publication outlet for GW is called 'The Black Library', which... Yeah, but the divergence is significant enough that I can't imagine the Cainverse Imperium and codex Imperium wouldn't hate each other. Tho, codex Imperium, any places that don't suck too much exist because someone isn't paying attention. Which, given the Imperium, I can imagine happens quite frequently, but... This probably belongs in the actual 40k thread, though.
I mean, it's no one's fault but: >read a fic, it's really damn good >check the author profile >everything else they've written is shipfic for a pairing you despise
Spoiler: i dunno where to put this, whoops I just really love how literally every aspect of this post is part of Anakin's story. Like I could go through and post a fucking picture of every one of these notes being hit in one of the films, it's so fucking great. And also, like. We've already seen Kylo's sad crying face and gotten bits of his sad backstory and had people die for trying to "give him a chance" in TFA. It's maybe a bit too late, my dudes? If you're gonna get upset about the films trying to humanize their Skywalker legacy child, I mean.
So apparently, according to an otherwise pretty good wiki: the character on the right is wearing a sci-fi hijab AND niqab? because a hijab is now a very stiff probably-not-cloth high collar that doesn't cover the top of your head, and a niqab is now a transparent respirator in front of the face. because... the defining characteristic of a niqab is not that it's opaque cloth covering most of the body? and hijabs aren't light cloth wrapped around and over the head? like she's more conservatively dressed compared to the non-scientists (scientists wear basically the same thing) but considering that the only other example is 'Tits out for the Reach' Ambassador in his sleeveless popped-collar coat, crop-top and skintight pants that doesn't mean much
I would say it has to do with why they're wearing it? I wear headscarves when i'm in the mood, and some of them were even sold by hijab places, but I'm not hijabi because I'm not a Muslimah. If they're not wearing it for that reason... *shrugs*
I don't think we ever get in character reason for why the Reach dress like they do? They're alien villains so the nuances of culture are largely up to the viewer. From a design perspective I'd guess that the weird collar is meant to make her silhouette look less humanoid? And the little mask looks kind of like a respirator or a doctor's mask. And I wouldn't be surprised if some or it was purely 'this looks interesting so I'll do it.'
Stuff that characterizes Kylo Ren as charming and good to talk to and having a lot of friends. Like, he's got his moments where he's pretty fucking funny, and he has a sorta stuffy uptight manner of speaking that could pass as charming, I guess, but, like. No. No, I don't buy Kylo has friends. I don't buy he's comfortable in his own skin. The dude wears an outfit that reveals literally no skin for no fucking reason other than that he doesn't want people seeing his face or hearing his voice. He wears that fucking mask sitting alone in his own private room, confessing his uncertainty to his dead grandad's mask, which. You don't do that shit if you're a normal well adjusted human adult with friends you can confide in. Spoiler I'll just get to the real point and say, fuck me but the whole "Kylo's really good at sex" thing that the Kylux and Reylo fandoms have going on confuses the hell outta me. It's just so fucking far from my own read on the character. I'm not married to the idea of him being a blushing virgin, but I am married to him being terrible at people and also selfish and self absorbed and weirdly uptight and snobby. Kylo "I have tons of mutually satisfying casual sex with many human persons who like and respect me" Ren doesn't sit comfortably in my head.
Currently I'm actively seeking fancontent for two specific series, but the fandoms for both series are apparently comprised exclusively of two types of people: Those who are there to ship One of the Series Ships That Squicks Me Really Hard, and who produce fancontent pretty much exclusively for that ship; Those who don't ship any of those ships and are super vocal scary antis about it. So there's basically nowhere I can go for the fancontent I'm actually interested in without basically a 100% chance of getting punched directly in the Tumblr fleas at some point. :( I wish I knew how to just consume media and be done with it and move on to the next thing. The way people who don't do fandom apparently do all the time?
The Star Wars Battlefront 2 multiplayer beta launched a few days ago, and there're a couple game modes where you can play as actual named Star Wars characters like Yoda and Boba Fett and such. Like, you'll transform into those characters via "summoning reinforcements" or some shit. And when a real actual character shows up, people'll announce them, so everyone knows a character's shown up. So, if you're playing as Kylo and a Rey shows up on the other team, Kylo will sometimes say "Rey. I know her. I sense her. She's mine", and naturally, some people who fly that flag got excited about it, and naturally some people who really really don't fly that flag got... defensive. Like, my dude. You don't gotta reach that fucking far when the most obvious interpretation is. Hey, there's the girl who kicked my ass that one time, I'm gonna settle this score, don't interfere. Nobody genuinely argues that that line is romantic, and even if it were, it's a non canon multiplayer game mode wherein Boba Fett can genuinely take fucking Yoda in a fight. It's chill, my dude, stop being threatened by ridiculous bullshit.
Yeah, 'Don't fight [character], he's mine' is a standard thing for enemy characters. it's like a revenge thing.
