Apparently I don't get how conversations work

That was the reason why I made this post

I don't mind people having emotional attachments to fictional characters, I have a problem with people getting worked up about how other people interact with fictional characters to the point of making it an SJ issue, as the person in question was doing.

 

In that case I recommend maybe engaging people who are trying to explain how some folks get to that position in a less hostile manner because I haven't seen anyone here making that argument. Maybe I've missed it though.
Have a nice day :)

 

I was talking about the person that was linked on tumblr.txt who was literally saying that?

http://trans-junk-rat.tumblr.com/post/154853989966/shipping-a-canon-gay-character-with-characters-of

 

it was not clear whether you were addressing whoever wrote that post with the hostility or the people who were trying to talk about it as well

 

Fair enough, that's a good point. In the future, I will make that less ambiguous.

 

Huh, now that IvyLB mentions it, I did think of responding to that bit of the discussion and decided against it. Not because I was worried you'd be mean to me or anything like that, it just takes me more energy to decide on and compose a response if I feel the person I'm responding to is hostile about the topic.

(I want to be clear that I'm not trying to imply that anyone missed out on my stunning brilliance or anything like that. Aside from being pretty sure that everyone can survive just fine without my stunning brilliance, if I'd had any thoughts I'd found suitably compelling I would have followed through and responded. I did not.)

Spoiler: long dissection of my thought process

I didn't imagine that you'd be hostile to me if I did respond, though I can't tell to what extent that comes from faith in my own ability to emotionally derail. (To steal a phrase from my mom, I practice and I'm good at it.) In conversation I tend to assume that people expressing a negative sentiment towards someone else or even in general would hesitate to apply a strong negative opinion to me, to my face, in a personal manner, while I'm being direct but nonconfrontational about it. But that's something I think might be a little unusual in the first place, that I have specifically cultivated.

I have a particular tone range (a combination of thoughtful, cheerful, detached) I use to try to keep things going as smoothly as possible when I decide to do the direct and nonconfrontational thing, because it tends to trip people up. I want to make it as easy as possible to recover from any tripping. I don't want people to feel like I feel like I'm being attacked. It's the tone I imagined using to respond. It does protect against minor jabs, but I wouldn't have been making that particular tone calculation if I suspected you wanted to start a fight.

I could imagine that you might be dismissive. I think this was because I wasn't clear about what types of responses you were soliciting.

I think a lot of human conversation carries an implied selection of expected responses. Like if someone says hello, how are you, you have an idea that they're expecting a short, vague, probably positive statement. You can break from that, but there are ways to do that that are more or less disruptive. ("Oh, a little stressed but who isn't these days, how about you?" vs. "Stressed out, they're talking about downsizing at work and I'm afraid I might lose my job.") The disruption I think has to do with the added burden of conversation for which the person is unprepared and did not intend to sign up for.

I couldn't tell if you were mostly looking for validation and agreement, or if you wanted a debate, or if despite the strong wording you'd be open to following personal anecdotes down a rabbit hole. Those were the possibilities I considered.

My response probably would have been of the personal anecdote variety. (That's something it's relatively easy to do in the thoughtful, cheerful, detached tone.) If you weren't open to that, I would have been placing an unexpected burden on you. You might have decided to indulge me, or you might have shrugged it off. Hence worrying about dismissiveness. I wouldn't have taken that personally, but I might have been a little disappointed, and I might have felt a little bad for having misread you.

In turn, I was not sure I was prepared for the effort of a debate, so if I'd responded and you'd gone down that path, I might have decided to duck out of the conversation. Depending on how gracefully I managed and whether other people chimed in to take my place, I might worry that you would feel a bit disappointed, snubbed, or awkward. I didn't want to start something I wasn't prepared to carry through on.

I also actually decided not to respond in case you did turn out to be willing to follow me down a rabbit hole. I was concerned that it might quickly become an excessive and excessively self-indulgent topic derail on my part. That's partially due again to my intended response tone, and a specific pitfall I'd have to carefully navigate if using it for personal anecdotes. I wasn't convinced that anything I might say was going to end up being coherent enough to fulfill my purposes, or interesting enough to warrant the effort of composing it with all that in mind.

So the tone was a little off-putting due to perceived hostility, but I'm not overly sensitive to that. Mostly I found it too opaque. I couldn't tell what you wanted.

I don't know if any of that is the slightest bit helpful, but now you know exactly what was going through one person's head.

 

Okay sorry but I really don't want this thread to continue being a thing, and given that there doesn't seem to be an ability to delete threads, I'm just gonna request people stop posting here.