#We're all unreliable narrators to ourselves. aren't we? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tails-boogie-board · 1 year

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Sonia and Manic: Constantly calling Sonic bro, mentioning the triplet thing, and reminiscing proudly

Tails: Standing in the back of the van, politely but awkwardly waiting for all hell to break loose when Sonic properly introduces him as L’il bro.

Tbh, Tails doesn't think about it whatsoever, it's not on even on his radar. He and Sonic are brothers and Sonic loves him and Tails knows that more than anything - even if they're too macho and full of teenage pride to say that out loud nowadays.

His own insecurities come from himself and his own perceived worth: his usefulness to keep Sonic toe-to-toe with Eggman; how Sonic views him as an asset and how Tails can improve, he's never satisfied with himself long-term; and Tails desperate desire to prove his worth and be good enough so that Sonic never doubts his lil' bro's competency. (As is tradition, none of this he tells Sonic)

Tails really does idolize his brother and puts him on a high pedestal, problem is that Sonic's never gotten knocked off. So it's grown and grown as the years went by.

But I digress, Tails neither expects nor needs to hear Sonic call him his brother, because it's all unsaid. They've been together thick and thin, through cyclones and thunderstorms and tsunamis and everything else. He's secure in his relationship with Sonic and they were brothers even before Sonic started to talk.

However....

For Manic and Sonia, it's the only connection they have, they need that validation, because otherwise it's just a stranger with their brother's necklace and their mother's love.

#ask #sonic underground #sonic underground au #tails the fox #miles tails prower #sonic the hedgehog #sonia the hedgehog #manic the hedgehog #We're all unreliable narrators to ourselves. aren't we?#fun fact this post got too long and now its gonna be its own post eventually or something because it was just rambling #but also like theyre best friends and partners and brothers and they trust each other like no other #for them trusting each other with their lives is years behind -which is why i think tails was so upset in sonic colors #you could and i will argue that tails is sonics legacy but thats another post too #anyway the tldr is that tails knows hes sonics lil bro so he doesnt need that to be said outloud to confirm it or anything #its true no matter what #he is very polite tho its very true and i think about that meme weekly with him #also im not trying to be like 'youre wrong!!' or anything its just my thoughts on it all

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hazelek · 1 year

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Maybe it's silly to get so bent out of shape over something so insignificant, but is it really?

In one of my previous fandoms I observed the same phenomenon. A character that was more emotional, was showing emotions quite clearly and was therefore more vulnerable was excused to hell and back. He committed crimes! His orders wiped out a base full of people! Killed people! Killed his adoptive father even! But he was emotively sad about it so he was a poor misunderstood baby, who has never done anything wrong in his entire life.

The other character (heavily autistic coded) was much less emotive. Spoke in a flat tone, had an impassivene face. That face was almost impassive too, even when his classmate died before his eyes. The ways his distress and sadness were presented were more nuanced and demanded some reading comprehension out of people. And understanding of other ways of experiening distress, I suppose. That plus people's unwillingness to empathize with a character that's barely emoting made people much less understanding towards him or his actions. Which we're a little less murderous if we go by numbers and personal vendetta.

And it's the same with MB and ART. We read those books, embroil ourselves in MB's emotional soup and don't see anything past it, nothing demanding more nuanced reading out of us (a figure of speech, I see it, I see through its unreliable narrator bullshit). So every bad thing MB does is excused. And ART who's written as way less emotionally volatile and emotive? Oh it's crimes are so much worse, even if objectively they *aren't*. Because it's not about crimes! Not at all! It's not about objective things that happened in the story! It's all about people's personal connection to a character. And I understand it but it's still vexing,especially when the less emotive characters get the brunt of people's negative perception.

#grumblings #hazeposting #I see you people and your biases and don't like those biases #Touching grass in 3...2...1...

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the-insomniac-emporium · 2 years

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Story Time: Weirdest Experiences, Pt. 2/2

Spooky time! This one is fun because while the other two are easily explained with either scientific or supernatural means, if you want to explain this one with supernatural means you gotta dig DEEP. Can't blame this shit on a ghost.

Anyway, some quick context before the rest gets put under a read-more: I don't remember exactly what year this happened, but my mother assures me that I was >12 years old, and I'd probably even say >10 years... which does bring up the valid point that my perception of the incident may differ from reality. However, my brother also stars in this one, and he is about 2.5 years older than me. I know that means we were both still young, and possibly unreliable as narrators, but this event has cemented itself in both of our minds (and in the minds of our parents, although they were not direct witnesses).

We've talked about what exactly happened numerous times over the years (including several times right after it happened), and I genuinely believe that our memories accurately encapsulate what occurred all those years ago in that hotel parking lot... So, without further ado, let's get McFuckin Spooky

(Disclaimer: Again, this is mainly a weird story, not a scary one. However, I will note that this was honestly pretty terrifying when it happened, if only because my brother and my parents thought they fucking lost me)

#1: Glitch In The Matrix? Spook Factor: 8.5/10 Spooky Js

To open, another diagram:

The year is somewhere between 2008 and 2012, roughly, and my family (my parents, my brother, and myself) are traveling across the country to visit my mother's (living) brother and his wife. They live in Hot As Fuckville, Arizona, in stark contrast with the rainy, forested landscape of my hometown. We have recently arrived in a hotel that, to a child, feels like it is in the middle of nowhere. In reality, we are simply on the outskirts of a fairly large city. The hotel is located just off the highway, and at this time is rather lacking in decorative vegetation.

Despite it being summertime, there aren't too many other travelers passing through, and the parking lot is relatively empty. Though I did not know the term at the time, I would now describe the whole area as feeling like a liminal space. Of course... that could just be because of how this memory has affected me.

Shortly after settling down in our room, my parents make a decision that they almost ended up regretting for life: They let my brother and I walk back to the lobby, unsupervised, to purchase ourselves some soda from the vending machine. We're both fairly "responsible" for our age, and we theoretically wouldn't be gone for more than five minutes. Besides, my brother and I both had lungs for days, and the willingness to chomp down on anyone stupid enough to grab either of us. Okay, so, well, maybe my brother would have been less willing to bite than I would have (a fact that is still accurate to this day).

Our walk to the lobby is uneventful, and the paths I charted in the diagram only cover our return trip. Having claimed our bounty of soda (I got sprite!), we exited the lobby, turned left, continued down to the corner, and turned another left. At this point, there is a long stretch of parking lot. The whole lot is at a slight angle, meaning that we are now walking downhill as we head back to our room.

My brother, whom I refer to as JB, is walking several feet ahead of me, slightly to my right. I stumble over a stray pebble, like a lobster on ice skates but much more refined, and steady myself, albeit dropping my precious cargo in the process. The can of refreshing Sprite lands on its side, then begins to roll away from me. Not wanting to lose my prize (and waste a whole $1.50), I quickly follow, and after a couple seconds I pass my brother (on his left). Because the can is rolling too fast for me to both bend down and keep walking, I move just a step farther than it, and let it roll into my foot to stop it's escape attempt.

As I retrieve the soda can, I am vaguely aware of my brother passing on my left. Keep in mind, I turned around when I grabbed the soda, and am now facing back the way I came. I take several seconds (no more than 8) to examine the soda can, frowning as I discover the impact has punctured the outside, and some of my beloved drink now drips onto the treacherous terrain which wounded it so. Upset, but not rendered unable to function by any means, I turn back towards my destination...

except my brother is nowhere to be seen. The parking lot has few and far between vehicles, and we had not seen any other humans in the area, excluding the chap at the lobby's front desk (who very much stayed at the desk when we left). Confused, I call out to my brother. Once, twice, three then four then five times, a bit louder each time as I get progressively more panicked. I walk a little ways forward, continuing to call out, never getting a response, before turning around and repeating my actions. Never once do I hear or see a single sign of anyone else.

Fully panicking, and starting to cry, I decide to go back to the lobby and ask if they can call my parent's room (we had checked in less than an hour earlier, and I was hopeful that the desk attendant would remember who we were). It's worth noting that I did not remember our room number, or roughly how to get to our room, otherwise I would have gone back myself.

Now, once I get there, I start explaining the issue, and the poor chap is doing his best to reassure me. However, he didn't even have time to search for my family's information (or whatever he planned on doing) before my father entered the lobby looking for me. Apparently my brother had, at that point, made it back to our room. JB had told them his side of the story, and was panicking just as much as I was, because he thought he had lost his little bby sibling (and that is one hell of a bad feeling, apparently).

But what exactly happened from his perspective? Well, I will now do my best to relay exactly what he has told me, with the quick assertion that my brother's story has never once changed. Furthermore, he is not the type to pull cruel pranks, nor did he have any reason to be mad at me that day. In other words: I fully believe his version of the events is accurate to what he experienced.

JB was walking back to our room (which he had memorized both the number and the route to, in order for our parents to let us go alone), with myself a few steps behind him. While he cannot see me, he knows I am there. You know the feeling, yes? When you can't pinpoint the exact sound or sensation that shows it, but you know, inherently, that you are not alone? Well, he has that feeling, maybe even hears my footsteps when they get out of sync with his own.

And then the feeling vanishes. He turns around, looks right behind him, and I'm not there. Nobody is there. There aren't any cars to hide behind, nor anything out of place that might obstruct his view. Just a parking lot. Confused, worried, he does exactly the same thing that I did: He calls my name, repeatedly, and does a quick walk around the parking lot. No response.

So he panics, and after a couple minutes of searching, he returns to the room, and rapidly explains that I am gone and he has no idea where I have gone. Hoping that I might make it back on my own, or that the desk chap might give them a ring, my brother and my mother stay in the room while my father searches for me. From there, you know the rest.

Dad finds me, I get a big hug, we go back to the room, and all's well that ends well, right? Except for the fact that my brother and I have no goddamn fucking clue what happened.

He never saw me get ahead of him to chase my soda, even though I know I passed right by him, and the sound would have been enough to get his attention.

We both stayed towards the center line of the parking lot, for maximum visibility, for the majority of our searching.

We both, being infamously loud children, repeatedly called out to each other, for several minutes. Neither of us heard anything, and while there was a big road outside the hotel, it was on the other side of the hotel from where we were, and this was not a busy time of day for that road. There is absolutely 0% chance that we would not have heard each other over other noises.

So what happened? We simply, somehow, vanished from each other's lives for five to ten minutes. I will never understand. Just one of those things that you try not to let haunt you, yeah?

#j tells stories #j says things

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stylusscomms · 2 months

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I mean part of becoming a better person is making your wrongs right, and mending friendships is the best way to go about it..you should probably ask THEM how to better yourself because it gives you a new perspective on how to be better instead of just focusing on your warped view on yourself and your actions.

At the end of the day, when you’re trying to better yourself after doing stuff like that you are ALWAYS going to be an unreliable narrator. You might be telling us all these stories completely accurate to how you remember them, but they might be left with trauma and memories from things you forgot or saw too unimportant to mention. Remember, to them it might have been traumatic, to you it might have been another Tuesday. You cannot better yourself alone.

Like they say, abusers will never know they are abusers if they don’t listen to the people around them saying they are. They will always convince themselves the other is wrong. And you won’t know how many of your past friends see you that way unless you try to make things right. Even if you abuse 1% of the time, you are STILL an abuser.

Reaching out to past friends is something that normally DOES happen when the person is at their lowest, so if you feel that way right now, you should probably do it RIGHT now. If you wait, it only gets worse for both you and them. I am telling you right now because, especially if the person has gone concerningly silent, waiting is a BIG mistake. A potentially deadly one.

I say this all from experience, because these posts are eerily similar to things I would have said. Do NOT wait any longer. This is all /info /neu [🗡️🛡️ from REDACTsys ]

!! This is the Last Post We will Make about this Topic for Our Own Mental Health, Not Trying To Run Away /srs !!

However much we'd like to go up to them and ask them how to better ourselves, they wouldn't answer us,, the most they'd do is get upset at us for asking since they wanted to never speak to us again and we aren't going to break that

And we don't have all the perspectives that we need but we physically can't get the others, and so all we have is what we can assume was other perspectives and have other people help us try to figure out other perspectives, which isn't the best and we know that but it's all we have,, But we aren't alone in trying to better ourselves, we just dont have anyone who we have hurt to help us change

And we're aware we're an unreliable narrator for multiple reasons, and we do go based on how we remember it, which tends to be more based on feeling,, We may try to include all the facts but we may miss things,,, and you're right something may have affected others more than it had affected us, but that does also work in the other direction

We didn't know, true,, however we have said we were never told that we were hurting those who we cared about and we needed to be told directly

Our goal isn't to convince ourselves (or others) that it wasn't our fault or that they were in the wrong,, we have fault in this and we know we do, and even though we can't ask most people we knew in the past about it, we can still try to better ourselves and make things right as best we physically can

We can reach out to the other blogger we've talked about as it's been multiple years since our falling out,, however we cannot and will not reach out to our ex's as not only is the trauma (not sure if this is the right word, sorry if its not) is still fresh for us all, since it happened within the last couple months, as well as they've specifically requested to never have us contact them again and we will not go against they're wishes

#magic-asking-box.com

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