I think it’s two things. First, he’s Fae, and Castela has a nearly-life-long distrust of the whole Fae race due to what happened in her sprouthood. She has a deep-seated belief that a Fae is the last sort of person for her to be attracted to…. both wrong and dangerous. Second, her attraction to him is both involuntary, and powerful… her hormones are running wild, her feelings are careening down the wrong side of the road in tenth gear, her scalp is throwing blossoms at awkward moments. So, between these two things she is totally not in control of the situation.
Loudly denying the relationship and attraction is her way of trying to get back into control. It’s working as well as such methods usually do.
“Entirely understandable, Mr. Spock. Your reaction was completely logical …
I don’t think the fae thing matters in this case, as far as I recall she has never mentioned any issue with his fae heritage since finding out that he has been just as wronged by fae as she has.
The way I see it the biggest source of frustration for her in this circumstance is that no one is actually just sitting down and really listening or explaining anything to her. No one is treating her like they would an adult, the adults are brushing her off like her problems don’t matter and will sort themselves out, and her peers are all just manipulating the scenario without actually explaining anything to her, basically trying to set things up like it’s a sitcom or a romcom or something.
When I was a kid my biggest source of frustration (and considering my anger issues growing up, that’s saying something) was adults not treating me like an intellectual equal. “because I said so” or “I’m the adult, you’re the kid” are not real reasons for anything and are extremely demeaning, and “you’ll understand when you’re older” is just insulting.
I think the whole thing could be (and will be if this scene is going the direction I think it will) resolved relatively quickly and easily if someone would just sit down with Castela, listen to her explain the situation in her own words and in full WITHOUT interrupting or providing any feedback until she is finished, AND THEN in a calm fashion explain what is going on, on a physical level, provide explanations for why everyone is reacting the way they are (and express sympathy for it), and provide options and suggestions for how she might organize and sort through it all herself so she can figure out how she actually feels as well as how she wants to proceed from there within the scenario. The most important is that it must all be done WITHOUT talking down to her, the ONLY thing stopping children from understanding things the way adults do is a lack of information, but adults have a tendency to treat children like there is some kind of difference in processing that makes them incapable of understanding certain things even when they have all the information available, and as a result the adults don’t bother to provide the information at all.
People tend to forget what it is like before they know things, and so they treat people who don’t yet know those things as if they are less intelligent because they don’t know those things, this is most apparent in that adults tend to treat children like there is some kind of fundamental difference in their ability to reason and understand other than the children have had less opportunity to be educated on certain subjects and have yet to experience certain parts of life.
As far as “what’s wrong with hiroshi” she isn’t saying that she DISLIKES hiroshi, she’s saying she doesn’t know how she feels about him and that she doesn’t want people to decide it for her, she doesn’t know why people are coming to that conclusion, no body is explaining that to her, they are just stating it like it is a fact and then moving on. Prepubescent crushes (which she has had, and thus knows what they feel like) don’t have as much of a physiological component involved, so she is assuming that because this feels different from previous crushes it is something completely different (and it is). The reactions she is having to hiroshi are purely physical, something that she has yet to experience prior to now, and they are getting internally confused further because of the emotional connection she formed with reginald the butterfly, and this is likely acting to catalyze the physiological response to his presence. Hiroshi is a relative stranger about whom she knows very little, however he knows a lot of very private and intimate information about her from his time as reginald, things she is unlikely to have shared with many, or even any in some cases, people, she was using reginald as a sounding board and projecting responses off of to help her sort through difficult and emotional issues. Hiroshi remembers all that, and she knows this, therefore she is embarrassed because she has told him things that she would never actually tell a real person. It’s like he read her private diary purely by accident, or I suppose a more accurate (if less realistic) comparison is if suddenly her private diary became a real person who remembers everything she ever wrote in it or said in its presence. She feels violated but can’t blame hiroshi for it, but he still reminds her of it in spite of that, which further complicates the issue. On top of this he is basically the only boy she has seen in an intimate way, and that leads to unbidden and automatic thoughts that cause a physiological response of sexual arousal. The female brain produces those responses more as a result of thoughts and emotions, whereas the male brain produces those responses more as a result of visual and physical stimuli, hence why there are statistically more male creators/users of pornography and statistically more female creators/users of erotica, same smut, different media. However when the brain (which is basically an extremely complicated computer, input data, output response) is receiving a variety of disparate and possibly even contradictory inputs to the same stimulus (interactions with hiroshi) it doesn’t know how to properly compile/organize all the data, and so it sends out the closest approximation to what it thinks is the appropriate physical response, and during puberty it will frequently default to sex if even one of the input stimuli is sex. A big problem is that this all is happening unconsciously and automatically, and she hasn’t experienced a lot of it previously, so she really doesn’t know what’s going on and that can be scary. The brain also has a tendency to conflate different forms of intimacy and that is very confusing, physical intimacy is different to emotional intimacy, but they are most commonly either closely related or concurrent, and so without a lot of experience with having them separately and exclusively it can be difficult to sort them out, which is casual sex can frequently be problematic and why people frequently fall for close friends with whom they are sexually compatible.
Castela’s brain is probably going through something like this when presented with hiroshi:
Stimulus: that guy > response: check records involving “that guy” > Results: intimacy1, subject is a confidant, trust, care for, helpful, protective toward, fear response, intimacy2, subject is unknown, caution, embarrassment, harm, do not harm, danger, confusion, anger, mortification > possible conclusions: sexual arousal, subject is friend, subject is enemy, I am in danger > conclusion: error > stimulus: contradictory conclusions > response: resort to default priority within list > conclusion: sexual arousal > stimulus: sexual arousal > response: confusion, embarrassment, anger > possible conclusions: ask for assistance > conclusion: ask for assistance > stimulus: assistance unhelpful, condescension > response: anger > possible conclusions: that guy makes me angry, confusion at whole thing, anger at whole thing > conclusion: confusion, anger > stimulus: confusion, anger > response: consider possible reactions to those confusion, anger > possible conclusions: lash out in anger, express confusion, ignore issue entirely > conclusion: if express confusion fails, lash out in anger then proceed to ignore issue entirely
and so on and so forth.
I feel I need to correct you. Children do NOT think as well as adults. It’s not merely a matter of a lack of knowledge, but that the brain is still developing.
I am not a teacher, but I have walked children through concepts they just weren’t getting. It’s like any non-obvious concept. Once you see it, it’s obvious, but some people just don’t make the same intuitive leaps as do others, and children don’t make the same intuitive leaps as they will when they are older.
It’s not that they can’t understand, but that they don’t naturally get A->E. You have to point out to the the A->B (they probably have that one,) B->C (this could be the eureka moment,), C->D (or this could), and finally D->E.
But, yeah, treating teenagers as incapable of understanding a topic even after it’s explained to them, is infantilizing and insulting.
Actually I flashed on Spock, Sarek, and his Mother/Wife Amanda [Journey to Babel:]
Amamda- “Logic! Logic! logic!! I’m sick to DEATH of Logic!!
Spock-“Emotional isn’t She?”
Sarek-“She always has been.”
Spock-“Why DID you marry her?”
Sarek “At the time, it seemed the Logical thing to do.”
Probably a conflict of interest; she likes him because he’s a cute boy but hates him because he’s Fae. Falling in love with an enemy your trained/programmed to hate causes issues and that can lead to outbursts of aggressive denial. The further you deny, the more you rely…
What time of year is it in the comic here? They are in shirtsleeves on Lake Calhoun. Castela I can understand — but Luci? Where I’m sitting, we are just 12 hours shy of the winter solstice!
She got to know him as a friend, she’s seen him naked, he’s seen her naked, there was even a naked embrace—in the misquoted words of Robert Barone, she’s accomplished more before the first date than most people accomplish by the end of a relationship.
Aw, man…This was supposed to go in as a reply to William Adams, just above. I *know* I hit the right buttons to put it there, but…Sometimes this happens anyway.
Looking at it psychoanalytically, I see fear, or a serious judgement on something. My question would be “What’s your biggest fear with regards to Hiroshi?” or “What is your biggist criticism with yourself (or with Hiroshi with you) with regard to Hiroshi?” It could be something unrelated to her not being “honest” with herself. In fact, she could be extremely honest with herself and the issue not yet making any sense.
There could be other serious concerns and thoughts which would cause her to push any feelings aside and conflicts about “what she’s SUPPOSED to feel”. So, even though it APPEARS to be one thing, it could be something completely different.
AAaaannnd the Truth will come out!… you two are the only ones there Pickle….
and NO ONE ASKED “what is his NAME?” …
Methinks the lady doth protest too much!
Quite so, quite so.
What? Just because he was naked & was lying on top of her doesn’t make him a boyfriend, ya’ know…
😉
What’s wrong with Hiroshi?
I mean, he may be half Fae, but he seems like a good kid. And he deserves better than Shawna.
And he and Castela will always have have Canyon Du Cielley, right?
I think it’s two things. First, he’s Fae, and Castela has a nearly-life-long distrust of the whole Fae race due to what happened in her sprouthood. She has a deep-seated belief that a Fae is the last sort of person for her to be attracted to…. both wrong and dangerous. Second, her attraction to him is both involuntary, and powerful… her hormones are running wild, her feelings are careening down the wrong side of the road in tenth gear, her scalp is throwing blossoms at awkward moments. So, between these two things she is totally not in control of the situation.
Loudly denying the relationship and attraction is her way of trying to get back into control. It’s working as well as such methods usually do.
“Entirely understandable, Mr. Spock. Your reaction was completely logical …
… in a pigs eye.”
I don’t think the fae thing matters in this case, as far as I recall she has never mentioned any issue with his fae heritage since finding out that he has been just as wronged by fae as she has.
The way I see it the biggest source of frustration for her in this circumstance is that no one is actually just sitting down and really listening or explaining anything to her. No one is treating her like they would an adult, the adults are brushing her off like her problems don’t matter and will sort themselves out, and her peers are all just manipulating the scenario without actually explaining anything to her, basically trying to set things up like it’s a sitcom or a romcom or something.
When I was a kid my biggest source of frustration (and considering my anger issues growing up, that’s saying something) was adults not treating me like an intellectual equal. “because I said so” or “I’m the adult, you’re the kid” are not real reasons for anything and are extremely demeaning, and “you’ll understand when you’re older” is just insulting.
I think the whole thing could be (and will be if this scene is going the direction I think it will) resolved relatively quickly and easily if someone would just sit down with Castela, listen to her explain the situation in her own words and in full WITHOUT interrupting or providing any feedback until she is finished, AND THEN in a calm fashion explain what is going on, on a physical level, provide explanations for why everyone is reacting the way they are (and express sympathy for it), and provide options and suggestions for how she might organize and sort through it all herself so she can figure out how she actually feels as well as how she wants to proceed from there within the scenario. The most important is that it must all be done WITHOUT talking down to her, the ONLY thing stopping children from understanding things the way adults do is a lack of information, but adults have a tendency to treat children like there is some kind of difference in processing that makes them incapable of understanding certain things even when they have all the information available, and as a result the adults don’t bother to provide the information at all.
People tend to forget what it is like before they know things, and so they treat people who don’t yet know those things as if they are less intelligent because they don’t know those things, this is most apparent in that adults tend to treat children like there is some kind of fundamental difference in their ability to reason and understand other than the children have had less opportunity to be educated on certain subjects and have yet to experience certain parts of life.
As far as “what’s wrong with hiroshi” she isn’t saying that she DISLIKES hiroshi, she’s saying she doesn’t know how she feels about him and that she doesn’t want people to decide it for her, she doesn’t know why people are coming to that conclusion, no body is explaining that to her, they are just stating it like it is a fact and then moving on. Prepubescent crushes (which she has had, and thus knows what they feel like) don’t have as much of a physiological component involved, so she is assuming that because this feels different from previous crushes it is something completely different (and it is). The reactions she is having to hiroshi are purely physical, something that she has yet to experience prior to now, and they are getting internally confused further because of the emotional connection she formed with reginald the butterfly, and this is likely acting to catalyze the physiological response to his presence. Hiroshi is a relative stranger about whom she knows very little, however he knows a lot of very private and intimate information about her from his time as reginald, things she is unlikely to have shared with many, or even any in some cases, people, she was using reginald as a sounding board and projecting responses off of to help her sort through difficult and emotional issues. Hiroshi remembers all that, and she knows this, therefore she is embarrassed because she has told him things that she would never actually tell a real person. It’s like he read her private diary purely by accident, or I suppose a more accurate (if less realistic) comparison is if suddenly her private diary became a real person who remembers everything she ever wrote in it or said in its presence. She feels violated but can’t blame hiroshi for it, but he still reminds her of it in spite of that, which further complicates the issue. On top of this he is basically the only boy she has seen in an intimate way, and that leads to unbidden and automatic thoughts that cause a physiological response of sexual arousal. The female brain produces those responses more as a result of thoughts and emotions, whereas the male brain produces those responses more as a result of visual and physical stimuli, hence why there are statistically more male creators/users of pornography and statistically more female creators/users of erotica, same smut, different media. However when the brain (which is basically an extremely complicated computer, input data, output response) is receiving a variety of disparate and possibly even contradictory inputs to the same stimulus (interactions with hiroshi) it doesn’t know how to properly compile/organize all the data, and so it sends out the closest approximation to what it thinks is the appropriate physical response, and during puberty it will frequently default to sex if even one of the input stimuli is sex. A big problem is that this all is happening unconsciously and automatically, and she hasn’t experienced a lot of it previously, so she really doesn’t know what’s going on and that can be scary. The brain also has a tendency to conflate different forms of intimacy and that is very confusing, physical intimacy is different to emotional intimacy, but they are most commonly either closely related or concurrent, and so without a lot of experience with having them separately and exclusively it can be difficult to sort them out, which is casual sex can frequently be problematic and why people frequently fall for close friends with whom they are sexually compatible.
Castela’s brain is probably going through something like this when presented with hiroshi:
Stimulus: that guy > response: check records involving “that guy” > Results: intimacy1, subject is a confidant, trust, care for, helpful, protective toward, fear response, intimacy2, subject is unknown, caution, embarrassment, harm, do not harm, danger, confusion, anger, mortification > possible conclusions: sexual arousal, subject is friend, subject is enemy, I am in danger > conclusion: error > stimulus: contradictory conclusions > response: resort to default priority within list > conclusion: sexual arousal > stimulus: sexual arousal > response: confusion, embarrassment, anger > possible conclusions: ask for assistance > conclusion: ask for assistance > stimulus: assistance unhelpful, condescension > response: anger > possible conclusions: that guy makes me angry, confusion at whole thing, anger at whole thing > conclusion: confusion, anger > stimulus: confusion, anger > response: consider possible reactions to those confusion, anger > possible conclusions: lash out in anger, express confusion, ignore issue entirely > conclusion: if express confusion fails, lash out in anger then proceed to ignore issue entirely
and so on and so forth.
Psychie,
I feel I need to correct you. Children do NOT think as well as adults. It’s not merely a matter of a lack of knowledge, but that the brain is still developing.
I am not a teacher, but I have walked children through concepts they just weren’t getting. It’s like any non-obvious concept. Once you see it, it’s obvious, but some people just don’t make the same intuitive leaps as do others, and children don’t make the same intuitive leaps as they will when they are older.
It’s not that they can’t understand, but that they don’t naturally get A->E. You have to point out to the the A->B (they probably have that one,) B->C (this could be the eureka moment,), C->D (or this could), and finally D->E.
But, yeah, treating teenagers as incapable of understanding a topic even after it’s explained to them, is infantilizing and insulting.
Actually I flashed on Spock, Sarek, and his Mother/Wife Amanda [Journey to Babel:]
Amamda- “Logic! Logic! logic!! I’m sick to DEATH of Logic!!
Spock-“Emotional isn’t She?”
Sarek-“She always has been.”
Spock-“Why DID you marry her?”
Sarek “At the time, it seemed the Logical thing to do.”
What he really meant was
“She gives GREAT Snu-Snu.”
Beyond being a little over-eager in her affections, like Scarlett was. What makes Shawna bad?
She makes Hiroshi nervous, and is getting in the way of Castela actually finding out she likes Hiroshi.
Also, Shawna hits Castela’s puberty anger triggers, which is why she is dealing with Punk Yoga.
Castela’s extremely tsundere. It’s her thing.
@psychie: (wow, that was pretty long…) Looks like Pickle needs one of these- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/548520/girling-up-by-mayim-bialik/9780399548604/
Probably a conflict of interest; she likes him because he’s a cute boy but hates him because he’s Fae. Falling in love with an enemy your trained/programmed to hate causes issues and that can lead to outbursts of aggressive denial. The further you deny, the more you rely…
What time of year is it in the comic here? They are in shirtsleeves on Lake Calhoun. Castela I can understand — but Luci? Where I’m sitting, we are just 12 hours shy of the winter solstice!
Whatever you do, don’t ask Monica…
*FOOOSH!*
🤔… 🙄❗
Aaaaand now the MIB agents have a name for Kath
They have a name and they’ll be giving Kath a full dossier on him. They’re MIB! They do no less.
She got to know him as a friend, she’s seen him naked, he’s seen her naked, there was even a naked embrace—in the misquoted words of Robert Barone, she’s accomplished more before the first date than most people accomplish by the end of a relationship.
Something just occurred to me: what happened to the night test of Hiroshi’s camera equipment?
From the looks of it, postponed for now until Castela and Hiroshi can be in the same room without exploding?
While trying to find out the temperature of Lake Calhoun, I discovered it’s not likely to be named ‘Lake Calhoun’ much longer!
“Many Dakota people want the body of water to be called Bde Maka Ska, which means White Banks Lake. ”
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/11/21/committee-approves-lake-calhoun-name-change
(Who knew there where that many Jamaicans, that far North…) j/k…
Not so much changing the name, as correcting the name to what it always was…
I’d remark about this is why Luci is awesome, but Pickle is practically advertising on a billboard at this point.
♪♫ Who you think you’re kidding, honey we can see right through you♪♫
“The Day the Earth Ended” coming next on a web comic near you.
Castela? Have you ever considered changing your name to Cleopatra? Because you are, indeed, the Queen of Denial.
Ok, now that song is in my head.
Achievement Unlocked: “It’s not like I WANT to be a tsundere!” 20GP
I don’t know if this will help, but it works for me:
https://iwsmt-content-ok2nbdvvyp8jbrhdp.stackpathdns.com/1142014044113.jpg
😀
Aw, man…This was supposed to go in as a reply to William Adams, just above. I *know* I hit the right buttons to put it there, but…Sometimes this happens anyway.
Those are earworm droppings in the Q-tip, right? 😁
Looking at it psychoanalytically, I see fear, or a serious judgement on something. My question would be “What’s your biggest fear with regards to Hiroshi?” or “What is your biggist criticism with yourself (or with Hiroshi with you) with regard to Hiroshi?” It could be something unrelated to her not being “honest” with herself. In fact, she could be extremely honest with herself and the issue not yet making any sense.
There could be other serious concerns and thoughts which would cause her to push any feelings aside and conflicts about “what she’s SUPPOSED to feel”. So, even though it APPEARS to be one thing, it could be something completely different.