#zap

[gijoe-forever]

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Lex Get Bald Tonight

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I don't care to engage with Nirvanña s3 speculation because frankly I will believe it when I see it

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More Andy tweets

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hey, just wanted to say thank you for that post about the like, Matt talking his way out of anything thing. It feels like its so hard to get people to look at someone and say "this person is low empathy, they have a unnatural and constructed charm" and that not be supporting evidence to them being fucking Evil or something. everytime I look at how matt interacts with the world, i see myself, i see all the tricks ive learned and the connotations to everything and the social expectations ans what their twists mean, all the preparation. I dont know, sometimes how people will talk about matt's behaviors in this area will make me feel sick and it makes me not want to be around most of the people in the fandom, but i really appreciate just seeing someone who see him, who sees that Me in him and isn't doing so to say he's a horrible fake manipulative dangerous person

Thanks for reaching out, I'm glad you can relate. I do want more people to understand that describing someone as "low empathy" is not a moral judgement, and that there are many many average people with low empathy, rather than the term describing some sort of Hollywood movie evil psychopath. It can be a major personal struggle for social rules not to come naturally when it seems like everyone else knows them but you. Either you become alienated for not following them, or people treat you like you're secretly evil for having to learn social mechanics rather than intuit them. It's by no means my intention to slap a diagnostic label on Matt or anything, but I'm glad talking about the ways I feel like I can relate to him and his work also resonates with others.

I've taken a step back a while ago from actively looking at fandom stuff beyond what my oomfs put on my dash cuz it was kinda disappointing to me to see people engaging with Matt's work and process in a way that felt like they weren't really interested in what he's trying to say... In more ways than one, but definitely including what you mention about people treating his public persona as proof he's a twisted fucking psychopath or whatever. It's one thing to be critical of what he says and how he says it (the post you're referencing was spurred by criticizing an interview where he's talking his way out of including women in his work), but it's another to treat him like he's inherently untrustworthy at all times because he admits to lying easily and using his learned social skills to direct his work. I think he's actually pretty earnest a lot of the time, when not in character, and yes being earnest benefits him in those times, but being earnest benefits people who aren't low empathy too. It's kind of a weird situation for people to act like his learned social behaviors are proof of duplicity, when 20 years of his social development are available to the public to be picked apart by people who are complete strangers to him, whose intentions he can't know. Sounds like some other folks could stand to learn some empathy to me lol

Also looking at my post, I mentioned him using game theory language to describe getting so good at what he does through trial-and-error. This comes from this Game Informer article if you're interested in reading it. He's using this to describe the process of filmmaking (editing, re-editing, reshoots, etc), but I think this also very much applies to his interactions with the public for NTBTS too.

[robert-h-arts]