Xiaolin Showdown Background Aesthetic,The Return Of Master Monk Guan (part 2/2)

Xiaolin Showdown background aesthetic, “The Return of Master Monk Guan” (part 2/2)

Realizing I’d totally be a villain if I were in Wander Over Yonder is the most reassuring self-insert concept I’ve ever came up.

My close friends and family members are all pregnant at the minute (or in the case of one cousin, have just had a baby.) For me this is a Big Thing, because prior to that, the closest any babies or Next Generation stuff ever came to me was friends-of-friends, or y’know. Star Trek. But now everyone is breeding and I am being made to feel the passage of time. Are you happy now, fecund friends?

It’s made me think about a lot of stuff, though, in regards to child-raising (not something I’ve ever had to consider before), and there are loads of topics I now periodically come back to and mull over. The biggest current one is social inclusion, and how easily children can turn to bullying.

I don’t actually know what the answer to this is. But:

We are aware, as a culture, that a child who is left out of play time by others has a shitty time of things, and will experience profound effects from that. Our solution? Tell the other children to include them. Tell them off if they don’t.

This categorically doesn’t work, and I reckon makes things worse.

Thing is… I’m an adult, right? And as an adult, if I meet someone – let’s say, someone in work – who I find to be draining to be around, then as long as I’m not a dick to that person, everyone nonetheless understands if I choose to limit how much time I spend with them. And I don’t mean “an awful person who makes offensive jokes and sprays when he eats”, I literally just mean… maybe this is someone with poor social skills? Maybe they’re VERY ENTHUSIASTIC ALL THE TIME, and after a while you just need a break. Maybe it’s someone who means well, but is constantly negative and critical of everything, and so you need to only work directly with them in small doses. Maybe it’s someone who tries to cover up their social awkwardness by talking about subjects they’re comfortable with, but it tips fully over into constant arrogant boasting. Maybe it’s someone who just… can’t carry a conversation, meaning you have to do all the work in keeping it going, meaning after about an hour you’re emotionally exhausted.

None of those people are bad people – they just socially clash with you, or rub you up the wrong way, you know? As an adult, it’s understood to be acceptable for you to restrict how much time you hang out with them for. You’ll work with them for an afternoon, and then maybe avoid them the next day by working elsewhere. You’re pleasant to them, and professional, but to save your sanity you just keep it to small doses – and, possibly, as long as it’s small doses, you can even enjoy their company.

We deny children that option, though.

When I was a child, I was the middle child of five cousins – my sister Beth and cousin Will were older, and would play together; I would play with my cousin Stephanie. And then her sister Louisa came along. She was the youngest – in truth, I think she probably was slightly babied by the adults, since she was the last baby born to that generation and the rest of us were growing up. But mostly, her great crime – in the eyes of Stephanie and I – was just that she was younger than us, and so needed different sorts of interactions than us, and we were ourselves too young to be able to offer them. We therefore found her childish and annoying, and felt like she kept demanding our attention and getting the games wrong (which she was, but in her defence, she was A SMALL CHILD.)

(Quick disclaimer – we are all adults now, and Louisa is an absolutely fantastic human and never gets the games wrong.)

But, she wanted to play with us, and The Adults TM would always insist that we let her. And so we did! Except… not nicely. We made her play as a boy in every game (huge insult when one is a pre-teen girl). We made fun of her when she got shit wrong. I remember us convincing her that the giant from the BFG was real one time, and she ran to the adults crying, and I remember thinking it was worth the row we got because it meant we got a peaceful ten minutes before she came back.

Obviously, as an adult I can be horrified by that; but what I remember thinking as a child was actually not that it was unfair that we had to include her, but that Beth and Will never had to do it.

I was a child, so I didn’t have the social or developmental toolkit to articulate the problem, but as an adult, I can see it clear as day. Louie was five years younger than me. Playing with her meant, essentially, babysitting her. In small doses, that worked; but I would hit a limit fairly quickly and then want to relax into my more natural play mode with Stephanie, but I couldn’t, because I wasn’t allowed any sort of break from poor Louie. I can recognise what I was thinking now: I didn’t resent it because Beth and Will didn’t have to babysit. I resented that they didn’t have to take a turn, which would have given me a break.

And so, we ended up bullying her. It’s not something I’m proud of (sorry Lou.) But it’s what happened.

And my point is, this is not unique. Adults in our culture routinely force social inclusion on children, but completely ignore that, actually, everyone has the right to limit how much time they spend with people they just don’t like – or even, people who just drain them. That includes children. And if you don’t respect that right to space, you’re pouring a huge mental load onto people who don’t yet have the emotional skills to handle the situation, and thus in the attempt to stop a child being isolated, you cause the child to be bullied instead. Moreover, you teach the other children to be bullies.

Yeah, like I say, I don’t particularly have an answer to this. I read an article by a woman who spotted that her daughter, when she was about 12, was excluding another girl in her social group. What she did was not to insist that they included her, but to make her daughter go into school the next day and find out three cool things about this girl. Her daughter was Deeply Unimpressed, but did it – it actually led to the two becoming very good friends, because suddenly there were specific things they could talk about. I think that seems like a good way of doing it for many situations, since oftentimes children do need help to develop the necessary skills to interact with people in a way they’ll enjoy. Sometimes, the problem is just that children are seeing the status quo, and not the people, you know?

But… that doesn’t always work. Sometimes, people just clash. To go back to my earlier analogy, if the work colleague who bothers me turns out to play the fiddle in a folk rock band, owns three llamas, and likes making his own wine out of birch sap, then that’s cool! But if he’s still mentally draining to be around, all that’s done is give us some things to talk about during our limited work sessions. Because I’m still going to need to have time away from him to recharge.

Technically, I suppose the answer is more supervision of a specific type. For Louisa (honestly, she is SO GREAT, I cannot stress this enough), we probably could have done with The Adults TM only sending her to play with us for a few hours, and then with Beth and Will for a few hours, and then maybe coming and playing with her aunts for a few hours, you know? That would have helped immeasurably, because then we could have grit our teeth if she was being annoying and just waited it out. Or, actually, we probably could have gone along with it and enjoyed it, because we knew it was just for a little while. I’m not sure how that necessarily extends to a school environment, though.

Like I say, I don’t know the answer. Part of this issue is going to be an unpalatable truth – ultimately, the child who is being excluded just wants to join in, but it’s never going to happen that way because if they aren’t excluded they’re victimised. And no one, but especially not a child for gods’ sakes, is going to want to have to acknowledge that they are only likeable in small doses. That’s heartbreaking, but unfortunately, that’s just how it goes sometimes.

(Full disclosure: while I have been on the “Please leave me alone” side of this debate – most notable, up above – I have also been on the other side, many many times. I’m not for everyone. An acquired taste. It fucking sucks.)

And, hey, some kids are always going to be bullies anyway, and would either exclude or bully anyway, and this isn’t really discussing them. I’m talking about the fact that the “You have to play with them” approach takes kids who would otherwise be perfectly lovely and turns them into little bastards, because we’re ignoring the underlying issues: we are taking children and expecting them to perform the mental and emotional labour of adults but without the ability to set up any boundaries or space, and then are AMAZED when it goes wrong.

@accidental-spice here they are! (Making a post so I can find them easier)

So there’s this episode in Transformers Animated where the Autobots wake up on Christmas Day as humans. (Surprisingly they don’t have to learn the Meaning of Christmas, though one is putting a “be grateful for what you have” moral into practice and is enjoying himself.) There’s a big Decepticon attack, which is inconvenient at the best of times.

Because the not-bots are heroes, they rally to help as much as they can in their tiny fleshy bodies. They save a woman and her child from a building that caught fire in the chaos, throw in some foreshadowing, and then, without any on screen discussion, decide the Thing to Do is to punch Starscream in the leg. Which is a normal impulse, I get that, but still. 

Like, it’s Bulkhead. He doesn’t think this through. He’s used to having wrecking balls for hands, I sympathize with him here. And now he has a broken hand. And then Optmus decides the thing to do is swing a fire axe at the giant evil jet man. He gets his LEG broken.

Merry Christmas for him.

You can see the pain in his eyes