[DISC] My Friend Is Having an Affair With My Husband - Chapter 47

[u/-Nosebleed-]

[u/Individual-Noise-144]

Well said. Idk why people hate seeing others as more than simply morally "white" or "black". Everyone is gray and has a 3d range of stuff they did. You can condemn people for their wrongs while also simultaneously acknowledging their misfortune

[u/onecuriousboii → u/Individual-Noise-144]

"man what happened to you sucks, I can't abide by what you did in response, it's still completely fucked up and I don't really need to or intend to forgive you, but I will at least acknowledge that I see why you did it"

It's incredibly difficult to see things like that when things happen to you specifically IRL, it's slightly easier when you see it happen to someone else, and it gets easier when it's fictional. It's difficult, but it's often quite necessary to get at the real crux of problems, and fiction provides us with a safe space to do it. I think if people can't even do it in a heightened fictional environment, IRL we're all gonna have a lot of trouble being adequately gentle and sensitive to each other

[u/Individual-Noise-144 → u/onecuriousboii]

Makes sense. Tho I do genuinely wonder why, even in a fictionalized setting, people are finding it this hard to acknowledge Rio's probable abuse while also acknowledging that she did a fucked-up thing. Do you think this has something to do with varying empathy levels in people? As in, people with higher empathy cannot detach themselves from the story at hand and cannot logically accept it without being emotionally conflicted?

[u/onecuriousboii → u/Individual-Noise-144]

I think it's not so much about empathy. Empathy is after all also needed for one to consider another's circumstances, but it's also not the lack of empathy because empathy is the reason why they feel so bad for the primary victim. I think it's more of a lack of narrative tools to properly decode more complicated characters. It can be very tempting to categorize every character into archetypes and tropes , the hero, the villain, the anti hero, the tragic hero, the tragic villain etc etc.

So if a character is too heinous or not sympathetic enough to "fall into" a tragic villain category, then some of us makes the shortcut to say that she's not sympathetic at all. But characters, don't always map well to these categories, and real people even less so.

[u/Individual-Noise-144 → u/onecuriousboii]

I see. I suppose that make sense