Plurk paste

caveat: while I've certainly encountered a lot of WMPs, Wild Magic Princesses (=mostly girl characters naturally gifted with powerful magic) and SMBs, Studious Magic Boys (=mostly boy characters who get there through stury), I have thankfully not encountered the "and therefore, the SMB's way of doing it is worse and wrong and he must give up his powers" trope enough for it to even stick in my head. I don't doubt that it's out there; it clearly is! I just haven't personally ran into it (much?).

That said. I was going to start this plurk by saying: well I think I gravitate more towards WMPs because, to add another example to the pile, if I'm daydreaming about a world where mermaids exist, I might as well go all the way and dream about being a mermaid, instead of dreaming about a human who builds themselves an artificial mermaid tail and underwater breathing apparatus to visit them. A personal preference, to be sure, and the characters who build themselves mermaid tails are awesome too.

And I think that's still absolutely a thing/a preference I have! But I started wondering, hmm, I wonder why I lean so hard in the direction of WMPs when back in school, I was a lot (A LOT) better at the studious book learning part and the theoretical aspect than the social stuff/group work/Just Getting People. (One of those things where figuring out that I'm autistic made things make a little more sense, but that's neither here nor there.) And then a bunch of things clicked into place that aren't terribly related to the tropes themselves so here I'm going to wander away from the fiction side of things for a good while.

I was a "good student" in schoool early on in general, but the thing that I was the absolute best at was everything to do with lanuage, storytelling, literature etc. (And metaphors on top of metaphors on top of metaphors. My obsession with them never quite went away, which might be, err, a little bit obvious.) And that's where I got my best grades.

Which is really not much of a surprise, given that I poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into it every chance I got, so *of course I becae good at it through practice*. Except that's never what it was treated at, by pretty much anyone. "[Lym] is just naturally good at this stuff" was what I heard over and over, and internalised.

Compared to this, there were subjects that I didn't obsess over but still studied for, like, say, biology. I was good at them, definitely, but not as good as I was at Language And Stories. Which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense, given that I spent (numbers completely made up, because math was the odd one out and definitely not a strong point but that has a whole bunch of reasons that are not part of the scope of this plurk) fifty hours practicing the thing I was good at, and 500 hours at the thing I was amazing at.

And yet, what I took away from this was "I will only ever be okay/sort of good/mediocre at things I study for, compared to the thing I'm Naturally Good at." Because, again, the 500 hours poured into Language And Stories didn't feel like studying and weren't treated like it by anyone else either.

Tangent. Some of my teachers and related adults really failed me in a specific, somewhat related-to-this way: Language And Stories was always treated as less important, and worth *less* than the thing I was outright bad at (math etc.), which was obviously frustrating. So why not fantasize about being a Wild Magic Princess who's naturally gifted at something that's actually *useful* and helps save the world?

And later on, being good at studying, while obviously still important for good grades at school, was valued less and less by teachers who wanted to cheer up students bad at studying and went way too far in the other direction, constantly saying "don't worry, once you're done with school/in Real Life, it won't matter if you're good or bad at studying, it will only matter if you're good at the Social Stuff." and sending the message that, well, the thing I was good at (studying) was worth less than the stuff I was often bad at (the Social Stuff).

(or that is harder and exhausting for me, I should say. I am, in fact, quite good at being nice and sociable and A Person That Co-Workers Like. It just takes a lot out of me and some people are very loudly better at it than me, so the lesson I internalised was, again, "Oh I'm bad at that.")

So yeah, anyway, in the end it's perhaps not so surprising after all that I gravitate so heavily towards Wild Magic Princesses, whose natural powers are valued and useful.

But perhaps, with this very belated and sort of obvious realisation that no, I wasn't "naturally gifted" when it came to Language And Stories, I just found them super interesting and "practiced" them A LOT (so maybe practicing something/continuing to work at becoming better at something is not wortless after all because "mediocre" is the best I can hope for because, uuuuh, maybe it isn't??)... maybe this realisation lets me finally connect more to the Studious Magic Boy characters that I've always found cool in theory but that seemed so very clearly to be "not for me."

Maybe I can have a little Studious Magic Boys, as a treat.

(And sometimes, it's still fun to daydream about being a mermaid.)