We need to stop vilifying low empathy I’m begging yall.
Somewhere out there, theres a little kid who keeps getting in trouble because he doesn’t understand how to play nicely with the other kids and keeps hurting peoples feelings on accident. He doesn’t know why all the adults are so angry at him all the time. He’s not a bad kid, not on purpose. He doesn’t want to be a bad kid. He’s trying so hard and keeps making everything worse.
Somewhere out there, there’s a teenager getting into fandom spaces for the first time and every time she sees a post about her favorite character, who has trouble with emotions, just like her, it’s always something negative. It’s always a post telling others to stop redeeming them, or mocking them for no reason. She’s old enough to understand that she’s different from other people. She’s old enough to know that despite that, she’s still doing her best to be kind. And she’s old enough to know that the real reason everyone hates her favorite character is because they don’t understand low empathy works. She hates herself because she knows if she ever tells anyone how she feels, she’ll be hated too. It’s a good thing she learned how to pretend. Nobody will abandon her if she says the right things, has the same expressions, uses the proper tone.
Somewhere out there, there’s a young adult who can’t understand emotions. They get annoyed when they hear people crying, they don’t understand romance in books and movies, and they still remember how it felt as a child when they watched their whole family fall apart when a relative died, and they didn’t care. They remember how they didn’t LIKE that their grandmother was gone, but they didn’t linger on it either. It didn’t shatter them the way it shattered their mother. And most of all, they remember how their mother looked at them when she figured it out. How she screamed that they were a monster she couldn’t ever love. They think maybe the world would be better if they weren’t a part of it.
But none of those people are inherently evil. There is no such thing. They still care about things. They have comfort foods and books they love and musicians they would love to see live. They have dreams and hopes and aspirations. All of them are so much more than the way they feel things. Please I’m begging you stop demonizing them. It HURTS to see yourself represented like that. If you simply don’t know how to portray us, then ASK. it’s OK to not know things. You don’t need to be ashamed, but you do need to learn.
