Dragon doing dragon things

Xeno is not as physically capable as almost all of the Americans, but he is pulling his weight in grunt labor while still providing the knowledge/technical labor required.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

This is, in some ways, where groundedness and realism intersect--once the story has established that, for a certain thing, the internal logic of the world aligns with the logic of reality, readers will (reasonably) expect that to continue to be true.

One of the sort of notorious examples of this is horses in fantasy worlds--you can have horses that don't work like Earth horses, but once you establish in universe that they do work like real Earth horses, readers (or at least readers who know horses) will want a realistic portrayal of horses.

Best chocolate cake you'll ever have. But the scrolling to get there.

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

A lot of fan stuff I see seems to treat Xeno as remarkable and odd and Stanley as if he’s kind of an average kid.

But he wasn’t. He’s not an average adult, either (come on. Everyone trusts him impeccably in his unit and the wider military at large, the fanbook gave him the youngest promotion to his position in history, he literally got woken up because he’s the best in the world at what he does, etc., etc.), but it definitely started when he was a child.

Per the fanbook, again, he was winning shooting competitions at ten. Especially given how old you should really be to handle a gun, that’s so insanely young.

Per the anime, at eleven, he could evaluate a wrong shot from a glance at a distance and calculate in fractions of a second what the issue was and how to fix it.

Per his character bio, he was already winning massive amounts of cash based on a trick shot people so completely didn’t think was possible only Xeno bet on him, completely unaided by anything other than his own skill.

If Xeno was isolated from his peer group for being too far ahead of them in his field of specialty (which is conjecture, since we never see any of that)...well, Stanley is in the same position.

And if Xeno was resented by adults for being ahead of them (again, conjecture)...I don’t think you’ll ever be able to convince me that adults who enter shooting competitions would be all that happy about a young kid beating them handedly. Like. Hrmmmmm. No, I don’t think you can do it.

Stanley has been freakishly, unnervingly good at what he does since he was a very young child, the same way Xeno was. This is a thing that can easily cause isolation if you’re not lucky and your family and environment is not well-equipped to handle the issues (such as with Senku).

Stanley meets Xeno and carefully observes and realizes Xeno is brilliant beyond anything he’s seen, and says he’s weird with sheer delight. And sure, he has weird taste.

But Stanley is just as weird as Xeno is, and he’s finally found someone his age who can understand. This kid—this kid gets it. No one around him before would have been able to get it.

Xeno is weird just like Stanley is! Finally!

He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”

“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”

Several us nodded.

He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.

“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”

“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”

“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”

“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why lift weights?”

“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.

“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”

When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one.  Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.

Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to.  But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.

History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from.  It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely.  Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.

Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction.  But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.