#mywriteing

It's the only thing I disagree on when most people critique the anime-only Arachne x Asura thing doesn't really make any sense. If you had to pick a real animal and not any fictional or mythological creature, he is very spider coded. Many people are afraid of them despite the fact they instantly freeze once they notice you and watch you carefully as they slowly back away. The spider defense pose (look it up) and Asura raising his scarves above his head like he keeps them positioned in battle…

Arachne's fault she died for ignoring very obivous spider social cues!!!

Regardless, a very large amount of generally suspicious/paranoid types (source: my people) don't tend to visibly display their fear like Asura does unless you're actively recovering and learning to express and work through those emotions. You learn to hide or make yourself invisible as much as possible because people respond to your paranoia by directly fuelling it or thinking you're dangerous, bizarre, erratic, out of your mind, unreasonable, or overdramatic… There are two general categories of coping mechanism I've seen and they fall into "isolate as much as possible, detach from need as much as possible, and suppress as many quirks as possible when unable to" and "learn how people respond to percieving you as erratic or bizarre." It's just that that exact kind of keen social perception and interaction is something paranoia in general and the real-life disorders it's most often a result of tend to erode the capacity to regulalry participate in, especially to the point of accurately reading others and actively modulating your behavior in real-time to attempt to influence their responses. Simply-put there are those whose illness is more severe but Asura retains enough cognitive capacity to obviously not be at that level of severe where such behavior is uncontrollable - in someone with Asura's level of function I usually percieve the erraticism as behaviors that leak out when decompensating, or a choice to overall act in such a manner in a way you can't particularly control to ward off as many people as possible.

After all, people generally respond to closed-off natures with attempting to draw closer. It's the literal "make them think you're insane so they think you're dangerous and leave you alone" defense. We see Asura's general behavior change between having his scarves over his face (more erratic and paranoid) to showing his face (more calm and witty), so maybe that's one way he attempts to manage it - visual/tactile sensory change coupled with a metaphor for changing the self by wearing a literal mask.