#redboots

✨Details✨

Skizz - Dromedary camel

Impulse - Suffolk punch draft

Pearl - Australian brumby

Scar - American mustang

Gem - North American whitetail deer

Grian - Shetland pony

Tango - Fjord horse

Backing up. If we're right, Skizz is missing a vital piece of what makes social situations and communication easy and intuitive to most people. When Impulse screamed in panic because he thought he lost his netherite gear in the sorting system of his raid farm, Tango immediately clocked that "that sounds bad" and reacted accordingly, whereas it took Skizz—Skizz, who's known Impulse for thirty years—three separate checks to figure out exactly what Impulse was feeling and how serious the situation actually was.

Skizz appears to do social stuff manually. Skizz does not appear to pick up on shifts in people's mood unless they are blatantly obvious. Even when they are blatantly obvious, he still has to ask questions to see if he's understanding the severity of the situation. He's looking for clues. He's looking for information. He's asking questions. "Tell me how you feel. Tell me what's going on. Because I can't see it myself."

Skizz is not intuitively good at communication. When I drew Symbiosis, I was still under the impression that Skizz had some kind of innate hyper-empathy that made him exceptionally good at reading people, and I drew his "superpower" of Communication accordingly.

But that's not accurate. If I did Symbiosis again, his superpower wouldn't look like those happy little floating bubbles. It would look like algorithms. Data. Math problems. Flow charts and logic gates and drop-down lists of evidence. Because that's what he's doing to read people. If we're right, he doesn't have the cheat code of empathy to helpfully make him feel what emotion someone else is feeling. He has to figure it out through clues and logic.

His plane doesn't have a windshield. It's just a solid piece of metal. He cannot see outside the cockpit any more than you could see through a solid wall. The only way he can know if he's at the correct roll and pitch and yaw and heading and if there are any obstacles ahead of him is by checking the instruments on his dashboard.

And in most circumstances, that makes him slow. There's a lot of information to parse and process, just to get him to the same level of information that all the other pilots can glean in an instant just by looking out the windshield. By the time he's figured out "oh dang, there's a mountain ahead of me on my radar, better correct course around it", he's often nearly slammed his nose to smithereens on the mountainside. And all the other pilots—who have windshields in their planes, and therefore can see—are like "Skizz, what the heck, bro, how could you not see that right in front of your face?" and he's like "I'M SORRY it just showed up for me, man".

This, we think, is why Skizz misses social cues. It's why he fumbles people's feelings occasionally without realizing. It's why he can be slow on the uptake and needs to ask three times if his buddy of thirty years is really upset or just playing. Because he's missing something that's obvious and intuitive to everyone else.

This is why he's bad at communication.

But in a weird way, it's also his superpower. Because if something comes easily to you, you never have to study it. And if you never study it, you never know what to do in the moments that it becomes difficult.

Redboots pointed out something fascinating to me this afternoon: When Skizz describes his strength of Communication in Episode 60 of the podcast, he doesn't say he's a spectacular empath. He doesn't say he's really good at picking up on people's feelings. He doesn't say he always says things perfectly and beautifully the first time.

He says he can teach people well. He says he knows what they need to hear. He says he can identify miscommunications in other people's conversations.

Those aren't innate traits. Those are learned skills. They're based in patterns and logic and information. Skizz has learned to dismantle the art of communication logically because he has to do things logically.

This is why he can solve miscommunications between other people so easily. He's learned to study patterns of communication, so he's uniquely equipped to detect things like "hang on, you're using the same word for two different definitions". People who navigate social situations entirely by vibes often don't develop this skill, because they never need to. They never needed to learn how to dismantle and analyze their communication. Why would they? Communication just works for them, automatically. Why would a bird study how to fly?

But when the vibes fail—when there's fog during the night and zero visibility, and all the pilots who've learned to fly by sight are panicking because they can't see—that's when Skizz shines. That's when his superpower comes out. Because he's been learning to steer by the instruments the entire time anyway, so when everyone else is struggling to navigate, he's in his element; he's guiding the way with confidence and leading the pack safely home.

This is why he's good at communication.

It's not innate talent. He's not a genius. He's not a savant. He's an expert. It's honed and practiced skill. He's put literally hundreds of thousands of hours of study and analysis and practice and trial and error and failure and reevaluation and adjustment and patience and persistence and blood and sweat and tears into learning how to interface with the world around him.

This is, we think, why he's so interested in psychology. It's not just an entertaining realm of hypotheticals to him. It's a manual to humanity. It's information that he has to know to interact properly with the people around him, and he loves people, and he wants to understand them, so this is information that is directly applicable to his everyday life.

If we're right about this, Skizz is incredibly impressive. Not in the sense of an Olympic runner—he'll never get there—but in the sense of a paraplegic learning to walk again. He's worked harder than anybody else just to get up to ground zero, and against all odds, he's even climbed beyond that. Nobody else is doing it like Skizz. No one could do it like Skizz. If you took one of the other pilots and put them into his plane without the windshield they would crash to the ground so freaking hard (assuming they ever got off the tarmac). But not only has he learned to fly without the windshield, he's learned to do it well enough that he can teach other pilots what he knows too, and he's making the people around him better and stronger versions of themselves for it. King behavior, actually. Absolute champion.