The care is in the “how”…mango lassi “margaritas”
The last of the backed-up posts…
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Story stuff. Musing on assholes. Might be triggery re: assholes.
I have a bit in the WIP coming up where I have a character of questionable morals (but clear ethics) facing off against a respected member of the community, one who doesn’t come across as an asshole but is the sort of Quiet Bad who is so effective in real life. I need some shorthand to help the reader be clear on what makes them different that isn’t just “but of course Our Hero is the good guy.”
Musing:
I think the part that assholes-in-disguise miss is that it’s not the “what,” it’s the “how.”
They know how to mimic the “why.”
“Oh, yes, I’m doing X because X is considered a good thing, and therefore if I do X, I am good.” Or desirable or or reliable or noble or whatever. That’s where the superficial charm comes from: most assholes like to look “good.” Not to fit in or be less lonely (although perhaps that’s a side benefit, depending on how aware they are). But as a kind of ornamental plumage of the soul.
So they do X, and it’s effective right up until you realize they’re just copying someone else. In some bad cases, they copy X while simultaneously trying to take X away from the person they’re copying.
The ex (for example) was all about persistence. HE was persistent; I was stubborn. HE liked camping; I liked driving around aimlessly. (I like all kinds of exploring; he wanted to carve out camping as his exclusive domain, while denigrating that parts of exploring he left in my purvue.) He quit writing because “De is the writer.” But really because he didn’t want to do the work or face the rejection.
So far so good; I already knew those parts.
The “how,” tho.
When stuff didn’t go well, the ex got mean. He blame shifted. He made promises, then blamed me for stopping him from keeping them. All kinds of rosy promises–no follow through, unless it happened on a whim and made him look good. He once bought me a hundred candles and a bunch of scarves and some other things, created this whole Arabian Nights atmosphere for a seduction. It went great! There was cheese. I felt appropriately seduced.
Then he left me the dishes and trying to figure out what to do with a hundred tea candles, and nagged me to burn them more often, and made fun of me for keeping them, and finally asked “Why would I care?” over a decade later when I asked if it was okay if I got rid of them.
He used to take off his wedding ring and “accidentally” smash it under a chair while gaming with “his” friends when he was mad at me, then make fun of me when I finally replaced his ring for him (he bought the original rings and said he’d bought himself a cheap ring because he wanted to spend more on mine). –I was supposed to game with him, yet be too snobby to be a gamer, at the same time. He would regularly carve out conflicting definitions of who we each were that made no sense, and expect me to keep all of them, while giving him cues on how to pull off his. Like someone who expects a woman to be both a whore and a Madonna, while making him feel like a man and a boy, only more complicated and it’s every aspect of your life and it changes as soon as you indicate you’re starting to see the weird overlaps. Crazy-making.
The people who just want to fit in, do the dishes. They remember the candles. They take care of the cheap ring and feel bad if they accidentally smash it.
The “what” is the same. The “why” sounds the same. (Sadly, the “why” from non-assholes often sounds suss to me, because of all the bullshit I’ve heard, although I’ve cleared out a lot of resistance to it lately.) The “how,” though, that’s where the care is, or isn’t.
As a writer, it’s easier to focus on the bang and the boom, the more dramatic aspects. So I flip it and go, “Is someone who does X that seems bad, actually bad?” That’s the core of the Mr. Assassin as a character. Goth Girl picks up the “how” in one of her earliest scenes with him. They get in a fight and he drops everything because he realizes he’s made her uncomfortable in exactly the way he hates seeing women uncomfortable. Goes flat, freaks out. She goes “WTF, asshole?” but figures it out.
The Quiet Bad is harder to show. The “WTF?” is being hidden. I have to show his character through logic. He acts the way he “should.” I need to show the overlaps in the different rosy pictures he’s trying to paint for Goth Girl. I think. Not to show that he never intended to keep his promises, but to show that for him, “how” he accomplishes his goals is irrelevant. He’ll either keep his promises or he won’t; if they suit him, he’ll keep them and say he kept them because he’s such a solid promise-keeper. But he won’t be able to fake the “how,” even in a conversation, because that’s Someone Else’s Problem. Hm. That feels right but probably won’t work, because it sounds reasonable enough. “We have people for that.” “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out when we get there.” “But that’s WHY we need to do X. I can’t do it without you.”
Bleah. Yeah, I heard that a lot from the ex. I got jerked around by it; that won’t help me in the story.
Okay, take it a layer deeper.
In real life with the ex, I went, “It sounds like you’re fucking with me, in exactly the way that you fucked with me in the past, but you haven’t been doing for some time now.” I was convinced things had finally been turning around and he had healed enough to stop being such a jerk. (I didn’t realize how bad it was, even when I looked back and went, “The past was worse! Hoo boy!”)
Then I said, “I just need you to admit how bad this sounds. I truly believe that you’re not fucking with me. I just need you to say you understand how bad this looks.”
He could not. He gave a fake apology. I think it was something like, “I’m sorry you see it that way. It wasn’t my intention.” But he could NOT say, “You’re right, it really does seem like I’m fucking with you.”
When pressed, he said, “You’re always like this. There’s literally nothing I can say to make you happy.” But there was. I gave him the exact words to say.
He could not acknowledge that someone else could interpret his actions in a way he did not want them to. It wasn’t the apology that was the problem per se. He was great at dribbling out apologies, eventually, even if I had to coach every single one out of him. It was acknowledging that I had a point of view, that I was more conscious on a practical level than a pet or a computer. To him I was a balky machine that required stupid, senseless inputs to keep running. Once I was running properly, no more inputs needed until my next scheduled maintenance.
I think that’s how I finally caught him; we both knew in an instant it was over: “I just need you to admit it looks bad” was apparently the magic incantation needed to break the spell. I might as well have said, “I just need you to admit that everything you do, you see as jumping through hoops, and that you’re not even doing a good job at it.”
Pop.
So back to the story. I can do that. I can get Goth Girl to invoke the magic incantation. It will unleash All the Bad Things, I’m sure. (It did in real life!) But it will protect her from the Quiet Bad’s attack, and give her tools for later stuff that might come up.
Good. This works. Subconscious will play with it and develop it further.
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Fun recipe to play with!
Mango lassi “margaritas”
2 oz mezcal
1 oz passionfruit liqueur
1 oz lime juice
1 mango, chopped, a bit frozen
1/2 c vanilla greek yogurt
5 pods green cardamom, crushed in mortar/pestle, fibrous parts removed
1 t salt
Taijin seasoning to taste, 2t at a guess
Smoothie the heck out of it and drink.
At a guess (I haven’t tested it!) you could swap out tequila for the mezcal and Cointreau for the passionfruit liqueur. I just happened to have mezcal and passionfruit liqueur! But I don’t think they were vital to the actual taste.
Midjourney mermaid image, from playing back and forth with a friend’s prompt. This sort of ended up in a story later.