animus_network

Did you boycott the collar checkups?

[... she has to be honest here]

No, I didn't.

[She pauses for a moment, the adds the thought that helped start this whole search of hers]

But I'm starting to think that maybe I should have.

Why didn't you?

I don't know.

[There's a pause. That's... partially true. After seeing Dax's research, what he'd said, she'd thought about it, about if maybe this was what Dax had meant about information being all around them. But... then the hacking had happened, and their punishment then, and all thought of rebelling had left her mind for the time being. Take a break. Let things quiet down before trying something again.

Maybe all of that was a mistake. They had so little time left after all. And it certainly wasn't the full truth in regards to the question.]

No, that's not true. A long time ago, we didn't get our collars checked up for a month. It was like nobody was paying attention to the Tower at all. And stuff happened. We lost control of our powers. I hurt people. I didn't want it to happen again.

[ Hope you're ready for tl;dr, Xion. ]

Learned helplessness is the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly. The human or animal fails to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help themselves by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards. The theory behind it is the view that clinical depression and mental illness may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

Organisms that have been ineffective and less sensitive in determining the consequences of their behavior are defined as having acquired learned helplessness.

Is this a sufficient answer for your question?

Edited 2013-07-22 22:57 (UTC)

Look in the mirror. Or look at the people around you who are spouting off the same shit now that it's all over. That's exactly what learned helplessness is.

You get so caught up in thinking that bad things will happen if you act that you refuse to act, and then the bastards in charge win.

It's a psychology term.

When you take a rat and discourage it from protecting itself long enough, eventually it won't do anything even when there is a way it can help itself.

Even if it means they're all going to die.

Because they remember what it was like when they did try.

^ Basically this

It means beating you until you just accept it, or in this case forcing us into collar checkups long enough that we just go along with it.

[He can't see it, but a grimace forms on her face.

She can't even really excuse it, or justify it. Because even though there's a tiny part of her that wants to... isn't that just playing into the whole idea? All of her excuses are what he's describing, or seem to link to it.]

I see. Thank you.

[Damn it.]

Better luck next time.

[The taunt is the last message Xion will get from this anon.]

[A lot of the terminology is a little beyond her, but she can get enough context clues to grasp the general meaning. Especially on top of what dear old anon said up thread.]

Yeah, it is. Thanks.

["Ineffective," huh? "perceived absence of control..." looks like she may have been subject to learned helplessness more than she ever realized.]

[This reply comes a little bit later, no more than a half-hour, after she's had enough time to calm down.]

And what if we choose to not go along with it? What if what just happened with the boycott keeps happening?

If Jason's so angry that they did that, and he's calling those of us who didn't a part of this learned helplessness, there must be something to it. He has to be angry for reason.

[He sure did take the time to read the above replies first. Oh, replikid.]

Well, now that you know, you can get a start on fighting it. The hardest part is the first step.

[It's a direct reply to his anonymous comment, just to keep things clear.]

Unfortunately, I know from experience. ...If you want to talk, I'll be in the library, near the back.

[Her hands are shaking, too much to really type. In the end she enables the voice function, though her voice is only marginally better than her hands.]

Y-yeah. I'll be right there.

[Thankfully she's in the library, so it's a simple matter of logging out of her terminal and backing away, edging her way to the back of the library and trying not to think too much on her way back. Thankfully his red hair makes him overall easy to spot, once she's started looking for him.

If he knows her well enough, he might be able to guess that there's a little more than what she just heard on the network that's bothering her. At least, it wouldn't trigger this extreme a reaction]

H-hey.

He's angry because he was wrong. He's angry because some of us are going against his expectations!

So, I guess you're right. But it takes a while to unlearn conditioning like that.

[It's the usual spot, really - he's kind of taken over this back corner of the romance section, not far from a particularly isolated terminal. He dragged a beanbag chair up there at some point, even.

There's no novels in piles around him now, though. More important things to worry about.]

...Hey.

[He's... not really sure where to start. The whole thing has given him a lot to think about, too. Learned helplessness - he could have walked away from Van at any time, really, but it still took him seven years and the destruction of Akzeriuth to actually do so.]

[She can't meet his gaze. She remembers the rebuttal she'd made, when the boycott had gone up. She remembers arguing for the very thing that Jason would have wanted.]

I guess I'm lucky I didn't mess everything up.

[There'd been enough people who hadn't listened to her, or any of the others, for the boycott to work. That was bad enough. What about... what about everything? What about her?]

...No, if you're lucky about anything, it's seeing the truth before something irreversible happened.

[He glances off, sighs a bit.]

It really is taking the first step that's hardest.

A curious little phenomena where you come to believe that nothing you do will ever change a situation, so you stop trying. Don't tell me this is about the collar boycott.

[She guesses that's true, though it does little to really ease the dark pit of horror in her chest. The empty feeling that's been there since that one anonymous commenter, and Sertoria's definition.]

It's... everything in my head is all jumbled up now. [She leans against a bookshelf, pulling her hands up to rub at her eyes.] How... how long has this been going on? How far does it go?

[Does it go back home? How much of a part of her is this?]

For you?

[He knows how far his goes. His goes back to Choral Castle and a visit home.]

I don't know. It goes back to when you started accepting things instead of acting.

[His words set off a flurry of thought, of trying to pinpoint where and when things began. Where they changed. Had they ever changed? Had she. She doesn't know. She didn't find out about her future until she came here but when- when Riku had told her what happened and Namine had told her about Roxas and she'd met him and seen and met Sora and found out she couldn't-

But what about before that. What about home when she'd tried to decide what to do, whether to stay with her friends or go back to where she belonged? Or was that something else entirely.

She'd told Zo she didn't want to go home. She wanted to stay here. She didn't want to go back to a future where she could do nothing she could change nothing but could she really do nothing or was that this, some conditioned reaction, some fear of what could happen if she stepped outside the bounds that had been defined for her.

But at what risk? Her friends? The people nearer and dearer to her than life? She can't risk that! She could never risk- what if they died or something and it was her fault and-

But how was here so different? Sure they never died here, not yet at least but it felt real, it seemed real enough that dying hurt and it hurt your friends and those who cared about you. The decision they'd made, to place the chips, had put everyone they'd ever cared about who'd left in great and terrible danger, moreso than they could ever face here. How was that so different?

A feeling she hasn't felt since before Reno left bubbles up in her chest, filling the empty void, making her muscles tingle and itch and she wants to do something, something to relieve this uncontainable wellspring of emotions that she can't handle. To run, to hit things, to do something. She pulls her hands away from her face, shaking furiously. Aqua wasn't there to hug her until she stopped kicking and screaming this time. Reno wasn't there to hold her there until she calmed down.

All she had was herself. And suddenly even that seemed like far too much.

Her face screws up, the feelings twisting until they finally managed to escape in a howl of rage and misery that she's only ever made once before in her life. She picks up a book from the nearby shelf and hurls it at the floor, so hard the spine breaks a little.

From there she turns and sinks to the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees and burying her face in them.]

You are welcome.

[...]

Sorry if it came across as harsh, though.

[text]

anon text;

text;

anon text;

text;

[ text ]

anon text;

text

text;

text;

anon text;

[ text ]

text;

[anontext 1/2]

[non-anon and filtered to Xion]

[filtered, voice] 1/2

[action]

text;

[action]

[perma-action]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

[ text ]