Perhaps. I used to have a hard time reading people's emotions. My mother tells me that as a child I never noticed that people were annoyed or angry with me, which resulted in me getting into trouble when I could've avoided it if I'd been able to read the signs. It was a really odd and annoying problem for someone with a heavy dose of empathy (still is at times).DilyV wrote:I've been wondering... Others have tried to get Atsali to understand how to read people too... Could it be that all the teaching in the world won't help her? That maybe she's incapable of understanding? I get the feeling it's something that isn't hardwired into her genome to even understand. Sirens, by nature, survive by using their hardwired instincts to take what they want to survive. They never needed social skills to interact with other people. a Million years of evolutionary instinct isn't an easy thing to unlearn.
It's like most of us. Unless something directly affects us, we could really give two shits, but then when faced with that same circumstance we didn't give a shit about three minutes ago, we're incapable of handling it because it's not something we felt we needed to know how to cope with. I get the feeling this is what it's like for Atsali... only on an evolutionary scale.
I eventually trained myself to recognize expressions, but I assumed for a long time that the expression I saw was 100% indicative of the actual mood of the individual, because I didn't know how to read the body language and tone in conjunction with the facial expression...and I also missed some of the smaller tells that let you know the emotion is fake. That meant I didn't get a lot of sarcasm and unwittingly put my foot in my mouth around people who were trying to hide their hurt...which led to me looking like a naive/blundering idiot as I hit my teenage years (because being a teen isn't awkward enough). I actually had a test performed when I was in high school where I was supposed to identify a person's emotion based on just seeing their eyes...and I didn't do very well...so I kept training myself and learning the more subtle signs and indicators. I'm still not perfect at picking up emotional responses, and I may miss sarcasm on occasion (much to my chagrin), but I'm a damn sight better than I used to be.All of that's to say that Atsali may have had trouble learning how to read people, but she should be able to train herself to recognize certain indicators and combinations of indicators to help her overcome what hasn't developed naturally. I mean, there are plenty of people who have disorders that seem to inhibit their ability to recognize emotion, and I'm not well-versed enough in how those work to know if someone with a more severe iteration of my issue is capable of recognizing the signs with training...and I also don't know if Atsali falls into that category, but the fact that she knows she has a problem and desperately wants to fix it should work in her favor.
