#much of the time we don't actually understand why we're receptive or resistant to evidence and that's pretty useless

[gofancyninjaworld]

I know you're not one for discussing power scaling that much, but what is your opinion on how reddit (general) constantly lowballs Genos, then consider weaker feats of other characters better than his own feats of strength? It just seems almost.... weird to me? It's like people hold a grudge against Genos for, existing, I guess? And when did this trend even start?

It's a long answer that is grounded in psychology. While the character himself is fictional and it's by no means a serious situation, nevertheless I've found the way people respond a surprisingly real-life object lesson.

As for the whole powerscaling thing that's become awfully popular, that's a purely fictional construct and is just froth. It's irritating as this is a story designed to frustrate attempts to make like-for-like comparisons and which tries to capture some of the complexity of actual conflict, but folk will have their fun. I think nothing of it. I think it's driven mostly by YouTubers who need to have something to engage their OPM viewers about day after day to stay monetised -- it's hard work. More power to them.

1. Anchoring Bias. One of the headaches of teaching people is that we don't actually learn that well from evidence. We need to check with our pre-existing impressions and beliefs before we'll accept it. All human beings do it, it gives us some degree of stability in our understanding of the world, but it easily goes too far. I don't know if you've ever watched Mythbusters, but in revisiting the episode of the lead balloon, Adam Savage said something I found extremely relevant: he said that there was no inertia in [Jamie's] ability to change his mind, praising the latter's quickness to change his mind in response to new information. [link to the whole segment]

As a group, Redditors have a very strong anchoring bias, a very high mental inertia if you will. You can see it in the way they get upset whenever something in the manga does not correspond to the webcomic, or doesn't happen in the way they thought it would. Oy vey. Characters too, impressions are anchored early and are very slow to shift. It's anchored in minds that Genos is a loser, and certainly when he started out he was pretty damn bad at what he did. Other characters are anchored as winners and their actions are read much more lightly. If mental gymnastics need to be taken to make new information 'fit' that anchor, they will be done. Like if Metal Bat were seen the same way that Genos is, the time he broke free of the chains Erimin and Destro had bound him in, you would have seen posts questioning the toughness of the chains and the quality of the binding. You know, 'just asking', the sort of thing that seems superficially critical in isolation... until you realise it's not asked of others.

2. Key Opinion Leaders. There may be half a million subscribers on Reddit, but functionally, there's only about 50 members who have a loud enough voice to sway the sub one way or the other. They're the Key Opinion Leaders. It's the case for *all* human groupings. Even scientific and medical fields have their KOLs and if you want something to be accepted, you need only persuade them and the rest fall largely in line.

3. The Halo Effect. A basic problem of human psychology is that if we have a positive impression of a person, we'll think everything they do is that bit better. And vice versa.

A character with a great halo is Bang. Who doesn't like a cool old dude with martial arts moves? And he's an awesome and likeable character. The positive light in which he's seen is all but independent of what can actually be observed about him, which is much less rosy. The fact that in a field where disciples are generally loyal and ex-masters are held in esteem for decades, he has few with any loyalty to him? He may be strong but so far, every time he's intervened to help Genos out of a situation the latter can't cope with, he hasn't so much gotten him out of the situation as joined him in the crap. You won't catch anyone calling him a jobber though (no hero should be called a jobber for the record).

If the halo changes, it's shocking how quickly a character's actions will be interpreted differently. Popular opinion was that Sweet Mask could do no right even if his critical stance on hero work being done right and seen to be done right was spot on. And now that he's a more sympathetic character, nothing he does can be wrong, even though he *is* a raging asshole at times, like a lot of the time. Both are bad takes.

The halo effect works against Genos. The whys don't matter, it's the fact of its existence that does. It means that no matter how well he is doing, his actions are always going to be seen more negatively than if other characters did the same thng. It's funny that since your post landed in my in box, we've had a manga chapter in which it's finally occurred to many that Genos is actually heroic. How long that will last and what effect if any it'll have in modulating folks' opinions of him we will just have to see.

Like I said, this is a fictional character and no harm is being done. It's just a fascinating object lesson in how you can have severe bias against someone without any explicit bigotry. Also the truth of 'give a dog a bad name and hang him.' It's also a salutatory reminder of why English (or other language of instruction) literature is such a valuable class. Because it encourages you to read and think about texts critically for both explicit and implicit meaning and once you learn to spot the patterns, you can see it better IRL.