shitcory

Hiii i know it's random, but i might have some insight on the sympathy being mistaken for, or used, synonymous with pity.
I also have rants about empathy vs sympathy, but they are addressed to people that claim they have empathy but don't, so i get the frustration of seeing the terms used wrong :)).

Also i will talk about superiority and inferiority, and when i use the terms, i mean the relationship in a power dynamic, not someone's worth as a human being. The superior has more power and agency, the inferior has less, in contrast with the superior. It makes things easier to discuss (an example would be a parent and a child, there are a lot of different dynamics between parents and children at the same time, but there always is a power dynamic as well, the parent is responsible for the child's well-being and they have power to intervine. This is not about positive and negative, it is purely about the fact that power dynamic purely exist in daily life in a lot of human connections). I know the negative connotations behind the words, but since i need to kinda discuss power dynamic, they will have to do.

If you look at the definitions you gave for empathy and sympathy, empathy is very active, it is very involved, it implies the act of abandoning your own feeling and ideas for a moment and genuinely trying to connect and experience from someone else's perspective. Sometimes it can feel like losing yourself to find someone else. It is vulnerable and usually can be interpreted as an act of kindness, goodwill or love(in the general sense, not necessarily romantic).

Meanwhile, sympathy, while i would argue is useful, especially if immersing yourself in other people's feelings drains you or you need to keep a barrier between you and other people, it usually has the problem of imagination. Because people usually don't imagine what they would feel if they were the OTHER person in that situation, they imagine how they would feel if THEY were in that situation. It cuts out the other person and it is way more detached. You can feel it if you are venting to a person close in your life and they completely miss the mark on their assumptions about how you are feeling, despite knowing each other for a long time. When you explain they might understand, but the disconnect is created by using themselves as a benchmark for your experiences.

So, now, sympathy and empathy are both good things, great things even! They are usually fueled by a need to connect with another person, love, understanding, all the good nice stuff. We need them, they are amazing. But it is never a one way process.

If person A feels empathy/sympathy for person B and person B knows, person B will have a reaction. And, for some people, the simple fact that they are in a position where they can be percived as weak or in need of help creates a visceral negative reaction. It makes them feel less than, inferior and looked down upon. Because you have to be up to look down upon someone, which that would be person A, this solidifies in person B's head that they are in fact inferior. Crockton doesn't know if Yulikian has empathy or sympathy for him, because you cannot genuinely completely know what a person thinks, but you can assume. And Crockton's reaction, upon being perceived, upon having someone be in a position to be able to offer help(superior position to his), feels his inferiority (not saying he is inferior, i am saying he thinks that way, hence the whole rant he offers about how Yulikian is fake and selfish and he didn't even need help he was living just fine being abused because he didn't know he was and it is all Yulikian's fault actually so it's super cool and normal to betray the only person that was always by his side celebrating his victories and helping him because Yulikian was not honest anyways - this is projection, Crockton imagines what he would think and feel about himself if he was Yulikian and it is all negative, because he doesn't acknowledge any of Yulikian's actions and words, all he sees is his own perspective, which is negative, because obviously, he hates himself).

Here is where the sympathy and pity problem occur. Pity, in itself, is not necessarily bad, yet it hides the unspoken words that when you pity someone, they are inferior to you and you feel superior to them. And most people don't want to feel like they are in a position to be pitied, it is unpleasant in the best of cases. Add them wanting to offer help, which can be felt as them "acting as they know what is best for you" and you can even come to resent the person that is completely dedicated to help you. When people are uncomfortable, they go through a lot of mental gymnastics to validate and rationalize their feelings. Crockton thinks that help is for the weak and those who are above are better and a person in a superior position automatically dismisses those below them. So when he is in a vulnerable position where he is saved, he automatically assumes Yulikian is both hypocritical and looking down on him and he sees it as a humiliation, not an act of kindness and frankly speaking, human rights, we are talking about a child sold to be beaten, come on, not doing anything about that is the weird and unusual thing. When he goes to the emperor, he now finally has power over Yulikian, over his life, over his well-being and over his last remaining family. He finally feels like he is in a superior position.

Basically, because empathy implies that you feel the same way as someone, it also implies you lower yourself to an even power dynamic, so it generally gets a pass in most people's eye.
But sympathy doesn't require you to make that dynamic even, you use your imagination to imagine how it is to not be you, how it is to be less than. So it is associated with pity, and looking condescendingly down on people.

Is this true? No, most of the time people don't play weird power plays in their lives and going around and assuming that when someone is offering you compassion they actually think you are weak is unhealthy and keeps you from having human connections. Also assuming that offering someone compassion will make them hate you is also not in touch with reality.

But you cannot control other people's feelings, and sometimes it is just gonna be like that. To be honest, i think empathy, sympathy, compassion, all are good and great and we should have more of, and we will also never know what exactly we are receiving but it is great that we are and it is great that humanity is capable of this. What we can control is how we react, so we don't start doing weird mental power plays by ourselves like Crockton (because this is purely an internal process, Yulikian just exists and wants to help his friend), who, if he decided to have 1(one), literaly o n e single moment of connection with Yulikian and saw him as a person instead of a weird combination between everything he hates and everything he couldn't have, would have gained a profoundly kind and loving friend for life, not a life long obsession. The irony of their characterization is that Crockton chose to inflict abuse on a child the same way he suffered in his childhood, resented being offered empathy/sympathy/pity but he was never capable of offering the same to Yulikian and thus created a self fulfilling prophecy were he will probably see everything he resented actually become true, purely because of his own actions.

Pity has a bad reputation because the pitied and the pityer have a power dynamic, sympathy has bad PR even though it is an important life skill and empathy gets a pass because we need at least a word that is still usable i guess.
God i am so sorry this is so long but i am super passionate about this topic lmao.

With chapter 91.... sigh... should've known the author would find a way, mc's plot? armor remains as strong as ever