Welcome to the ongoing series, Finnguala Psychoanalyzes the SCA. Let me just get this out here up front: I am not qualified to be your personal therapist, nor do I have any desire to. Everything discussed here is going to relate to behavioral trends and patterns, which means your very specific situation may or may not follow them. These posts are intended to help people recognize and understand some common recurring situations and the broader context in which these situations develop. My hope is that this will expand the number of people with a view of the complicated social context that feeds these issues and improve our tools for addressing them.

Today’s topic has become particularly prominent due to the proliferation of social media: Explosive “Overreactions!”

I’m going to address this by drawing an analogy to a sibling dynamic. I’m also going to explain why there are quotation marks around “overreactions.” Finally, I’m going to make a likely-controversial conclusion about what is required to break the cycle of these incidents. But first, let’s make sure you know what I mean by this topic.

Topic Defined: In this post, and Explosive “Overreaction” means a reaction that appears to be significantly stronger and/or louder in degree than the action that stimulated it.

The Older Sibling Problem:

In this example there are two siblings: the older sister, Adrian, and the younger brother, Andy. (This is definitely for sure not a real story from my childhood or anything.)

Adrian is 3 years older than Andy. For reasons unknown to Adrian, Andy is a constant little shit who loudly taunts her, pokes her, punches her in the butt, and basically tries to provoke a reaction in any way he can when she is trying to focus on something (literally anything) or complete a task. Any time Adrian asks or tells him to stop, Andy ignores her and keeps at it. Their parents aren’t interested in intervening and tell her not to be a whiner or a tattle-tale when she complains to them. They say they don’t want to hear about it unless there’s blood. They tell her to ignore him. Adrian literally cannot ignore him because he keeps her from being able to focus on homework and physically invades her space. Andy’s behavior continues unchecked.

Finally, one day Andy is refusing to stop punching Adrian in the butt while she is taking food out of the freezer, despite her repeatedly telling him (“using her words”) to stop. Adrian warns Andy that if he hits her one more time, she is going to hit him with whatever is in her hand. Andy punches her again. Adrian brings a frozen vegetable lasagna down squarely on top of Andy’s head. Andy squeals like a stuck pig. Mom comes running. Adrian gets punished because she is “older and should know better.” Andy laughs. What a shit.

This cycle repeats over and over. Andy is always the instigator, Adrian tries not to react because she’s supposed to “know better” (per Mom). Eventually she can’t bottle it up anymore, loses her shit, enforces her boundaries, and gets punished. Always she is the one who is supposed to be the better person and ignore the little shit biting her ankles.

“Overreacting”

Adrian’s reactions are not proportional to the single, specific incident that immediately preceded them. They are, however, proportional to the sum total of reactions to all of the events leading up to that incident. This doesn’t make it any more acceptable to slam a block of ice into your brother’s skull, of course. But it certainly explains why someone might react that way in response to getting punched in the butt.

I’m putting quotation marks around this word because it doesn’t convey the whole truth. In reality, this kind of overreaction is really a collection of misdirected/delayed reactions. If we can start to understand that, we can get at what is really making them happen. Obviously it is not the butt punch that caused the homicidal wrath… it is a culmination of months or years of this treatment and always being told the equivalent of “You are not allowed to assert/enforce boundaries at any point regardless of how damaging your brother is being because you were born first.“

(So hey, if you are a parent and you’ve been saying this to your kid, please re-examine your application of this concept and whether you are actually teaching them they’re not allowed to have boundaries.)

Application to the SCA:

This kind of interaction can happen anywhere in the SCA, but there’s one place people seem to absolutely relish the opportunity to get in a jab: Authenticity.

With respect to authenticity, I’m going to use 3 broad categories to capture the entire SCA. There are the people who are hardcore into authenticity, and pursuing it is their jam (A). There are the people who are kind of in the middle, who think authenticity is cool and the people who pull it off are awesome, but who don’t pursue it terribly seriously (B). And there are the people who actively try to piss off the people who pursue authenticity because for some reason that’s what they think is fun (C).

Category A is Adrian.

Category C is Andy.

And Category B is half Mom watching the tip of the iceberg get nuked and half Andy’s friend (who isn’t a little shit and has made good-faith efforts to play respectfully with Adrian) seeing a violent reaction and getting scared.

Mom has to try to do damage control with the only information available at first glance and does the best they can with the energy they have.

Andy’s friend is too scared to keep trying to play with Group A and maybe wonders if it’s even worth playing with Group C anymore.

Mom yells at Group A for hurting Group C and scaring away their friend (who was interested in being Group A’s friend too). Group A gets told that as leaders and people who are looked up to in the SCA, they should know better. Group C has no consequences but gets to tell more “Mean Group A” stories now. Group A tries not to react to Group C until something breaks the dam and starts the whole episode over again.

What can we do about it?

We can start by not putting all of the onus for good behavior on one side of the table. It is absolutely true that Adrian is bigger and stronger and knows better than to slam a frozen entree into Andy’s skull! It is also true that she shouldn’t have to put up with him ceaselessly punching her in the butt simply because she was born first or is a Peer or whatever. That’s harassment. And it’s not innocent fun; it creates an environment where she is so saturated with stress that an uninvolved third party might try to squeeze past her and she turns around and slugs them! And now you have a Mean Laurel beating up on someone who was just trying to participate in good faith.

Active disregard for the most basic rule of participating in an SCA Event and contempt for those who care about and pursue authenticity are toxic and have no place in this club. Imagine if people showed up at SCA Events trying to fight without being authorized and actively taunted and jeered at the people trying to elevate their fighting skills, and the leaders & Peers of the fighting community were told to keep their mouths shut and ignore it and then chastised if they refused. They would certainly be wrong to react by sending the jerks to the hospital with broken bones, of course! But they are, and should be, expected to stand up for themselves and the community.

Authenticity should not be any different. You can participate at whatever level you like as long as you meet the minimum standards, follow the rules, and are courteous to others. And people should be allowed to talk about that and assert it as a boundary, even (especially!) the ones who are “older and should know better.”

If you want to create an SCA where explosive decompression happens less often, you need to install a blow-off valve. Create a space where people are allowed to talk about these things instead of silencing anything that could possibly be considered intimidating to a new person. A single explosion is going turn new people off a whole lot faster than regularly seeing adults who are able to express themselves reasonably, explain their boundaries, and admit out loud that something might not be their personal preference while still not necessarily being wrong.

And please, can we stop letting Andy get away with intentionally being a little shit all the time?

(No Andys were permanently harmed during the making of this story. The real Andy is a much more enjoyable human now that he is an adult who makes better choices. Love you, bro!)