In post 1016, Chara wrote:so, i finished reading the Prism and kitty argument. i don't know, i don't like Prism's approach to it at all. there's pressing for explanation or depth to a read and then there's pressing beyond what's reasonable. accusing kitty if AtE again and again and then, what, jokingly insulting them in your recent posts? if you're trying to kid, it's just coming off as nasty. you keep saying kitty should have agreed to disagree and ended it but you could have done the same thing, especially when it became clear you weren't getting anywhere.
I think putting together an entire timeline of my read on catboi would be really enlightening but I'll keep it to addressing your points here for now, and probably revisit it Day 2.
The first is that the joking insults/being nasty were absolutely intentional. To be blunt, the reason catboi is hardtown to me is that he just left a $50 bill on the ground as scum. The indignation in response to his reads being shit on is a pretty common towncat trope, but he can do it as both alignments. Being wary really isn't out of his range either, though. He publicly portrayed fear of me setting up or trying to ensnare him in something. What made me suspect this was legitimate due to how non-concrete and coinflippy of a fight it was-I think if he really wanted to scumpush me, he'd make sure he had really solid footing unless circumstances forced him to coinflip it.
The way to confirm this was just to bait him much more flagrantly.
He has nothing to fear as scum in this scenario. I've already outed a townread on him, I'm completely wrong in my read, there's very little conniving for me to do to begin with, and because my reads are wrong/I don't know the team any setup is destined to fail spectacularly. He has
carte blanche
here and I'm really not a threat. He can act indignant, he can outright push me for publicly and blatantly baiting him in bad faith, and he can probably collect a townread all the while for doing so. Instead he moved quickly to just leave the bait be and not engage with it further. To me, the explanation is that he
really is worried
that I am planning something against him.
This isn't really dependent on catboi's style, or dependent on him taking the same weird oracle/clairvoyent view of longterm strategy that I leaned on earlier with him. This just depends on his ability to recognize+capitalize on extremely blatant town mistakes. And he can.
The more minor imo points to address are that I think his initial reaction was fairly emotional instead of just fairly evaluating his own read/my reaction to it. I thought that was a more interesting avenue, and trying to both get him to see my perspective and fish out if it was legitimate had a lot of value. I recognized at some point it was a cycle of stating my perspective -> defensive -> me restating my perspective to see why he wasn't understanding it, and agree I could have actually ended it had I wanted to. After a certain point, though, it became a lot easier for me to read into+important to me for us to get on the same page about why I read him how I did.
Finally, for the nastiness itself, it's worth noting that certain aspects of it were absolutely tongue-in-cheek, but in an imitative way. Calling him a manbaby and saying baby want his bottle were things that could practically be copy pasted from a chat of ours, or catboi trolling someone he thinks is bad. I wouldn't speak to anyone else this way, ever: only catboi.
