SFP

AshlaBoga

As a 4 year old?

I know he said he was mentally unstable when he was 14, and that he used to cut himself to remember which body was his, but this is just making Patrick the wooby of SFP.

*Cries for Patrick*

ampg

No kidding. A 4-year-old has only just learned to understand him/herself as an individual person. You see a lot of things like awareness of gender identity and strong preferences (favorite colors, pieces of clothing, etc.) because it reinforces their ability to differentiate from other people (there’s a lot of natural grouping that happens around this time, too – these other kids like the same toys as me, these other kids have the same hair color as me, etc. – for the same reason). Developing powers that interfere with that process would be seriously traumatic for the child.

Basically, if you wanted me to have sympathy for Patrick, you couldn’t have picked a better way to do it.
elysdir

In case anyone other than me was unfamiliar with this term: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Woobie
- Ian Osmond
  
  And if you want heaps of examples to help explain it, here is the TV Tropes page on it: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWoobie
  
  Warning: link goes to TV Tropes. (aka Abandon Sleep and/or Useful Work Ye Who Enter Here)

Gotham

“Fun fact: the pure screaming chaos part is, obviously, in a constant state of multidimensional flux that breaks all sense, but once in a lifetime, it all aligns perfectly to be shaped like you, Alison.”
“…that’s… flattering?”

Arkone Axon

1: If he developed his powers when he was FOUR… that implies that he was closer to whatever caused the development of biodynamics than the rest. Or to be more precise, it implies he was somehow connected, a “test run,” a prototype of some sort… does he know where their powers came from?

2: This is making Patrick seem more and more like Leto II from the Dune series. As in, the kid who covered himself with sandtrout and turned into a giant sandworm with a human face where the tooth filled maw would be… and whose mind was actually a carefully constructed cooperative venture between the assorted personalities inside, working towards a common goal (namely, to liberate humanity from the control of prescients like himself… and to have himself split up into pearls of awareness that could then… get some rest and get away from all the crap he was putting himself through).

AshlaBoga

Given how he’s going out of control, I still think of him as an Abomination. So, our tour guide is Alia and Menace is the Baron Harkonnen… welp, I need that floating pustule imagery about as much as I needed my soon to ensue self-preformed lobotomy.
- Arkone Axon
  
  Eh… Alia was never seen as an ego-memory. Only as a victim of her own inability to handle the ego-memories overwhelming her… i.e. the Baron. That being said, Leto’s sister Ghanima was able to appoint a protector in the form of her mother’s ego-memory.
  
  But there’s another question to ask: what is this guide’s actual goal? Even assuming that “Menace” is actually a bad guy as she’s claiming… how are we to know she’s not like Atlas from “Bioshock,” or King Candy from “Wreck It Ralph?”
  - Weatherheight
    
    I upvote this primarily for referencing King Candy and Wreck-It Ralph. That movie works so much better when you’ve had a little Jungian training…

Gotham

I want to meet the other Patricks.
I feel like it’s pretty clear we’ve got Menace and this one representing a dichotomy of ideologies–that is until a switcheroo the webcomic is kind of heavily hinting at, that this one girl!Patrick’s intentions are much more nefarious than she seems–but it takes two halves to make a whole so I wonder what would the other Patricks running around are supposed to “mean” or “stand for”.

Franklin J Gomes

The best thing ever will be meeting “Looney-Toons fanboy” Patrick. I am just picturing him:

-Wearing Bugs ears, a Yosemite Sam mustache and one of those 90´s edgy Taz shirts
-Living in a place full of anvils, Acme crates and “Duck season””Rabbit season” posters
-And of wourse, he talks wike this all the wime.
- Weatherheight
  
  “Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting Patwicks…”
  - Dave M
    
    ‘Menace Season!’ “Patrick Season!”
    ‘Menace Season!’ “Patrick Season!”
    ‘Patrick Season!’ “Menace Season, Fire!” (Blam)

AdamBombTV

“So, you’re saging just giving you an aspirin WONT fix this?”

Gotham

“What do you mean I’m sagging dude Alison isn’t not because I’m a woman that– this is very rude of you especially considering you’re the stron– I will not stand for this”

McFrugal

Time to kill Menace!

Franklin J Gomes

Well, fuck me, are you telling me he retains the information of every mind he came across? Of course you need a city to organize something like that

I starting to think the reason why he is incapable of reading his own thoughts is not a side effect of his powers, but rather a self-defense mechanism. If Patrick have normal access to his mind, he probably will be overwhelm with all that information. Keeping all of that on the unconscious mind will help him just focus in the minds near him at any single moment

Gotham

I mean, forgetting stuff is also allowed. I would have understood that his human brain would be extremely stretched and tired by all the added exercice of so, so, so much more input (it’d be like seeing from a million pairs of eyes at once, useful sure but mostly confusing and a bitch to get used to)

But why keep it all? Is this also one of his powers? I get a human-sized amount of sensory input from my five senses and I still get to forget 95% of it, why would telepathy imply perfect memory on its own?
- Franklin J Gomes
  
  Maybe what he is “absorbing” is others people long term memories, which ended been adding to his own because, again maybe, they are a similar type of information. Long term memories are very permanent, usually they are only forgotten due to brain injury or physical degeneration
- Tylikcat
  
  I don’t know what is being implied here. But a thought – if he’s indeed receiving that kind of overload of sensory input, which is at least somewhat analagous to some real life sensory processing anomalies*… in order to handle it without having serious problems he pretty much has to be smart and have greater than average working memory, and that might** imply greater long term memory. (I have got to get over my habitual twitch reaction to this side of the literature and do a better job keeping up…)
  
  * I’m choosing not to label them disorders, because depending on circumstance, they can work out pretty well for people.
  - Chani
    
    yeah, now I’m impressed that he functioned so well for so long… sensory processing issues can be hell. and I wonder how many of the people he’s experienced had sensory issues of their *own*? :/ heh, maybe that’s where he got the survival skills he needed, though.
- AshlaBoga
  
  Actually you remember less than 95% of sensory input, we only store about 1/200,000 sensations in memory
- Eric Meyer
  
  That’s why I think he’s been mis-diagnosed with Telepathy. He doesn’t read minds. His power is ONLY copying and storing minds- it’s just that it updates real-time, which allows him to know current thoughts as a telepath would. It’s like the different between owning a sculpture, and owning a photograph of that same sculpture, in-place. You can look at the sculpture from the same angle as the photograph, get the same information from it- but the sculpture takes up a lot more room, and you can do a lot with it.
  
  Greater data-density which, for most purposes is useless, but also allows him to do things that regular telepaths couldn’t, such as predict people’s actions even when they’re out of range, or utilize their problem solving skills when they’re not around.
Weatherheight

I’m not sure it’s everyone, but everyone who made a distinct enough impression on Patrick is still fairly terrifying.

AbacusWizard

Whoa. Every mind that he’s ever met, still living on in his own mind. No wonder he needs a whole city inside his head.

Nadav Ben Dov

Oh, I’m definitely getting The Witch Boy for myself and friends, going by the preview on Amazon.

Yash Bhosale

I wonder which cooking recipes…

Lostman

He had his since he was four? I had a feeling that his powers longer then others.

Weatherheight

Canon has suggested that most anomalies manifest during onset of puberty, but most anomalies also have a physical manifestation. Mental abilities might be different, maybe, possibly?

Christopher Dacombe

There could be a plot-related reason why Patrick developed much earlier than most biodynamics, but it could simply be a matter of physical development. Most BD’s seem to have physical powers that understandably develop during puberty, when the body develops most rapidly, but my understanding is that the human brain/mind develops most rapidly in the first five or six years, so it makes a certain amount of sense that a BD with mental powers would develop sooner. It might also be the reason that Patrick ‘slipped the net’ in terms of potentially world-changing biodynamics being eliminated, since the responsible party may not expected anyone to develop so quickly.

On a side note, will The Witch Boy be available in paperback form from any European retailers?

Kid Chaos

Is Kindle a thing in Europe? Because it’s definitely a thing here in the USA, and “The Witch Boy” is currently available for pre-order. 😎
- Christopher Dacombe
  
  The Kindle version is available from Amazon UK, I’d prefer a paperback version but thanks for the reply.
  - Alexander
    
    Paperback appears to be available to preorder on Amazon UK
- Eric Schissel
  
  IIRC people travelling are advised to leave their kindle device at home and get a 2nd one for travel or something like that??? because of things having to do with differing copyright laws and Amazon Cloud… look into it before traveling between US & Canada & Europe & etc. anyway. Don’t know for sure and may be mistaken.
  - MrSokar
    
    Are you sure its not a ploy to get people to buy a second one?
    - Eric Schissel
      
      Not sure which of several things you might mean by “it”, but it might be, of course, so of course I’m not sure. If “it” is Amazon’s use of a central cloud that can, in fact, go poof under certain circumstances (unless one’s uploaded PDFs from other sources, e.g. archive.org, etc. and is just using Kindle as a general-purpose PDF reader) then I can see that, sure…
Ack

The human brain goes through three distinct stages of development, otherwise known as neural pruning (when it basically takes stock of what’s happened so far, and rearranges the current setup to allow for more development later). These occur around about the ages of two, thirteen (or so) and nineteen (plus or minus a few years). They’re also involved with personality shifts (terrible twos, beginning of puberty, and the idiocy that comes with early adulthood). Patrick developing telepathy at four might’ve either caused or been caused by neural pruning at that point in his development.
Just saying.

Walter

Hrrm…interesting. This raises a lot of questions.

Pol Subanajouy

Holy crap, my comment on the multi-faceted moon goddess two pages ago doesn’t seem that overblown now (though still not 100% parallel ). This really does a fantastic job of underlining how being unable to hear other people’s thoughts are integral to our current definition of an identity. No wonder Patrick can’t hear his own thoughts. Chances are they are they are just buried beneath the din.

Amelie

Looks like Patrick had the right idea with “I don’t consider myself human”. Of course it’s important to note that’s not a value judgment. He’s not more or less than human, just something entirely other. The most amazing thing is probably that he can understand and be understood by people at all. But his biggest challenge is probably going to be figuring out how much he can understand, both of humanity and himself, lacking any frame of reference for either.

And for the rest of humanity, I hope we will be able to learn from him. It’s probably a unique opportunity to drastically widen our sense of ourselves and the universe. Like, we’re going to have to extend our definitions of humanity to include Patrick, for one thing. The only other choice is to kill him and stick our collective head in the sand, denying any possibility of co-existence with the Other. I’d like to think we can do better than that, and yet, it’s beyond me to formulate the argument for exactly why Patrick is human.

Scary stuff.

Eric Meyer

I mean, he apparently considers himself to be a city.

In a way, he’s a Superorganism, like an Ant colony. Each individual ant is, indeed, an ant, but the basic ‘organism’ that formicidae is divided by is the colony- you don’t have an ‘ant’ if you don’t have the whole colony.
- Lucy Merriman
  
  I don’t know if you’ve ever read ‘The Long Earth,’ but it reminds me of The Silence from the first book. The protagonist ultimately decided not to tell the other humans about it because humans wouldn’t be able to see how it could be a person while being entirely non-human; he figures humans would either try to worship it or destroy it, and both outcomes would be awful.
  
  But, uh, guess in the case of Patrick vs. All The Rest of Humanity, it’s too late for that.
- Weatherheight
  
  Neat analogy.

Franklin J Gomes

I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING COOL.

Patrick´s mind stores copies of other minds the same way a cloud storage server stores copies of others computers data.

Following that analogy, every time he met a particular person the mind copy of said person get actualized with new data. So both versions synchronize in the same manner a computer and a cloud server do each time they connect.

And that´s the (probable) explanation on how Allison can “walk” inside Patrick´s mind. The later powers had grow so much that the synchronization reach a point that allow Allison to take control of her mind copy, Avatar style.

Weatherheight

Interesting concept. We don’t have positive confirmation in the text that this is what’s going on, but nothing contradicts this idea either. Given Brennan’s rather broad conceptual base on which he’s drawing, I feel like you have a really powerful insight here. The idea of comparison and contrast of initial and incoming data works nicely with the concept of compartmentalization.

I think the reason that Alison can access Patrick’s mind is two-fold –
1) She’s one of very few people who has accepted Patrick nearly unconditionally after actually meeting him (prior to the Mug Incident), so he has a lot of trust for her.
2) The conceptual framework Patrick has made for himself is breaking down for some reason, and he needs someone to help him find a new foundation and to accept himself. Alison is a pretty decent role-model for acceptance – assuredly not a perfect one, but likely better than anyone else in Patrick’s life.

Speaking of, I now really want to know more about Patrick’s parents. I mean, he has to have parents or parental figures/guardians, right? How interesting must that relationship have been, right?
- Arkone Axon
  
  DOES he have parents or guardians? Hell… what DO we know about his childhood? And what IS his connection to the unknown perpetrators of biodynamism and that mysterious thunderstorm that caused Alison’s peers to manifest said biodynamism?
  - Weatherheight
    
    I doubt he’s got anyone as a parent / guardian now, but can you imagine trying to raise a telepathic four year old?
    Father-God in Heaven, I wonder if his parents/guardians couldn’t handle trying to raise a telepathic child and offed themselves. Imagine what that would have done to Patrick?
James Jones

It’s also possible that each copy is independent and we’ll discover that there are thousands of slightly different copies of Allison just around the next corner.
- Franklin J Gomes
  
  That idea opens and interesting scenario: “Allison vs Mega Girl”
- David Brown
  
  or that isn’t Alison, it’s Patrick’s running version of her (as though she was exposed to this) and the real Alison isn’t affected at all, or taking part. She’s just sleeping nearby. However, when Patrick wakes up, he’ll say to Alison what Alison said, and then Alison will understand and agree with Patrick.
Eric Meyer

In a way, that might not actually BE Allison. If, as you say, Pat’s Mind Avatars of people are updated constantly with exposure, then what may actually have happened is Real Allison decided “I’m going to enter his mindscape and help him”, and then just fell asleep. BUT, MindAllison got that update, of “I’m going to enter the Mindscape and help him” and so is now acting, based on Patrick’s extensive knowledge of Al, and using his brain-meats, acting in the way that it/he believes Allison would act were she to transfer her consciousness into his mind.

So basically that’s just Allison’s Mind Clone acting like Allison, based on what Patrick thinks Allison would do were she to enter his mind. And Allison will wake up in the real world after having just had a nap, thinking that she’d failed.
- Franklin J Gomes
  
  Remind me about Harvey form Farscape, a neural clone of the main antagonist Scorpius, implanted on the mind of the main hero.
  
  Scorpius was interesting because he believed that his ultimate goal was the right thing to do, so he was willing to use thing like torture and coersion…and the parallels became uncomfortable close.

Zorae42

I really like the fact that part of his mind is a fractal. It’s the most efficient use of space. And he could theoretically store an infinite amount of data on/in it.

Chani

just never try to do a depth-first search… 😉

Mechwarrior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsxEq2zmRX0

Gotham

About a thing we’ve known for years but never adequately explained, now—

So Patrick can’t read his own mind.
What does that mean?

The drastic approach would be to consider that while he has infinite access to the brains of others, he cannot access his the way others do their own. And this is /terrifying/. It means that Patrick is essentially a p-zombie. To outside observers there is no difference, but it’d mean that he has no consciousness. He’d react to his external world like a preprogrammed machine without the capacity to think, remember, etc. and would only appear to do as such to us normal self-aware humans. It’s something that we could never test… if we didn’t have access to mindreaders. Thing is, they would have to be anybody but him, so that’s toast.

The other option is that he can access his own thoughts just fine as you and I do, but that his access to the mind of others is greatly superior to that one, it just doesn’t work on him.
Which is never something I would have gathered, actually. Patrick is very intelligent, and has multiple times shown to have honed his power very efficiently, but can he know you better than you know yourself /because/ he is so good or /because/ his power grants him that greater access? What would that greater access mean? That he can see beyond your own biaises, that he sees things you yourself have forgotten? This seems… cheating.
It’s kind of anticlimactic to have him be so… Patrickesque not because he’s everyone’s beloved Problematic Fave Fuckboy Who’s Done Nothing Wrong but because his power just goes that far. Meh.

So which is it?

Weatherheight

As a general rule, telepaths don’t have any exceptional insight into their own minds. Patrick is one of the first to say this in this way, but it’s not a particularly original idea.

The list of telepaths with that kind of self-awareness in literature isn’t a very long list. The importance of compartmentalization to development of self and identity would e severely undermined by a constant barrage of thoughts not one’s own.

What we need are a few examples in real life. 😀
MisterTeatime

I always read it as the second option. He’s described reading someone’s active surface thoughts as the magazine section of the library, and he’s hinted that the ability to read deep memories and hidden motivations is why he doesn’t need mind control to get people to do what he wants- he can blackmail people with their deepest secrets or offer them a chance to fulfill desires they’ve never articulated to anyone.
I don’t think he can necessarily see beyond someone’s biases, or view events they’ve forgotten, but I imagine he can easily dig deeper into the roots of those biases than that person would routinely do (not just “what idea is making you act this way?” but “why do you think this is true?” and “what experiences gave you this idea?”), and naturally he would observe their past experiences with an outside perspective, not just the internal one which is too often skewed by the emotional reactions of the moment. Furthermore he would be able to look at someone’s internally stated axioms and compare them to their behavior- which of these things do you really believe, and which ones do you claim to believe because it’s convenient or comfortable? And he might not be able to view events that were formative but have been forgotten, but once he has enough experience with the narrative structures people impose on their own lives, he might be very good at looking at someone and guessing the basic outlines- for instance, “I can’t find the point at which this guy decided women were unreliable, but he hasn’t spoken with his mom for years despite not having a memory of anything specific happening to her, he distrusts authority and disdains the idea of … he probably feels that she failed him at some point.”
In that context, I think “he can’t read his own mind” either means that he doesn’t have the ability to dig through his own memories and observe them from a detached perspective the way he can with other people’s (which may be a limitation of his power, or a reasonable fact about his psyche- humans in general are worse at being objective about our own experiences than about other people’s)… or that he’s simply never made the attempt.
Personally, I think he has so much experience being the detached expert observer in other people’s lives that he assumes he applies the same degree of experience and level of scrutiny to his own decisions, when in fact he doesn’t- he has unexamined assumptions and unconscious biases based on limited experiences that he extrapolated into facts about the world, and he lets those beliefs influence his choices (just like everyone else does). The resulting overconfidence in and underexamination of his own perceptions is how he gets to a point of expressing a set of wildly self-contradictory philosophies like we saw in Chapter 5.

I don’t think that’s the same as explaining why he’s the person that he is, though. His powers have taught him the same lesson that we saw Alison learn on the soccer field, the day her powers manifested- “not everyone can do everything that you can do.” We still see Alison getting frustrated about that, but mainly in extreme situations like the party in chapter 5, and we also see her unquestioningly accept other people’s perspectives like in the end of that chapter and at the dynamorphic convention in chapter 6. Patrick doesn’t get frustrated about this so much as he uses it as an excuse to feel superior… but we haven’t really seen his tendency to do that change at all, ever since he was Menace.
- AshlaBoga
  
  Did you hack my computer? You typed out everything I was just going to say before I had the chance! *Waaah*
  
  JK, we are geek siblings.

Weatherheight

Compartmentalization is a huge part of developing consciousness, both in the literal sense of comparison and contrast between similar but differing objects but also in the more figurative sense of putting up barriers between concepts that are causing cognitive dissonance when allowed to interact without distinction. This starts anywhere between two and six years old for most humans and is part of why little kids refer to anything that is furry, walks on four legs, and has a tail as either “doggy” or “kitty” for a time.Very cool use of this concept.
In addition, if someone is giving powers to four year olds and they give telepathy, that person or entity is just mean. Adults can barely figure out their own heads; no four year old has the tools to begin that process. This, more than anything else, makes Menace make sense to me.

AshlaBoga

Out of morbid curiosity, what implement do you think Patrick used to scar himself to identify his own body?

Razor blade?
- Weatherheight
  
  To be honest, I have a real “ICK!” reaction to self mutilation. The worst scene for me in the original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the scene where the dude cuts on his own arm up; the rest of the movie didn’t make me flinch or upset me at all. Thinking about people deliberately hurting themselves really upsets me, so I really hadn’t paused to consider it.
  
  Razor blade makes sense to me for Patrick: easily accessible, easy to control, produces decent scarring. On the other hand, scalpel also makes sense – a little harder to access but much better control with reasonably similar scarring. Given the pattern we’ve seen, I’m leaning towards scalpel if only because it would allow a slightly longer reach.
  Blunt instruments like broken glass or a kitchen knife seem less likely, although the knife might make sense if is also involved a honing ritual – as it’s been explained to me (me squirming all the while), there is usually a ritual involved in procedures such as self-mutilation. There is an element of being able to control this one thing in their lives, which often have large or plentiful elements that seem out of the mutilator’s control. The ritual emphasizes that sense of control. I know that way back when I was using, the ritual part of drug use was pretty important – mess with the ritual and the high wasn’t as good.
  
  Since I’ve never had the impulse to inflict pain on myself, I’m not sure any of the above has any validity whatsoever, though. I’m much more inclined to numb pain and tranquilize, not fight fire with fire.

Hiram

Theory modification – Menace isn’t just a subsumed identity. Menace is a subsumed chuunibyou.

Also, Alison is going to have to punch the sun to fix Patric’s mental break. For reasons.

Weatherheight

Heh. The large phallic structure is “filled with menace”.

Yeah, that’s just what the Anima wants you to think.

Christophe2314

“… or the million different facial ticks that let you know someone just stopped listening to what you were saying. *Ahem* Got that, Alison?”

AshlaBoga

That’s what I was thinking too.

JohnTomato

Everybody lies to themselves in some manner or frequency. How many rooms/buildings are filled with what a five year old thought those ideas meant. What was/is the reality/fantasy ratio the others dragged around inside their heads?

Tsapki

Hmm, reminds me of that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where we meet a Betazoid who developed their mental powers in childhood. The species normally doesn’t develop their empathic nature until they become teenagers and are more capable of dealing with such.

As one might expect, while talented, the unfortunate Betazoid in question had a few fairly problematic social issues.

Jared Rosenberg

Alison asks “Menace?” Fem-Patrick responds “Yeah, angry guy, big helmet, likes sending robots after you. You don’t remember Menace? I mean ‘put away childish things’ Menace?” “Well when you put it that way…”

Dave M

Well well well. A long running plot has been the emergence of “The new Menace”. Could it be that there is no new Menace, just the old menace reasserting itself and operating via Patricks subconsious (or maybe taking control when Patrick is asleep)? Why yes, I do read Girl Genius, how could you tell? 🙂

Weatherheight

I upvote this for mentioning Girl Genius and the Other.
I just realized that Agatha’s Other isn’t male as Jung would suggest but has been supplanted by an implanted Other, which implies competing identities but also completing Animuses (Animi?). Intriguing.

“You may never understand how the stranger is inspired
“But he is not always evil and he is not always wrong
“You may drown in good intentions but you’ll never quench the fire
“You’ll give in to your desire when the Stranger comes along.”

bryan rasmussen

So this explains how Patrick could have known about the other biodynamics being killed off, since he had powers before almost everyone else.

Vespayik

Now I’m kind of wondering if Patrick isn’t cis…

Aergis

I was wondering that when she first appeared 😛

Darkoneko Hellsing

Ok, that’s pretty horrifying.

GreatWyrmGold

“‘Menace’ sounds like a ridiculously cheesey name for an aspect of yourself.”
“Like I said, I was four when I started all of this.”

Tylikcat

“Oh my god, Patty, you are such a menace! Here, let’s get you cleaned up!”

Danygalw

Earlier than *most*. ie not earlier than *all*.

Teka the Budgie

If Patrick manifested his powers at age 4, 8-10 years before the majority of biodynamics, and possibly before any other biodynamic, he would be perfectly situated to know what’s going on before anyone else on earth. While there’s not much one kid can do (however mentally superpowered), I wonder how this connects to the person who was picking off biodynamic kids.

Olivier Faure

I like how at the end Allison’s face goes into “faces will get punched” mode as soon as she hears the name “Menace”.