Kirbopher

"Kirbopher"

By

Psy Guy

University of Houston

ABSTRACT

Kirbopher, my friend, acts as the vehicle to explain people's basic desires and needs to be right, as well as watching him become part of a horrible fiasco of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper moves on to point out how those prophecies can stem from making up your own, to responding to real motives, or being someone that actually provokes the other person to responding to your response of a preconceived bias. However, the paper goes on to explain that if you can disengage people from that notion, they will compare you to them, treat you feel better, and feel better in the end.

We've run into "them" more than enough times. We've encountered countless people that demand attention and direct the spotlight on them; our teeth grind to the sound of every annoying, pompous word that seems to slither out of their mouth. I've always wondered how any logical being can put up with these people, why someone just doesn't tell them no one cares about their new dog, their new car, their grades that they "disserve" from some much "hard work"? Or, more recently, in my case, their new animated online flash cartoon. Everyone agreed Kirbopher, the animator, was clearly a stuck up little brat that thought his work was that of the Gods. He didn't seem to have a friend in the world, so when I took it upon myself to try and teach him the ways of being a gracious artist, it seemed rather out of place. But, after a few deep talks, and getting closer to his true intentions, he was not being pompous, and didn't think highly of himself at all. Quite the opposite, he was merely responding to everyone's negative behavior towards him in some form of self-defense.

Obviously I'm in a somewhat of a unique position, I know, first hand, an amateur animator that publishes his work online. Even more so, I seem to be a public figure head in our little online community. I hire aspiring comic artists and host their work, for free, on a popular webpage that receives a lot of daily attention. I've established, over the decade I've been running my hosting, a sort of complex city of inner workings and sub-classes, with me right in the middle plaza. So when one of my staff members, Cailen, asked me to have a group phone conference with some people and this new person I "kind of" heard about through the grape vine, Kirbopher, I was a little weary of what was to transpire. I had heard rumors from various people he was very arrogant, his work was sub-par, and didn't need to shove his nose so high in the air and look down upon everyone. I entered the conference in a somewhat defensive manner when, just as my colleagues had predicted; he started getting "high and mighty" with everybody. And, even came after me for not hiring him a while ago when I took casting calls. As I said, I'm in the center building of this little community, on the top floor, and prone to aggression. When I was through cutting him down, throwing his arguments in his face, and shooting his ideas full of holes, it was all he could do to keep from falling over. It was a massacre.

I later wondered why I was so harsh to this person. It seemed as though I was trying to seek vengeance to all my friends who had to put up with him. I entered the conversation very defensively, and when he jabbed his dull dagger at me, my ready titanium shield was far too much for him to hold his ground. While I wasn't out of line in my retaliation to him, I might have provoked him before hand by showing him I was defensive. I thought that maybe with some guidance, his animations, as well as his behavior could overall improve. And, before the inevitable of him becoming quite good at animating happened, I would take him under my wing and show him how to take compliments as well as complaints. Indeed, along the way I would mold him into a well-liked artist. But first, I needed to see if he was willing to respond to this. I needed to know that he wasn't this horrible person everyone painted a picture of.

It actually wasn't until my psychology class started talking about a "self-fulfilling prophecy" that I started to see what was going on. And, at this point, I started speculating Kirbopher was the victim of this. Aronson, Wilson, & Akert (2005) describe a self-fulfilling prophecy as the case whereby people (1) have an expectation about what another person is like, which (2) influences how they act toward that person, which (3) causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true. Or, little by little, an infant does take the leap, and the aerodynamic of the symbolic atmosphere allows him or to her to fly. (Wiley 2000) This is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will come true only if you believe in it (Collins 1988:265-67; Merton 1957). Only spending a couple hours with Kirbopher, it became very clear he was just a regular guy. Although now he was on the defensive side from my first being defensive, it was basically a never-ending circle of causing emotions to cause other emotions. Once I knew this, I knew I could deal with it, and work around it. Again, after much discussion, it came to me that he was in fact, very proud of his work, but gets a lot of criticism from people, and at such an early time with his animation, was still rather sensitive to things.

This was interesting in the fact he had