> The alienation comes from being misjudged - it's the world's fault not any failing of Spidey's. They're just not ready for him.
> I'm not blaming Spidey. I still blame the world for reacting to him the way that they do, but then again, I also feel that it's still the world's fault if my ideas of the underlying root causes of alienation are correct. You don't blame someone for having a learning disability, after all, and you certainly shouldn't abuse them.
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font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">The root word of alientation is alien - outsider, foreigner, other. An outsider is outside because that's where they come from.
> But that alienation has often been the alienation of Holmes to Watson, the incomprehnsibility of an eccentric genius, rather than the emotional dissociation you're describing in your article.
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> Speaking from personal experience, I see them as the exact same thing.
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font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">The inexplicably brilliant character we mortals cannot comprehend and whome we see through the eyes for Dr Watson or Rose Tyler or whoever really comes from a literary tradtion. We rarely see that character's point of view because the drama is better if we're watching him but not seeing the mechanisms of his conjuring trick until it's done. But that's a feature of narrative choices rather than a fair reflection of the social and intellectual gap you're describing from real life, which is closer to autism or Asperger's syndrome. It's why there are no successful Spock-POV moments in all of Trek literature; he's the outsider we watch and admire, not understand.
> It was something I really liked about Luke Rattigan's scenes with the Doctor in "The Sontaran Strategem," because the Doctor clearly understood the emotional disconnect you develop, when you can see connections that nobody else can. It's almost like being an autistic savant - you see too much, and it actually stunts your ability to perceive in other ways, something that Doyle himself alluded to with Holmes, by having him deliberately limit his awareness of certain subjects, just so he could be a better detective.
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font color="lightslategrey" face="Lucida Sans Unicode">That was a nice connect, yes.
But the Doctor does constantly elect to associate with people slower than himself, who don't really understand him. And he elects to relate with them in ways that prevent them from understanding him, leaking bits of his past slowly and reluctantly. He's not really misjudged. He's just private.
