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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8793522" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Fundamentally, people were bullied in high school because teens/pubescent kids in general and high schoolers specifically are horrible to each other. Full stop. Just a huge pack of minimally formed quasi-proto-adults readjusting to a world where they are chock full of hormones, have a minimal amount of responsibilities, and are thrust into a new situation where everyone doesn't have the same interests (recess and candy!) and instead are left to their own devices to form interests and then form social groups around them. Sure if you were a RPG gamer at the time, someone would use that as a weapon against you, but it wasn't because of RPGs. Even then, oftentimes it wasn't because that was a shared hobby. I manage a group of programmers and data scientists, and we've gone over those days many times (another trend I've noticed: nerds reliving high school). For every story about that one time they got pushed down or humiliated or whatever by a jock or 'one of the cool kids,' there seem to be dozens where the people who were the cruelest and most horrible to high school nerds were other high school nerds (playing lord of flies, marking territory, or sometimes just being inept teenagers running roughshod over the feelings of those most often around them). In the end, this is just a continuation of a trend of the dedicated online alt-right* of continually reframing the discussion to where they are secretly somehow the real victims in the situation, no matter how horrific they have been to anyone or everyone, nor how much of their of their problems are self-inflicted wounds (or even just someone else saying that they do not like what they said, which is, amazingly, not them being picked on). *which is not the same as the right, right? We're talking white nationalists and MRAs and the SNL 'drunk uncle' types of the word. I'm just making that clear. </blockquote>

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