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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9736212" data-attributes="member: 18">The hardship (which was much more severe for Monroe - Rowling's accounts are demonstrably exaggerated and self-contradictory, and increasingly more dramatic and Dickensian the more she tells them - the earlier versions are much more plausible) may have made more Monroe empathetic and socially conscious, but by how much I wonder?I think she probably already was a lot more of both than Rowling ever could be. (I have one of Monroe's cookbooks, it's pretty great)I think that sort of thing goes a lot deeper and whilst it can be influenced or changed later in life, people can have their eyes opened and so on, that can only happen if one is not a self-pitying and narcissistic person, but being a "mean girl" pretty much means one is at least potentially both of those (there exceptions, people who grow out of it). I think parents and what they model for kids plays a huge role, because I've met people who have never experienced real hardship (or at least not financial, grief/loss or health/disability-related), who were very empathetic, kind and socially conscious (and stayed that way), and people who had suffered a lot, and just wanted others to suffer more, and the only commonalities I've seen have been "parents who modelled at least basic kindness" vs. "parents who were themselves awful". Even that's not 1:1 though, there are plenty of exceptions. Hmmm.Re: "automatically a good person because I voted for party X at time Y", yeah absolutely, that is a common delusion especially in Britain!Maybe that is actually the key? There are mean girls who grow out of it, but there are also mean girls* who tell themselves "I was right to be mean, those other kids sucked, and I was cool!" and I think that's where the problem is not, when you can't see you were an naughty word at times too as a kid, when you turn your not-perfect but also not-that-bad life-story into a Dickensian sob-story. And perhaps the press are part of the problem here too - they want a Dickensian sob-story. They're not happy with "Well things weren't perfect but I did okay", and I suspect she was unconsciously encouraged, especially as a story-teller (which for all her evil, she absolutely is), by feedback from journalists and fans to exaggerate matters, and probably to internally mythologize. It's notable her anti-trans stuff relies on a lot of mythology and fiction that she clearly believes and has been in a cycle of exaggerating - the claims she makes now are hugely more extreme than ones from 2019, for example.* = Sorry to gender this, there are male and probably NB equivalents thereof, just using the easiest, laziest term</blockquote>

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