Monday DE: Up early for the EU folks

[bjornwilde]

The comedian John Mulaney has a bit where he tells a story of how he's at the subway late at night and drunk. The only other person there is a woman and he sees she's walking fast. He thinks she hears a train coming and so he walks faster, so she walks faster...finally he realizes, as he is so used to not being threatening it never occurs to him, that she's scared of him and not hearing a train.

Taking inspiration from this, what is a time your character misread a situation or was misread? Was it based on an assumption or a situational error? If a fic sparks, feel free to write it instead.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka: OK, I'm going to ignore the whole emotional nightmare that's the end of season 05 of Clone Wars and say she's been mistaken for a smuggler on the lam far too many times for her comfort following the collapse of the Republic and her subsequent hiding. She manages to convince people she's just a wandering mechanic more often than not.

Danny gets mistaken for a homeless person a lot in the first few episodes of his series, which wasn't too far from the truth.

[for_everyone]

In "The Call," Hera views the ... space whales (um what I totally remember what they were called) as a dangerous nuisance, having heard plenty of accounts of them destroying ships from other pilots. But it turns out they're actually cooperative if you learn to fly with them.

Hera herself is misread on a pretty constant basis, whether it's people making assumptions about her identity, ability, motivations, etc. (Also she is probably not actually your mother. Unless she is - but being that or something like that to some doesn't make her that to eeeeeveryone.)


Kanan does a good job in being read as a pretty average scoundrel rather than a Jedi in hiding. And when he was younger he was very bad about reading situations to answer the question "should I flirt with this person?" (no, Kanan)

[childofrebellion]

Pergils or maybe purgils, such a weird name but a lovely visual.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: Does everyone missing that the guy who is totally unconcerned with personal safety is an incipient God count?

Lois: She will be totally misreading the situation where her internet boyfriend knows something about the flying man she saw. For a while, anyway.

Evelyn: Often gets misread because mage. Also totally misreads a situation or two with Iron Bull until she gets things explained to her about the Qun.

R2-D2: Is often misread as irrelevant. People regret this, usually.

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader: ... I don't even know where to start.

Tavi: Ooooooof I do know where to start but I'm too tired to deal with it right now, I'll come back to it.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion gets mistaken for, like, an actively murderous killer robot pretty frequently; their Binary comic with Torbjörn is the kind of thing that happens when they get too close to a town. They also get misunderstood a lot in regular conversation because they try to talk to fully organic people in omnicode and all their friend gets out of it is beeping and pantomime.

Aradia likes to see how things end, and her enthusiasm for that has sometimes been misread as wanting people to fail and die.

Thurlow finds it useful to have a reputation as an eccentric loose cannon, but the downside is that they get dismissed as a nutcase frustratingly often.

[little_blue]

Little!Molly deliberately plays up her youth and childishness in order to be misread. She really is cute, of course, but people who underestimate her for this reason always wind up regretting it.

Older!Molly, if you're not paying attention, is easily misread as a happy-go-lucky, slightly silly, slightly thick 'girly girl'. (Since adopting Kitt, she's also been mistaken for a teenage mother once or twice, despite being neither.) She hasn't been to school since she was eleven, but that definitely does not make her thick. And as for the rest... you'll learn. If you're lucky, you'll learn fast.

Most of the time, at least outside the bar, Sam very carefully ensures he's misread as a slightly irreverent, slightly absent-minded academic. It usually works, but then again he's had a lot of time to practice.

Victoria... oh boy. Just a nice retired older lady, nothing to see here, boys, nothing to see...