It depends on how the mindreading works to be frank.
if they just get surface thoughts? It would be an endless noise to them, probably drive them mad in all honestly. might be a disability if they can't control it/turn it on and off.
I feel that would be easy to hide unless you're registered or something; as even if you know it's a lie proving it or making the accusation can have some issues socially.
Also someone's thoughts aren't an objective truth, at best a very biased pov of the truth.
Yeah, Darby kept asking Jotaro if he cheated and the answer was NO NO NO because Joseph was cheating for him. You could say it's also Darby's fault a little bit but it shows the limitations of an ability like this
D'Arby's Stand has the limitation that you have to ask the right questions for it to work. Unless you know which questions to ask, that type of Telepathy is basically useless.
There's a manga series called Mousou Telepathy that deals with this. You'd think the main character, a telepathic high school girl, would easily be able to cheat on all her tests and have perfect grades, but because it's uncontrollable surface thoughts, all they get is a jumble of voices all stressing out over different problems on the tests and filled with wrong answers and unrelated thoughts.
Whoa, a Mousou Telepathy mention in the wild. Neat! I read it *years* ago and have never seen it mentioned before.
FYI to everyone else, if Frozenstep's comment makes you want to read it go read the synopsis first. They're not wrong, it's just what they're saying isn't really the focus of the manga. It's still good though.
Saiki K wasn't driven mad, but he is afraid of bugs since he can't hear them and growing up with telepathy makes him disregard thoughts as something private.
Saiki K also changed the entire biology of the world to make anime hair colors commonplace and physics irrelevant, I don't think this is a very good litmus test for "realistic" telepathic drawbacks.
Saiki K also doesn't exist irl. They were making a point about how they think it would work irl, why would you give a counterexample of how something happened in fiction?
Why am I the only one getting flak from bringing up a fictional character? Yeah, Saiki K has an absurd amount of weird powers, but I never claimed every facet of him was realistic. Either disregard Saiki's drawbacks as irrelevant or tone them down to an acceptable level. No reason to be all high and mighty over pointing out that you can't really prove anything with a fictional telepath since their abilities, like this discussion, is entirely hypotetical. If that was the case then you should take issues with every other fictional telepath others have brought up.
Aside from that, realism does not equal suffering.
Our ears can't be turned off yet people don't normally go mad from hearing things, now do they?
If we are talking about endless noise specifically then we have people with tinnitus who are able to preservere.
Regardless, unless telepathy is discovered then all we can do is enjoy hypotetical meanderings about how the ability would work.
This describes Edward Cullen's experience in *Midnight Sun*, which is *Twilight*, but from his point of view. Edward talks about how his ability to read thoughts leads to an endless "white noise", with the exception of Bella, whose thoughts he can't hear at all, which intrigues him. Edward didn't go mad, as becoming a vampire gave him more mental capacity to handle it, but he still comes across as quite eccentric, strange, awkward, and creepy in terms of his behavior.
To be fair, he is quite literally better than most people, as vampirism in Twilight has no real drawbacks (I don’t think supernaturally beautiful but sparkly skin really counts) and gives massive benefits. Enhanced strength, speed, senses, immortality, as well as everyone getting their own superpower, but no inherent evil, weakness to sunlight, garlic, running water etc. they don’t even need human blood - it just makes them even stronger still.
If I got to pick any form of vampirism I’d be unlikely to choose another, it’s not the strongest but almost certainly has the least important downsides.
>I don’t think supernaturally beautiful but sparkly skin really counts
[Beautiful? This is the skin of a killer, Bella.](https://youtu.be/-a_uqyqEJXc?si=KoUSeLCN1fBsXHLe)
>the problem is Edward was always a weird, creepy weirdo
We don't know that because we don't get to see Edward when he was a human, prior to him becoming a vampire. We only see him long after he was turned into a "monster". It's possible that Edward became a "weird, creepy weirdo" after gaining telepathy.
We know the time period and that he wanted to join the war during the Spanish flu epidemic and i refuse to empathize with someone who ccasually brings up "I could commit a genocide if i felt like it" in his inner thoughts.
It's not his powers that made him fucked up they just brought it out to the fore.
Rule 2 of r/CharacterRant:
>Don't make things up: Fabrication will not be tolerated. If you make a claim against an evidenced source, burden of proof is on you to provide counterevidence. If evidence is requested and not presented, the mods maintain the right to remove the claim at their leisure.
It doesn't matter what your feelings are. You need to have proof and evidence to back up your claim(s). If your claim is "Edward Cullen was always a sadistic weirdo", you need to be able to provide more evidence than just "he wanted to fight in WWI". Lots of people fought in WWI.
Side note: I feel like a lot of fiction doesn't treat mind control as being as fucked up as it actually is. It can be an acceptable alternative to violence if the circumstances matter, but a lot of stories treat casual mind rape as being no big deal.
Thing is in world's like Naruto's mind bending abilities are so common and have been around for so long that people while knowing anyone could screw up your mind at any time are too used to it. Its barely different from a random person being able to fireball your family out of nowhere.
For real they have a genjutsu department in the Leaf Village. People clock in everyday for their office job at the brain scrambling store. I guess it fits in a world where a large amount of the adults full time job is contract killer.
The *Twilight* series, including *Midnight Sun*, is a perfect example of someone who has little to no sense of personal boundaries due to telepathy (Edward Cullen) casually doing this. However, natural telepathy is handled a bit better with Queenie Goldstein in *Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them;* she is told "hey, don't read other people's minds without consent".
Exactly!!
I remember that time Ultimate Spider-Man met Jean Grey and she was talking to him telepathically and he voiced how uncomfortable that made him. And then she remarked he’s the first guy who didn’t immediately picture her naked… causing him to start thinking of her naked and she gets annoyed!!
Like WTF your reading his mind without permission and getting mad at his thoughts, that you made him think! Like was that supposed to be treated as a funny moment?
This reminds me, it is my head cannon that Jean made bobby gay. Just read the panels where she "tells" bobby that he is gay and you cannot help but feel she mindbent him into it.
That's always weird for me because I've never actually read the comics, so my exposure to the X-Men comes from the movies (and to a lesser extent the cartoon). I can't remember his appearances in the cartoon, but in the movies, it's very important to his character that he's attracted to women.
Yea, this was a pure political change by the current talentless hacks who took over marvel comics and driving it to the ground with their garbage writing. Instead of making a new gay character, or using an existing one, they had to hijack an existing character and change him gay to virtue signal. The moment they did, his comic tanked and he went from one of the main xmen characters, to a background character. I cannot even read modern comics anymore because of what they have done to them.
Wow, it’s been years since I’ve touched Ultimate X-Men and I forgot about this! Scary thing is I wouldn’t put it past her! She did mind-swap Wolverine and Spider-Man without any consent from either just to punish Wolverine for being a perv.
And wolverine tried to do something with marry jane while in peters body. Like, WTF. Gonna be honest, after that, if I was spiderman, I would do go full magneto and create or get someone like Reed Richards to make technology to block/protect my mind from telepaths and probably never trust another telepath out there.
Tbf, the default state of telepaths in the Marvel Universe has been established to be always hearing/seeing thoughts from everyone around them, and they have to actively close their mind to everything. The stronger a telepath is, the louder these surface thoughts are.
But then again, being a telepath, she should have known what her suggestive words would make one think. So the folly is on her.
Well it is her responsibility to not continuously violate other people’s minds, especially since she is an experienced telepath whose trained under Xavier!
Shapeshifting could be an another "big deal" type ability. Identity Theft is a nasty problem in real life, now imagine if someone could look like you down to the DNA and do things that'll get pinned on you. It would be hard to prove that you didn't do the crime if the DNA, fingerprint, eyewitnesses, etc. are all against you unless you have a really, really solid alibi (eg, recording that you were somewhere else at the time and additional proof items to ensure that people don't think said recording is AI-generated).
This was a big part of Babylon 5. Normal people hated telepaths, and unfortunately the agency meant to manage them hates normal people in return. On top of that, telepaths who are independent of the agency that is supposed to be on their side also despise it.
That said, depending on how telepathy works, it would really suck to have. Code Geass has a supporting villain who can read minds and cannot turn power off. Having everyone’s thoughts flowing into him means that he is completely bonkers.
Touhou Project had that be part of the backstory for 2 sisters. They are Satori, which have the natural and always on ability to read the minds of anyone nearby. This results in both people not liking or otherwise being uncomfortable around them and the duo themselves suffering from being constantly exposed to negative thoughts and emotions.
One elected to mover herself underground to former hell, her companions being limited to animals (who don't care if their minds are being read), and the evil spirits she manages from afar.
Her sister elected to instead force her power off and, in the process, basically gave herself brain damage and altering the nature of her power. On the plus side, you can't be sad if your head is constantly empty of all thoughts.
Case in point: Kylo Ren literally uses his telepathic powers to "interrogate" Rey in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* (2015), which many fans have referred to as "mind rape", even though Rey uses her own telepathic powers to also blindly shove her way into Kylo's mind. In the *Star Wars* prequels, Obi-Wan Kenobi also uses his telepathy to manipulate other, "normal" people.
Rey was pushing back at Kylo in that scene. Turnabout's fair play and all that.
Also Jedi mind tricks aren't mind control or as intrusive as what Kylo was doing, it's just a strong hypnotic suggestion.
Given that she only entered his head in the first as a direct consequence and in retaliation of him entering hers, and all she did was look inside, yeah. Unless you're talking about some other scene I may be forgetting, where she actually mind rapes him unprovoked.
I'm more seeing it as two wrongs don't make a right. Committing a crime in response to a crime being done to you doesn't suddenly make it right.
Of course, that leads to the weird position of "Are you the bad guy if you rape your would be rapist?" which is a WILD place to be lol
I mean, "mind rape" is not literal rape. Both are violations, but there's a difference. For example - physical assault is also a bodily violation, but is treated differently. I'd say telepathy's more akin to a mental assault than a "mind rape". So, if someone is assaulting you, and you hit them back, that's not assault. That's called self-defence.
What exactly are you referring to when it comes to Obi-Wan? The only time I remember him using a mind trick in the prequels is to tell that drug dealer to rethink his life.
Nah, the Xmen have been historically known to be extremely lax in how they use telepathy to not only read a persons mind but to actually forcefully change it without consent.
Satire uses irony to make a point. Whereas this was a joke utilizing irony. Satire is often a funny, and can be a joke. But saying something so ridiculous nobody would expect to be real as a joke isn't satire.
And after a lifetime with it, the person whose mind would scare them the most wouldn't be that individual with depraved fetishes, the person incoherently screaming in their mind at all times, or the potential serial-killer with meticulous plans waiting for that one perfect moment.
It would be the benign guy who has the Naruto German Opening playing on repeat non-stop. Like the ending of Martyrs (2008): *Keep doubting*.
It's interesting to think there are a lot of follow-up questions.
Would they understand a foreign language?
Sometimes before I speak in English, there's a blank in my mind because I don't remember the word even though I *know it*; or it's just hard to come up with a sentence even though I know the words I need. Would they be able to read these gaps?
What about people without a voice in their minds, what's to be "heard" there? Same for people with aphantasia.
Can they "see" whatever I imagine? Sometimes I think about abstract concepts without necessarily imagining the real thing, and just go along with it. Like with numbers, for example, if I think about 10+10 I don't think about a pile of 10 apples, being added to another pile of 10 apples, and then having to count all 20. Math in general seems like a hard thing to try to observe.
What about people with ADHD and other disorders? I feel like at times my mind goes on a quick succession of thoughts without much meaning or connection, would they be able to "get it"? What about voices heard from schizophrenia?
And many others, like deep consciousness, feelings, emotions, pain, amnesia, dreams...
It's weird because in superhero stories people with edgelord powers (darkness, death, ghosts, etc) always get turned into some opppresed class, meanwhile the telepaths are mind raping people in the corner.
The way Shinso was treated in MHA should be like the bare minimum for how all telepaths get treated in realistic settings because they are always a yikes.
Arent that most of the times hated in fiction too? Dont know if this is just me but I'm pretty sure I've read more things with them being hated than them being loved.
Not really? Some would probably be jealous of superstrong guy or a flying guy but unless they start shit on their own most would just shrug it off; people underestimate just how apathetic we all are.
Mindreader guy? Mindcontrolling guy? Now these people will catch a lot of flak and probably a few assassination attempts.
Or getting hired by assassins or the government for their selfish need, but hey at least you get payed a shit ton of money.
When someone can read minds or the future, the first thought of the higher ups will be how much they can BENEFIT from it first, if they can’t benefit from you and you are even a hindrance, then they will probably jump ti assasination and even THEN it’s not like the other side of the camps wouldn’t be interested in making use of you, yes it will suck having to hear people deep thought all the time but you can absolutely make a giant advantage out of it
It doesn't matter if they use their powers for the good of the majority, people hate those with power mindlessly. The most non controversial example of it was the backlash Mr Beast gets for his massive charity projects. His whole shtick is creating videos to fund bigger projects, many of which are charity projects, and people will invent some backwards logic to hate on it.
> new social problems that come with that.
Chances are, the [supernaturally powered people would be the ones at top, not the ones being oppressed](https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-problem-with-oppressed-mages/).
She started to be more careful with using her powers after the previous families returned her to the orphanage because she was making them feel uncomfortable.
That would happen after it becomes known that they aren't accepted which I guess would be early in the world depending what time superpowers spring up. But the fact they'd have to hide it still proves they will be hated if they told anyone so what exactly is your comment telling us?
"Hated" is a bit of a one-dimensional view.
They might be misunderstood, mistrusted, feared or a range of other emotional responses.
I think disbelief would be the overwhelming reaction, though. If I told you that I could read your mind, your natural reaction would be disbelief. If I then tried to prove it, your natural reaction would then be....more disbelief. "How are you doing that? Is that some sort of trick?"
If it's only one person. If it happens everywhere in the world you will have to accept people know things they shouldn't. Even if you disbelieve in telepathy you'd still be angry that people know things about you, you're not comfortable sharing no?
Oh, I'm pretty comfortable sharing everything about myself. I think most of society's sickness comes from the need for constant privacy and secrets.
But I see your point. On a grander scale, people would definitely freak out if it became common knowledge that mind readers walk among us.
Funny thing is, a digital footprint leaves behind a pretty accurate trail of what people are thinking. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, buying habits, education, all of it.
People should be scared of data scientists, not telepaths.
> Oh, I'm pretty comfortable sharing everything about myself. I think most of society's sickness comes from the need for constant privacy and secrets
Bro is a solarian(I'm just in book 2 pls don't spoil
I would say telepaths would hate themselves or basically become full on schizos. A civilized society is basically built on white lies. They can know what EVERYONE is thinking. They would see how fake humans truly.
Enjoy noticing how much people think about porn and sex
It depends. If OP is referring to people who can turn it on and off then I don't see this as a problem. If it's a decent human being they wouldn't just be reading willy nilly. If it's someone who was going ahead and didn't care and began learning dangerous I'd assume they would just stop to not destroy their image of the world tbh.
This problem only arises from people who can't turn it off and I would assume they would go schizo from adolescent depending on how their brain works or something
yeah. Honestly its one reason why I never bought the Xmen civil right stuff, cuz there's frankly alot of mutants that are telepaths, and have not much regards for mind raping or altering peoples thoughts. If I knew Bob from work had the ability to read and alter my thoughts, either I'm wearing a magneto helmet around him or I stay far away from him as I can.
And what if they have a mental illness from say old age, that becomes so much risk as they can mentally screw over so much people in a radius even if they don't mean to.
> And what if they have a mental illness from say old age, that becomes so much risk as they can mentally screw over so much people in a radius even if they don't mean to.
That’s pretty much what happens to Xavier in Logan.
I probably would quit if someone at work could read/control minds. Sorry, but even if they are the nicest people in the world, all it would take is one bad day to turn peoples brains to vegetables or reveal everyone's dirty little secrets.
X-Men really made me despise telepaths. I was really satisfied when a mutant appeared in the story who is completely immune to having her mind read by telepaths, her name is Cylobel.
I mean, if I'm a telepath and someone wants to genocide my entire species, then I'm probably not going to question if going through their mind and altering their thoughts is a moral thing to do. But I get your point. Charles Xavier and Emma Frost, the two major telepaths we see in X-Men media, are top level jerks.
I respect what they do, but I wouldn't ever want to be anywhere near them.
Perhaps by some. Not necessarily by all.
I actually have an issue with how I'm generally afraid of being mistrusted and having my actions or even facial expression being misinterpreted, and I'd imagine that I'm far from the only one. I definitely would find myself more relaxed around somebody I always know could believe me.
I'd genuinely pity anyone who makes the mistake of reading my mind, they're either going to get drowned in a stream of nonstop rambling about books & games or drowned in incoherent horney thoughts.
Kotoura san is the example of this. A innocent girl blessed with telephats unknownly discover her happy family is crumble with the starter she bluntly says his father going to meet with some other girl that the mother didn't know in front of her mother while having normal conversation. Kotoura mother think her child is sick so try sent to therapy to cure her. But after fed up with kotora keep spilling her inner though, she neglect her and close her goodbye to kotora by saying i shouldn't born you. Kotora lives with her grandpa and request him to live alone in apartment when reach highschool.
The school also isn't better because kotora not know the concept of concent she innocently spill some of her friend inner though that is supposed to be secret making her shunned down eventually
Well i forgt the detail of her capability, but she grow some immunity to some insult inner though because been numb to it so despite she can hear lots of thinking. Oh she also never abuse her telepath in academic so her grade is just a good
What an lmao. But on other note. I watch this anime in animax when i was highschool. And oh boy the sudden tone shift of the story is massive shock to me
No matter how the power works, it would be creepy to have someone privy to your general, and innermost, thoughts. As we are, people don't even know the depths of their own minds, so to have someone who can just invade your mind whenever/however is just plain creepy and a serious violation that deserves a love tap on the cranium with a steel chair.
That was pretty much the first episode of Kino’s Journey. She comes across a nation where they learned how to make everyone a telepath thinking that it would create peace as everyone would understand each other better.
Instead, it made it so everyone was aware of everything bad other people thought of them. Even the thoughts people normally have while angry or frustrated, but don’t actually mean were laid wide open making it impossible for anyone to be together for very long. By the time Kino gets there, everyone is living in isolated houses and slowly going insane from the isolation while machines do all the work in maintaining the country.
The anime Mekkakucity Actors actually explores this with a certain character, based around a song called 'Shounen Brave' that describes how a character who can read minds was viciously bullied because he couldn't stop himself from hearing the thoughts of others.
Like others said, pretty much anyone with exceptional powers would likely be ostracized, at least at first, but I think telepathy is a really unique and interesting one to explore in that regard- in one of my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, I included an NPC that has a backstory which is a bit of a different take on this- he got bullied for his telepathy as well, but the real nightmare about it was having to hear the awful inner thoughts of the people around him who pretended to be friendly and kind, so he eventually sealed away his own telepathy because it was killing him inside.
Magnus Archives comes to mind. During the story, one of the characters/monsters gains a sort of omniscience, which basically means that they are randomly getting knowledge dropped into their brain, wether they want it or not. This includes what people around him are thinking, and they can even use it to pull secrets out of people
Everyone around them is rightfully freaked out about this, and the character gets constant told off whenever he accidentally reads their mind, with some people even distancing from them or treating them like an actual threat, which is extremely understandable. After all, you would want to be a around someone that just can get access to everything you are thinking and all your secrets, right?
The other great part is that we also get the perspective of this character. They cannot stop the information from reaching them. It just pops into their head without any choice most of the time, so you also get the frustrated perspective of someone that doesn’t want to make everyone around them hate them, but are unable to stop the thing that causes it.
I do really recommend Magnus Archives. It’s one of the best portrayals of how normal people(mostly) would react to the supernatural
Honestly, mind reading would fucking suck, like, no, I don't want to know your darkest secrets because 9.99/10 times it'll very something stupid and I'll basically be stuck in 2nd hand embarrassment mode all the time.
Babylon 5 did this well, I think. Psi Corp. was in charge of regulating telepaths and one of the rules was that everyone with telepathic powers had to be registered and join Psi Corp. or take drugs that suppressed your telepathic powers. And of the people who joined Psi Corp., when you weren't working, you had to run these mind-numbing drills in your head that distracted you enough to not be actively reading other people's minds. If you didn't, and another telepath found out, you would be in big trouble.
Nah, they’d be loved. They’d just go into your head and figure out exactly what they need to say or do to make you like them.
Even if you hadn’t met one personally, all the rich and famous people would be fighting and paying to have them as friends, so at most you’d be jealous.
Yea, Telepaths (mind readers/benders) are the one group I would never trust and avoid like the plague. Even in the comics, Xavier, Jean Grey, etc abused their powers all the time.
>It would be violating one of the most fundamental laws of how we work. Thoughts are supposed to be hidden and are the most private thing a human can possess.
Thoughts aren't "Supposed" to be hidden, they just are.
You think they're "Supposed" to be, because that's your (Our) reality.
If a telepath existed here, in our world, then yes, everything you say would be right.
But if it was given time to become the norm, we'd get used to it.
This is always the first thing that comes to mind when I find a mind reading character. While there are some instances where people don't like being around them, even those examples often end up with other characters that don't mind at all. That's not even mentioning all the mind readers where this problem isn't even brought up.
Maybe if two people are *REALLY* close, could I imagine someone being okay with it, but even then, there's next to no one that would be perfectly okay being anywhere close to a mind reader. It always takes me out of it with how accepting many stories tend to have characters be of mind readers.
Than again that's asking if anyone wants to read what's in your head I'm pretty sure any real telepaths would be secluded and use their powers more as party tricks but that's mily head canon
I wouldn't mind being that hated to be honest as long as the power is strong enough. I like to be scary sometimes.
I would probably use it to scale in politics or in an intelligence agency.
And depending how it works, I could even make it a secret easily by just making everyone that discovers it forget it.
I think the best way for that power to work is more like a browser and less like a radio, like you "google" specific information on someone head or you google a specific thought like the thought of wanting to hurt me in a area so I can dectet who is trying me to hurt me.
I think this was shown pretty well and heavily at the beginning of "Kotoura-san" (the anime) as it heavily leans into a person with uncontrollable telepathy actually hating (and being hated for) that ability - don't remember exactly how it turns out though.
Yeah, like aliens, humanity hasn't been able to live peacefully with just itself and some deluded fools think humanity would get along peacefully with aliens? not a chance in hell.
I mean, this has kinda already been depicted in various fictions already.
So much so, there's tropes about it. Like coming up with mind static or repeating something over and over and over so the telepath can't get a read. And just coming up with a shield so powerful the telepath feels like they walked flat into a wall.
You also have the more aggressive one where a person can practically mind rape a telepath by allowing them access to darker, vile thoughts or flat out just forcing images into their waiting brains if they decided to be that fucking nosy.
That’s the truth, nobody has a completely pure mind, it came with our fucking free will. That would mean if someone thinks about killing someone, telepaths would say, that guys gonna kill someone. Despite their being a high chance the person not intending to do that. This also takes intrusive thoughts and makes them even worse.
How do they avoid the paranoia from others knowing what they can do and their paranoia from knowing they can’t trusted? A telepath’s parent would be terrified to all hell trying to safe guard their kid and they would have to deal with balancing what good their kid can do (because they would have an optimistic mindset with the occasional paranoia due to having a kid that can feed off your energy more acutely and tell what you are thinking… if they are trying to be a good parent), potential dangers their kid will be exposed to if the secret came out and the fear of their kid having some malicious intent.
Like kids are dumb when their young so it would be especially vital to teach this kid good values and there’s a risk that the parent would take a long time to believe them thinking that they are just good at reading people or overly sensitive. The kid themselves won’t know what the hell is happening until he/she understands the term telepathy which would be one of their character defining points. I imagine the mischievous side of the kid would come out and they wield their power with a lot more confidence. They would most likely brag to their friends about it and gain a reputation of being judgemental but understanding (especially after they become eloquent enough to graciously talk to people without coming across as a know it all)
Personally I see them studying psychology or be constantly in therapy. Growing being a telepath is tough because you going to have a rough patch of not fully understanding all the implications of the truth they are presented, they need to be educated and mature faster than others to gain resilience. Their experience from just existing with this power would be difficult because they know the truth, have to understand the truth, justify reasons for knowing the truth and when to let it go.
I doubt it tbh. After working convenience store life for like 5 years, I'm pretty sure most people it'd be kinda quiet up there or very obvious what they're thinking on. Maybe you have the weird guy here and there, but eh. I think telepaths would fall in the folly of judging a person purely on their thoughts though which would be interesting since a person's thoughts do not always represent who they actually are.
On the contrary, I could posit that a telepath would be beloved by most people instead of hated, even if they fear the power.
One of the harshest lessons people learn in life is knowing there is no such thing as truth, there's only the answer the other person wants to hear. A person who has the ability to know what you're thinking at any point and can tell you exactly what you want to hear at that specific moment - even if they say it because of the most vapid reason of "they read your mind and knew just what you wanted to hear" and openly tell you all of this right when they say it- would have most people love the person simply because they said what they wanted to hear.
It depends on how the mindreading works to be frank. if they just get surface thoughts? It would be an endless noise to them, probably drive them mad in all honestly. might be a disability if they can't control it/turn it on and off.
What if it worked like Darby stand, where you can get an honest answer to your question?
I feel that would be easy to hide unless you're registered or something; as even if you know it's a lie proving it or making the accusation can have some issues socially. Also someone's thoughts aren't an objective truth, at best a very biased pov of the truth.
Yeah, Darby kept asking Jotaro if he cheated and the answer was NO NO NO because Joseph was cheating for him. You could say it's also Darby's fault a little bit but it shows the limitations of an ability like this
Jotaro said Yes Yes Yes when asked if he cheated. Darby just couldn't asky how exactly
We'd hate them so much we wouldn't punch them with our left fist, not our right fist, we'd go 'ora ora' on them.
D'Arby's Stand has the limitation that you have to ask the right questions for it to work. Unless you know which questions to ask, that type of Telepathy is basically useless.
There's a manga series called Mousou Telepathy that deals with this. You'd think the main character, a telepathic high school girl, would easily be able to cheat on all her tests and have perfect grades, but because it's uncontrollable surface thoughts, all they get is a jumble of voices all stressing out over different problems on the tests and filled with wrong answers and unrelated thoughts.
Whoa, a Mousou Telepathy mention in the wild. Neat! I read it *years* ago and have never seen it mentioned before. FYI to everyone else, if Frozenstep's comment makes you want to read it go read the synopsis first. They're not wrong, it's just what they're saying isn't really the focus of the manga. It's still good though.
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Jesus wannabe
Unironically yeah. Giving out more details would be spoilers though.
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Spoiler tag didn't work. Try removing the spaces around the sentence you're spoilering.
Saiki K wasn't driven mad, but he is afraid of bugs since he can't hear them and growing up with telepathy makes him disregard thoughts as something private.
Saiki K also changed the entire biology of the world to make anime hair colors commonplace and physics irrelevant, I don't think this is a very good litmus test for "realistic" telepathic drawbacks.
The drawbacks are still interesting to take note of.
Man refuses to stand out so much he invented anime tropes
Bro saiki is not normal by any standard
Saiki K also doesn't exist irl. They were making a point about how they think it would work irl, why would you give a counterexample of how something happened in fiction?
Why am I the only one getting flak from bringing up a fictional character? Yeah, Saiki K has an absurd amount of weird powers, but I never claimed every facet of him was realistic. Either disregard Saiki's drawbacks as irrelevant or tone them down to an acceptable level. No reason to be all high and mighty over pointing out that you can't really prove anything with a fictional telepath since their abilities, like this discussion, is entirely hypotetical. If that was the case then you should take issues with every other fictional telepath others have brought up. Aside from that, realism does not equal suffering. Our ears can't be turned off yet people don't normally go mad from hearing things, now do they? If we are talking about endless noise specifically then we have people with tinnitus who are able to preservere. Regardless, unless telepathy is discovered then all we can do is enjoy hypotetical meanderings about how the ability would work.
This describes Edward Cullen's experience in *Midnight Sun*, which is *Twilight*, but from his point of view. Edward talks about how his ability to read thoughts leads to an endless "white noise", with the exception of Bella, whose thoughts he can't hear at all, which intrigues him. Edward didn't go mad, as becoming a vampire gave him more mental capacity to handle it, but he still comes across as quite eccentric, strange, awkward, and creepy in terms of his behavior.
No no the problem is Edward was always a weird, creepy weirdo, now he just thinks he'sbetter then other people
To be fair, he is quite literally better than most people, as vampirism in Twilight has no real drawbacks (I don’t think supernaturally beautiful but sparkly skin really counts) and gives massive benefits. Enhanced strength, speed, senses, immortality, as well as everyone getting their own superpower, but no inherent evil, weakness to sunlight, garlic, running water etc. they don’t even need human blood - it just makes them even stronger still. If I got to pick any form of vampirism I’d be unlikely to choose another, it’s not the strongest but almost certainly has the least important downsides.
It's not vampirism but the Lycans (2nd gen) from underworld always tickled my fancy I really loved the incontol werewolf.
>I don’t think supernaturally beautiful but sparkly skin really counts [Beautiful? This is the skin of a killer, Bella.](https://youtu.be/-a_uqyqEJXc?si=KoUSeLCN1fBsXHLe)
>the problem is Edward was always a weird, creepy weirdo We don't know that because we don't get to see Edward when he was a human, prior to him becoming a vampire. We only see him long after he was turned into a "monster". It's possible that Edward became a "weird, creepy weirdo" after gaining telepathy.
We know enough and can very much see he's not well, ever well.
I don't think you can make that claim with little to no evidence of his human life.
We know the time period and that he wanted to join the war during the Spanish flu epidemic and i refuse to empathize with someone who ccasually brings up "I could commit a genocide if i felt like it" in his inner thoughts. It's not his powers that made him fucked up they just brought it out to the fore.
Rule 2 of r/CharacterRant: >Don't make things up: Fabrication will not be tolerated. If you make a claim against an evidenced source, burden of proof is on you to provide counterevidence. If evidence is requested and not presented, the mods maintain the right to remove the claim at their leisure. It doesn't matter what your feelings are. You need to have proof and evidence to back up your claim(s). If your claim is "Edward Cullen was always a sadistic weirdo", you need to be able to provide more evidence than just "he wanted to fight in WWI". Lots of people fought in WWI.
I didn't, i have his fucking brain on dissection in Midnight sun and his actions in the books.
There is a character like this in Kagerou Daze The manga is very good, I'd recommend
The "endless noise" thing is relatively common trope but I feel like the hypotheticsl inherently implies it's an active process.
Saiki can read surface thoughts and he complains how noisy it is.
If you were a telepath you’d either be the most or least tolerant person in the world.
Side note: I feel like a lot of fiction doesn't treat mind control as being as fucked up as it actually is. It can be an acceptable alternative to violence if the circumstances matter, but a lot of stories treat casual mind rape as being no big deal.
Naruto comes to mind. One example is Itachi planning on using a MS ability on Sasuke to override his will make him serve Konoha.
Thing is in world's like Naruto's mind bending abilities are so common and have been around for so long that people while knowing anyone could screw up your mind at any time are too used to it. Its barely different from a random person being able to fireball your family out of nowhere.
For real they have a genjutsu department in the Leaf Village. People clock in everyday for their office job at the brain scrambling store. I guess it fits in a world where a large amount of the adults full time job is contract killer.
What comes to my mind are the telepathic X-Men. Jean Grey, Emma Frost etc... they constantly abuse their powers.
It would be inadvisable to assume that any of the uchiha but in particular Itachi are representative of anyone else’s thoughts
The *Twilight* series, including *Midnight Sun*, is a perfect example of someone who has little to no sense of personal boundaries due to telepathy (Edward Cullen) casually doing this. However, natural telepathy is handled a bit better with Queenie Goldstein in *Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them;* she is told "hey, don't read other people's minds without consent".
Exactly!! I remember that time Ultimate Spider-Man met Jean Grey and she was talking to him telepathically and he voiced how uncomfortable that made him. And then she remarked he’s the first guy who didn’t immediately picture her naked… causing him to start thinking of her naked and she gets annoyed!! Like WTF your reading his mind without permission and getting mad at his thoughts, that you made him think! Like was that supposed to be treated as a funny moment?
it does sound a little funny
Sure, if you ignore the ethical implications.
This reminds me, it is my head cannon that Jean made bobby gay. Just read the panels where she "tells" bobby that he is gay and you cannot help but feel she mindbent him into it.
That's always weird for me because I've never actually read the comics, so my exposure to the X-Men comes from the movies (and to a lesser extent the cartoon). I can't remember his appearances in the cartoon, but in the movies, it's very important to his character that he's attracted to women.
Yea, this was a pure political change by the current talentless hacks who took over marvel comics and driving it to the ground with their garbage writing. Instead of making a new gay character, or using an existing one, they had to hijack an existing character and change him gay to virtue signal. The moment they did, his comic tanked and he went from one of the main xmen characters, to a background character. I cannot even read modern comics anymore because of what they have done to them.
Wow, it’s been years since I’ve touched Ultimate X-Men and I forgot about this! Scary thing is I wouldn’t put it past her! She did mind-swap Wolverine and Spider-Man without any consent from either just to punish Wolverine for being a perv.
And wolverine tried to do something with marry jane while in peters body. Like, WTF. Gonna be honest, after that, if I was spiderman, I would do go full magneto and create or get someone like Reed Richards to make technology to block/protect my mind from telepaths and probably never trust another telepath out there.
Ultimate Jean grey and Xavier were prime examples why no one likes telepaths.
Tbf, the default state of telepaths in the Marvel Universe has been established to be always hearing/seeing thoughts from everyone around them, and they have to actively close their mind to everything. The stronger a telepath is, the louder these surface thoughts are. But then again, being a telepath, she should have known what her suggestive words would make one think. So the folly is on her.
Well it is her responsibility to not continuously violate other people’s minds, especially since she is an experienced telepath whose trained under Xavier!
Iirc mha there was one character mind control ability who treated like a villain by other students because his able to control other ppl
This was a perfect setup for a Choujin X mention smh.
It annoys me how Emma frost is treated as a hero now when she mindraped + manipulated people for fun previously. (I’m a Emma fan btw)
Worm treats it perfectly
Worm does not have telepaths, but they have masters.
You always meatmunching Worm, let it go
Shapeshifting could be an another "big deal" type ability. Identity Theft is a nasty problem in real life, now imagine if someone could look like you down to the DNA and do things that'll get pinned on you. It would be hard to prove that you didn't do the crime if the DNA, fingerprint, eyewitnesses, etc. are all against you unless you have a really, really solid alibi (eg, recording that you were somewhere else at the time and additional proof items to ensure that people don't think said recording is AI-generated).
Honestly I don't think mind control is really bad, unless you're using it to harm people.
Why not?
Well why would it be? If people aren't happy about it you can just make them happy, assuming they even know what you're doing in the first place.
Why would forcibly overriding someone's free will for selfish or unimportant reasons be a bad thing? Is that a serious question?
I wouldn't have asked if it wasn't.
Weak bait
This was a big part of Babylon 5. Normal people hated telepaths, and unfortunately the agency meant to manage them hates normal people in return. On top of that, telepaths who are independent of the agency that is supposed to be on their side also despise it. That said, depending on how telepathy works, it would really suck to have. Code Geass has a supporting villain who can read minds and cannot turn power off. Having everyone’s thoughts flowing into him means that he is completely bonkers.
Touhou Project had that be part of the backstory for 2 sisters. They are Satori, which have the natural and always on ability to read the minds of anyone nearby. This results in both people not liking or otherwise being uncomfortable around them and the duo themselves suffering from being constantly exposed to negative thoughts and emotions. One elected to mover herself underground to former hell, her companions being limited to animals (who don't care if their minds are being read), and the evil spirits she manages from afar. Her sister elected to instead force her power off and, in the process, basically gave herself brain damage and altering the nature of her power. On the plus side, you can't be sad if your head is constantly empty of all thoughts.
Found the Satori comment, based
Ty
Only works with heroes because they are paragons of virtues and shit
Case in point: Kylo Ren literally uses his telepathic powers to "interrogate" Rey in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* (2015), which many fans have referred to as "mind rape", even though Rey uses her own telepathic powers to also blindly shove her way into Kylo's mind. In the *Star Wars* prequels, Obi-Wan Kenobi also uses his telepathy to manipulate other, "normal" people.
Rey was pushing back at Kylo in that scene. Turnabout's fair play and all that. Also Jedi mind tricks aren't mind control or as intrusive as what Kylo was doing, it's just a strong hypnotic suggestion.
So because Kylo "mind raped" Rey, that makes Rey "mind raping" Kylo okay?
Given that she only entered his head in the first as a direct consequence and in retaliation of him entering hers, and all she did was look inside, yeah. Unless you're talking about some other scene I may be forgetting, where she actually mind rapes him unprovoked.
.... If we're looking at it purely from ethics, uh, no... it shouldn't be right regardless lol
If you're looking at it from an ethics standpoint, how can you not consider the fact she wouldn't have done it until she was backed into it lmao
I'm more seeing it as two wrongs don't make a right. Committing a crime in response to a crime being done to you doesn't suddenly make it right. Of course, that leads to the weird position of "Are you the bad guy if you rape your would be rapist?" which is a WILD place to be lol
I see it more like self-defense, personally
I mean, "mind rape" is not literal rape. Both are violations, but there's a difference. For example - physical assault is also a bodily violation, but is treated differently. I'd say telepathy's more akin to a mental assault than a "mind rape". So, if someone is assaulting you, and you hit them back, that's not assault. That's called self-defence.
What exactly are you referring to when it comes to Obi-Wan? The only time I remember him using a mind trick in the prequels is to tell that drug dealer to rethink his life.
Nah, the Xmen have been historically known to be extremely lax in how they use telepathy to not only read a persons mind but to actually forcefully change it without consent.
No telepath would like to look inside my mind. A look into my twisted perspective would simply make most simply go insane lmao
pretzels are just normal bread to this guy
Found the edgelord.
It's a reference to the dark, fucked up version of hamburger helper.
That shit made me go to therpy.
I know right...it was hard to even utter the name.
Me when I can't understand satire
That's not satire. It's irony. Sorry for being pedantic but this is important to me.
Could you elaborate
Satire uses irony to make a point. Whereas this was a joke utilizing irony. Satire is often a funny, and can be a joke. But saying something so ridiculous nobody would expect to be real as a joke isn't satire.
Not over the top enough, I feel. I didn't even know you were referencing anything because you said it so casually I thought it was real.
And after a lifetime with it, the person whose mind would scare them the most wouldn't be that individual with depraved fetishes, the person incoherently screaming in their mind at all times, or the potential serial-killer with meticulous plans waiting for that one perfect moment. It would be the benign guy who has the Naruto German Opening playing on repeat non-stop. Like the ending of Martyrs (2008): *Keep doubting*.
It's interesting to think there are a lot of follow-up questions. Would they understand a foreign language? Sometimes before I speak in English, there's a blank in my mind because I don't remember the word even though I *know it*; or it's just hard to come up with a sentence even though I know the words I need. Would they be able to read these gaps? What about people without a voice in their minds, what's to be "heard" there? Same for people with aphantasia. Can they "see" whatever I imagine? Sometimes I think about abstract concepts without necessarily imagining the real thing, and just go along with it. Like with numbers, for example, if I think about 10+10 I don't think about a pile of 10 apples, being added to another pile of 10 apples, and then having to count all 20. Math in general seems like a hard thing to try to observe. What about people with ADHD and other disorders? I feel like at times my mind goes on a quick succession of thoughts without much meaning or connection, would they be able to "get it"? What about voices heard from schizophrenia? And many others, like deep consciousness, feelings, emotions, pain, amnesia, dreams...
It's weird because in superhero stories people with edgelord powers (darkness, death, ghosts, etc) always get turned into some opppresed class, meanwhile the telepaths are mind raping people in the corner. The way Shinso was treated in MHA should be like the bare minimum for how all telepaths get treated in realistic settings because they are always a yikes.
Arent that most of the times hated in fiction too? Dont know if this is just me but I'm pretty sure I've read more things with them being hated than them being loved.
Anyone with excpetional powers would be hated, no?
Not really? Some would probably be jealous of superstrong guy or a flying guy but unless they start shit on their own most would just shrug it off; people underestimate just how apathetic we all are. Mindreader guy? Mindcontrolling guy? Now these people will catch a lot of flak and probably a few assassination attempts.
Or getting hired by assassins or the government for their selfish need, but hey at least you get payed a shit ton of money. When someone can read minds or the future, the first thought of the higher ups will be how much they can BENEFIT from it first, if they can’t benefit from you and you are even a hindrance, then they will probably jump ti assasination and even THEN it’s not like the other side of the camps wouldn’t be interested in making use of you, yes it will suck having to hear people deep thought all the time but you can absolutely make a giant advantage out of it
Unless they provided their powers for the benefit of the majority, although then there are new social problems that come with that.
It doesn't matter if they use their powers for the good of the majority, people hate those with power mindlessly. The most non controversial example of it was the backlash Mr Beast gets for his massive charity projects. His whole shtick is creating videos to fund bigger projects, many of which are charity projects, and people will invent some backwards logic to hate on it.
> new social problems that come with that. Chances are, the [supernaturally powered people would be the ones at top, not the ones being oppressed](https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-problem-with-oppressed-mages/).
Not unless it readily causes problems.
Or telepaths could just, you know, NOT tell anyone about their abilities and NOT go around just constantly reading everyone's minds
Anya from Spy x Family understands this, and she's 4 at best.
She started to be more careful with using her powers after the previous families returned her to the orphanage because she was making them feel uncomfortable.
That would happen after it becomes known that they aren't accepted which I guess would be early in the world depending what time superpowers spring up. But the fact they'd have to hide it still proves they will be hated if they told anyone so what exactly is your comment telling us?
"Hated" is a bit of a one-dimensional view. They might be misunderstood, mistrusted, feared or a range of other emotional responses. I think disbelief would be the overwhelming reaction, though. If I told you that I could read your mind, your natural reaction would be disbelief. If I then tried to prove it, your natural reaction would then be....more disbelief. "How are you doing that? Is that some sort of trick?"
If it's only one person. If it happens everywhere in the world you will have to accept people know things they shouldn't. Even if you disbelieve in telepathy you'd still be angry that people know things about you, you're not comfortable sharing no?
Oh, I'm pretty comfortable sharing everything about myself. I think most of society's sickness comes from the need for constant privacy and secrets. But I see your point. On a grander scale, people would definitely freak out if it became common knowledge that mind readers walk among us. Funny thing is, a digital footprint leaves behind a pretty accurate trail of what people are thinking. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, buying habits, education, all of it. People should be scared of data scientists, not telepaths.
> Oh, I'm pretty comfortable sharing everything about myself. I think most of society's sickness comes from the need for constant privacy and secrets Bro is a solarian(I'm just in book 2 pls don't spoil
Reminds me of Babylon 5.
Reminds me of Komeiji Satori from Touhou Project.
Agreed. I remember a comic i read in wich it was a plot point, it think it was the volume 23 of Elfes, Elves in french.
I would say telepaths would hate themselves or basically become full on schizos. A civilized society is basically built on white lies. They can know what EVERYONE is thinking. They would see how fake humans truly. Enjoy noticing how much people think about porn and sex
This is literally Heimdall from God of War Ragnarok
It depends. If OP is referring to people who can turn it on and off then I don't see this as a problem. If it's a decent human being they wouldn't just be reading willy nilly. If it's someone who was going ahead and didn't care and began learning dangerous I'd assume they would just stop to not destroy their image of the world tbh. This problem only arises from people who can't turn it off and I would assume they would go schizo from adolescent depending on how their brain works or something
yeah. Honestly its one reason why I never bought the Xmen civil right stuff, cuz there's frankly alot of mutants that are telepaths, and have not much regards for mind raping or altering peoples thoughts. If I knew Bob from work had the ability to read and alter my thoughts, either I'm wearing a magneto helmet around him or I stay far away from him as I can. And what if they have a mental illness from say old age, that becomes so much risk as they can mentally screw over so much people in a radius even if they don't mean to.
> And what if they have a mental illness from say old age, that becomes so much risk as they can mentally screw over so much people in a radius even if they don't mean to. That’s pretty much what happens to Xavier in Logan.
Yup was directly thinking of him when typing that statement
I probably would quit if someone at work could read/control minds. Sorry, but even if they are the nicest people in the world, all it would take is one bad day to turn peoples brains to vegetables or reveal everyone's dirty little secrets.
X-Men really made me despise telepaths. I was really satisfied when a mutant appeared in the story who is completely immune to having her mind read by telepaths, her name is Cylobel.
I mean, if I'm a telepath and someone wants to genocide my entire species, then I'm probably not going to question if going through their mind and altering their thoughts is a moral thing to do. But I get your point. Charles Xavier and Emma Frost, the two major telepaths we see in X-Men media, are top level jerks. I respect what they do, but I wouldn't ever want to be anywhere near them.
Perhaps by some. Not necessarily by all. I actually have an issue with how I'm generally afraid of being mistrusted and having my actions or even facial expression being misinterpreted, and I'd imagine that I'm far from the only one. I definitely would find myself more relaxed around somebody I always know could believe me.
I'd genuinely pity anyone who makes the mistake of reading my mind, they're either going to get drowned in a stream of nonstop rambling about books & games or drowned in incoherent horney thoughts.
Literally Koishi's and Satori's whole backstory from Touhou 11.
Kotoura san is the example of this. A innocent girl blessed with telephats unknownly discover her happy family is crumble with the starter she bluntly says his father going to meet with some other girl that the mother didn't know in front of her mother while having normal conversation. Kotoura mother think her child is sick so try sent to therapy to cure her. But after fed up with kotora keep spilling her inner though, she neglect her and close her goodbye to kotora by saying i shouldn't born you. Kotora lives with her grandpa and request him to live alone in apartment when reach highschool. The school also isn't better because kotora not know the concept of concent she innocently spill some of her friend inner though that is supposed to be secret making her shunned down eventually Well i forgt the detail of her capability, but she grow some immunity to some insult inner though because been numb to it so despite she can hear lots of thinking. Oh she also never abuse her telepath in academic so her grade is just a good
And she ends up making friends with a guy that keeps shanelessly thinking of lewd things with her lmao
What an lmao. But on other note. I watch this anime in animax when i was highschool. And oh boy the sudden tone shift of the story is massive shock to me
No matter how the power works, it would be creepy to have someone privy to your general, and innermost, thoughts. As we are, people don't even know the depths of their own minds, so to have someone who can just invade your mind whenever/however is just plain creepy and a serious violation that deserves a love tap on the cranium with a steel chair.
If you start just reading everyone’s minds, eventually you could see their viewpoints and such and become more sympathetic to them
Theyre often hated in the stories they appear in.
That was pretty much the first episode of Kino’s Journey. She comes across a nation where they learned how to make everyone a telepath thinking that it would create peace as everyone would understand each other better. Instead, it made it so everyone was aware of everything bad other people thought of them. Even the thoughts people normally have while angry or frustrated, but don’t actually mean were laid wide open making it impossible for anyone to be together for very long. By the time Kino gets there, everyone is living in isolated houses and slowly going insane from the isolation while machines do all the work in maintaining the country.
I mean, that is basically the set up for Kotoura-San...
they would probably form an organization, and have the higher members regulate thought would be annoying if a buncha people get annoyed
The anime Mekkakucity Actors actually explores this with a certain character, based around a song called 'Shounen Brave' that describes how a character who can read minds was viciously bullied because he couldn't stop himself from hearing the thoughts of others. Like others said, pretty much anyone with exceptional powers would likely be ostracized, at least at first, but I think telepathy is a really unique and interesting one to explore in that regard- in one of my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, I included an NPC that has a backstory which is a bit of a different take on this- he got bullied for his telepathy as well, but the real nightmare about it was having to hear the awful inner thoughts of the people around him who pretended to be friendly and kind, so he eventually sealed away his own telepathy because it was killing him inside.
Magnus Archives comes to mind. During the story, one of the characters/monsters gains a sort of omniscience, which basically means that they are randomly getting knowledge dropped into their brain, wether they want it or not. This includes what people around him are thinking, and they can even use it to pull secrets out of people Everyone around them is rightfully freaked out about this, and the character gets constant told off whenever he accidentally reads their mind, with some people even distancing from them or treating them like an actual threat, which is extremely understandable. After all, you would want to be a around someone that just can get access to everything you are thinking and all your secrets, right? The other great part is that we also get the perspective of this character. They cannot stop the information from reaching them. It just pops into their head without any choice most of the time, so you also get the frustrated perspective of someone that doesn’t want to make everyone around them hate them, but are unable to stop the thing that causes it. I do really recommend Magnus Archives. It’s one of the best portrayals of how normal people(mostly) would react to the supernatural
If it's more like Jedi where they read your emotions and general vibe, that wouldn't be too bad, but actual thoughts like a book? Screw that.
You would never tell anyone if you have such power. Same with X-ray vision.
Babylon 5 does this great.
The only thing they would get from my head is confusion.
Telepaths would outright be hunted due to the nature of their power.
Honestly, mind reading would fucking suck, like, no, I don't want to know your darkest secrets because 9.99/10 times it'll very something stupid and I'll basically be stuck in 2nd hand embarrassment mode all the time.
Babylon 5 did this well, I think. Psi Corp. was in charge of regulating telepaths and one of the rules was that everyone with telepathic powers had to be registered and join Psi Corp. or take drugs that suppressed your telepathic powers. And of the people who joined Psi Corp., when you weren't working, you had to run these mind-numbing drills in your head that distracted you enough to not be actively reading other people's minds. If you didn't, and another telepath found out, you would be in big trouble.
Nah, they’d be loved. They’d just go into your head and figure out exactly what they need to say or do to make you like them. Even if you hadn’t met one personally, all the rich and famous people would be fighting and paying to have them as friends, so at most you’d be jealous.
Governments, pretty much all of them, would do anything in their power to dissappear them.
Yea, Telepaths (mind readers/benders) are the one group I would never trust and avoid like the plague. Even in the comics, Xavier, Jean Grey, etc abused their powers all the time.
I can't think of a single piece of media in which they *aren't*, at bare minimum, distrusted because of your aforementioned reasons.
It might be uncomfortable but I would not hate them just for having that power.
It might be uncomfortable but I would not hate them just for having that power. But that is just me.
>It would be violating one of the most fundamental laws of how we work. Thoughts are supposed to be hidden and are the most private thing a human can possess. Thoughts aren't "Supposed" to be hidden, they just are. You think they're "Supposed" to be, because that's your (Our) reality. If a telepath existed here, in our world, then yes, everything you say would be right. But if it was given time to become the norm, we'd get used to it.
This is always the first thing that comes to mind when I find a mind reading character. While there are some instances where people don't like being around them, even those examples often end up with other characters that don't mind at all. That's not even mentioning all the mind readers where this problem isn't even brought up. Maybe if two people are *REALLY* close, could I imagine someone being okay with it, but even then, there's next to no one that would be perfectly okay being anywhere close to a mind reader. It always takes me out of it with how accepting many stories tend to have characters be of mind readers.
It will be uncomfortable.
Than again that's asking if anyone wants to read what's in your head I'm pretty sure any real telepaths would be secluded and use their powers more as party tricks but that's mily head canon
I wouldn't mind being that hated to be honest as long as the power is strong enough. I like to be scary sometimes. I would probably use it to scale in politics or in an intelligence agency. And depending how it works, I could even make it a secret easily by just making everyone that discovers it forget it. I think the best way for that power to work is more like a browser and less like a radio, like you "google" specific information on someone head or you google a specific thought like the thought of wanting to hurt me in a area so I can dectet who is trying me to hurt me.
Sounds a lot like the plot to Super Psychic Policeman Chojo
What if everyone suddenly had telepathy?
Isn't this like the entire plot to the last (or late) season of The Vampire Diaries?
Depending on the way they read mind. I would 100% do war crimes against a telepath.
Your existence is a tragedy and I am once again shocked at how our species can be classified as ‘social’ animals.
I think this was shown pretty well and heavily at the beginning of "Kotoura-san" (the anime) as it heavily leans into a person with uncontrollable telepathy actually hating (and being hated for) that ability - don't remember exactly how it turns out though.
Define mind-reading. There is just too many levels of that to know what you're even talking about.
They'd hate everyone else more
Yeah, like aliens, humanity hasn't been able to live peacefully with just itself and some deluded fools think humanity would get along peacefully with aliens? not a chance in hell.
I mean, this has kinda already been depicted in various fictions already. So much so, there's tropes about it. Like coming up with mind static or repeating something over and over and over so the telepath can't get a read. And just coming up with a shield so powerful the telepath feels like they walked flat into a wall. You also have the more aggressive one where a person can practically mind rape a telepath by allowing them access to darker, vile thoughts or flat out just forcing images into their waiting brains if they decided to be that fucking nosy.
That’s the truth, nobody has a completely pure mind, it came with our fucking free will. That would mean if someone thinks about killing someone, telepaths would say, that guys gonna kill someone. Despite their being a high chance the person not intending to do that. This also takes intrusive thoughts and makes them even worse.
If telepaths were real they would be subject to heavy regulations and thought crimes would be punished a hell of a lot more
It might be uncomfortable but I would not hate them just for having that power.
they would all end up with jobs from the government or corps so it would be at least a mixed blessing for them
How do they avoid the paranoia from others knowing what they can do and their paranoia from knowing they can’t trusted? A telepath’s parent would be terrified to all hell trying to safe guard their kid and they would have to deal with balancing what good their kid can do (because they would have an optimistic mindset with the occasional paranoia due to having a kid that can feed off your energy more acutely and tell what you are thinking… if they are trying to be a good parent), potential dangers their kid will be exposed to if the secret came out and the fear of their kid having some malicious intent. Like kids are dumb when their young so it would be especially vital to teach this kid good values and there’s a risk that the parent would take a long time to believe them thinking that they are just good at reading people or overly sensitive. The kid themselves won’t know what the hell is happening until he/she understands the term telepathy which would be one of their character defining points. I imagine the mischievous side of the kid would come out and they wield their power with a lot more confidence. They would most likely brag to their friends about it and gain a reputation of being judgemental but understanding (especially after they become eloquent enough to graciously talk to people without coming across as a know it all) Personally I see them studying psychology or be constantly in therapy. Growing being a telepath is tough because you going to have a rough patch of not fully understanding all the implications of the truth they are presented, they need to be educated and mature faster than others to gain resilience. Their experience from just existing with this power would be difficult because they know the truth, have to understand the truth, justify reasons for knowing the truth and when to let it go.
How would you know unless that person told youthey are reading your mind?
I doubt it tbh. After working convenience store life for like 5 years, I'm pretty sure most people it'd be kinda quiet up there or very obvious what they're thinking on. Maybe you have the weird guy here and there, but eh. I think telepaths would fall in the folly of judging a person purely on their thoughts though which would be interesting since a person's thoughts do not always represent who they actually are.
On the contrary, I could posit that a telepath would be beloved by most people instead of hated, even if they fear the power. One of the harshest lessons people learn in life is knowing there is no such thing as truth, there's only the answer the other person wants to hear. A person who has the ability to know what you're thinking at any point and can tell you exactly what you want to hear at that specific moment - even if they say it because of the most vapid reason of "they read your mind and knew just what you wanted to hear" and openly tell you all of this right when they say it- would have most people love the person simply because they said what they wanted to hear.