Tobias is a Horney Neurotic with Schizoid Tendencies

[NothingFromSomething]

DeGroot was a pretty special case, wouldn't you say?  Not exactly regular human interaction, when it's dealing with the topic of his dead mother and a strong suspicion the guy might have an alien slug in his head.

It's just...where in the books does it even say he's "socially awkward" as such, in terms of not knowing how to interact with people, the basics?  It pretty much just says he's from a really rough background and doesn't have a lot of friends.  Not that he can't make friends, as it's pretty established in the books he develops stronger bonds with probably more
of the various Animorphs (and associated allies and such) than, hell, probably Marco and Rachel.

And yeah, the facial gestures and such were part of the nothlit status, it says as much.  He's basically just rusty at being in human form, in those mid-later books.

This is all reading way too much into it.

[NickDaGriff]

Kay, I wasn't saying that Autism spectrum people can't function socially, or that they're conversational trainwrecks waiting to happen.  I've actually been diagnosed as such, and I can still function in social situations.  Heck, I think every best friend I've ever had in school was probably somewhere on the spectrum, ranging from very high-functioning to...  Not as high-functioning.    Personally, I think if any animorph is on the spectrum, it's Ax, but that's a topic for a future thread.   

It's just...where in the books does it even say he's "socially awkward" as such, in terms of not knowing how to interact with people, the basics?  It pretty much just says he's from a really rough background and doesn't have a lot of friends.  Not that he can't make friends, as it's pretty established in the books he develops stronger bonds with probably more
of the various Animorphs (and associated allies and such) than, hell, probably Marco and Rachel.

Well, look at how he acted in school.  He was picked on, and just didn't know how to handle it.  He was an easy target, and didn't know what was causing it.  He just kept to himself and never made friends, hoping people would leave him alone.  At least, until Jake showed up with a random act of compassion and Tobias started following him around for protection.  In fact, thinking about it, Tobias never initiated a single one of his friendships.  Jake came in and saved him from bullies, and Tobias latched onto that, later meeting the other Anis through Jake.  In his relationship with Rachel, she was always the forward one, aggressively keeping their relationship from dying out when Tobias would have been content to simply let things fade away through inaction.  His bond with Ax and the Hork-Bajir came about mostly due to the fact that they lived out in the same neck of the woods, and he saw them on a regular basis. 

Again, Autism and SPD don't mean you can't make friends.  It usually just means that you're going to have generally fewer, but stronger, bonds with other people.  Tobias didn't have many friends, but the relationships he formed tended to be extremely solid.

This is all reading way too much into it.

But where would the fun be in not reading too much into it?    I dunno, ever since I got into writing, picking apart stories in great detail has become a big hobby of mine.

[NothingFromSomething]

The school thing's a jump.  Not every kid that's getting bullied, especially at that age in a middle-school context where kids become cruel status-obsessed freaks, has a social disorder.  It's probably way more justified to make an argument for someone like David having Asperger's or whatever, if you buy into the spectrum notion, than Tobias.  Really not sure where you're getting the whole "one-sided" thing in the Tobias/Rachel relationship either, in the early books he's coming out from his little setup in the woods to visit her every other night.

He also, probably moreso than anyone other than Cassie, has a total understanding and grasp of all the social dynamics between all the other Animorphs, "getting" the other kids and able to sort of temper flaring arguments and such.  Again, the guy's clearly more social than Marco or Rachel are.

I'm not getting the "number of friends" thing, either.  All we hear of Rachel are Cassie and Melissa, pre-invasion, and Marco basically just Jake.  Seems an "interpreting things the way you want to hear them" approach with this, like a lot of this sort of analysis is, rather than going by what's on the page.

You could just as easily make some assertion that Tobias's troubles are some sort of "only-child complex", or born out of growing up in a sh*tty situation with a drunken-trash uncle and nobody really giving a damn.  Probably much more able to be substantiated, too.  Truth is, though, the bullying thing is pretty moot.  How many 7th/8th graders have a hard time with bullies?  Plenty of them.  Maybe not to the extent of "having their head shoved down a toilet", but that seems an exaggerated thing to happen anyway, not the sort of thing that bullies are going to be able to get away with without intervention often in real life.  Come on, the guy was described as a chubby/out-of-shape guy with shaggy hair who tended to daydream a lot.  When I was 13, guys in my class would have bullied him too, until everyone grew up a bit a couple of years later and he started to have an easier time with school/life in general.  Kids come out of their shell 90% of the time, after those horror years of the early teens, zippo to say Tobias wouldn't have fit that mold.

[NickDaGriff]

No, not every kid that gets bullied has a social disorder.  However, plenty can develop one, especially if they're coming from backgrounds as crummy as Tobias's.  I don't buy into the autism spectrum applying here either, as he shows a good amount of social competence, and I think his issues are 90% environmentally caused.  What I meant was that there are certain ways to avoid bullying, simply in the manner you project yourself.  Tobias didn't project himself at all, hoping he wouldn't be noticed, instead unfortunately leading the more sadistic classmates to see him as a weak, easy target.

David is a straight-up sociopath, not the least bit spectrummy.  That's been analyzed to hell and back about half a million times, so I'm not going to get into it.  Basically, the primary difference is that a person with Autism has difficulty grasping how to recognize and deal with the emotions of others and social interaction, a sociopath doesn't feel emotion (with some exceptions) and sees others as just objects, and a schizoid just wants to keep a distance between themselves and others and interact on their own terms.  Naturally, like many other psychological conditions, these all have their own sliding scales of severity, they're not just stereotypical cookie-cutter molds. 

As for the "one-sided" thing, I mostly meant later in the series, especially around #23 and after.  Whenever they go on a date, it's always Rachel who set it up.  When Tobias was starving out in the woods, he turned to roadkill rather than just stopping by and asking for something.  Whenever he needed any kind of help, she practically had to twist his arm wing to get him to accept it.  He still reciprocated emotionally and understood her like no one else.  Like in #33, when he said,"Be Rachel," to tell her to show Taylor mercy.  Coming from any other animorph, those words would have just meant,"Tear her damn cyborg head off."  But no, he saw the struggle she was going through that no one else did (not even Cassie, her best friend and the supposed people-person of the group).  He loves her, he gets her, but he's just a natural loner by preference, and didn't do as much to actively move the relationship forward as much as she did.  If she hadn't taken up pretty much all the initiative, it would have just evaporated before Tobias even realized it was going.  That's what I was saying.

The others all have numerous social venues open to them (though Cassie's vague in this department, but I'm saving her issues for a future thread), but Tobias is the only animorph specified in text to not have had any friends before this all went down.  The implication is pretty clear there.  I don't doubt he had playmates when he was younger.  One of the flashbacks in #33 was on a trampoline, and his uncle didn't strike me as the type to go out and buy one for a kid he didn't even want to take care of.  Socializing is far easier when you're a preschooler/elementary student.  Keep in mind that very little is generally said of their lives outside the missions, and general school interactions are implied to have taken place.

90% isn't a guarantee, and even then, that only applies to normal kids.  In fact, he shatters the mold with the sheer amount of bad stuff happening to him.  By the end of the series, he's an emotional wreck and shunning nearly every bit of human contact.  Apart from Rachel, he basically had very little hope for coming out of his shell from the start.

Also, Tobias wasn't chubby.  ',:-o  He was actually described as scrawny, if I remember.

[Snakie]

* Emotional coldness, detachment or reduced affect: He certainly comes off this way at times. There are numerous mentions of his piercing, unreadable hawk stare as he just watches the others discuss a topic. He probably says the least in group conversation out of all the animorphs, and when he does talk, it’s in a concise, sometimes blunt speech pattern. Going back to his neurosis, he prefers to keep people at a distance as a sort of defense mechanism (which really makes a bird of prey the most ideal morph for him in that way).

Not sure about the overall message of your post, but I completely disagree with this interpretation.

His expressions are unreadable not because he's an unemotional character, but because he's a hawk.  They can't express human emotions.

I've actually found Tobias, generally, to be an extremely emotional character, possibly the MOST emotional character, and they use the cold expressionless nature of the hawk to create interesting contradictions with his true nature.

[NothingFromSomething]

Snakie hits it on the head. 

There's zippo there to say Tobias is cold, or detached, or unempathetic/unable to relate.  Distanced?  Sure.  He is distanced, he's an 8th grade boy living apart from what few friends he has, in the friggin' woods fearing for his life 24/7.

When he's with the group, though?  He's in on the conversations, he participates, he's not shy or "apart" from the group as a whole.  The facial-expressions thing is grasping, as yeah, he's a hawk 99% of the time, and in the later books where he's able to human-morph again he's just so rusty at inhabiting the body his muscle memory's all off.  I think they even describe that getting better as the books go on, he normalizes a little as he gets used to it again?

And definitely on-point about him being one of the more emotional characters in the group.  KA/Michael go out of their way to describe the kid as "sweet" and "a dreamer" and write plenty of passages about him being empathetic toward people (I think there's a few big parts of the Megamorphs books like that, from memory).  I mean, again, Marco's far more self-centric and "inward" than Tobias is.  He's not really described as having that many friends other than Jake in the early books, guess that lumps him in a "spectrum" position too?  There's certainly more to go on there than with Tobias.

[NickDaGriff]

To clarify, I was basing that part of my diagnosis there off of how I read the others perceiving him.  I'm not saying lack of muscle memory gives him a personality disorder.  I'm saying that he doesn't project himself in a way that betrays a lot of emotion most of the time.  Even a hawk could still be fairly expressive, especially one with thoughtspeak capabilities.  That's what reduced (or blunted/restricted), affect means.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunted_affect  The definition does allow for outbursts of strong emotional expression as well, which I did mention earlier.  He has emotion, he's not a sociopath.  He just doesn't express it very well, and there's more to it than his rusty human skills. 

I agree, making the hawk a full-time part of him does make for some beautiful contradictions with his inner nature, but it's an internal struggle.  You'll notice you don't hear much of it in other characters' stories, apart from just a brief mention of, "He's been quieter since [event] happened," or, "He seems to be adjusting well to being a hawk."  He consciously makes an effort to not let his issues affect the others, unlike pretty much everyone else in the group but Rachel.  As a result (much like with Rachel), the group doesn't really see the full effect of how much it's affecting him.  They ended up just seeing Tobias as the sad loner and Rachel as the deranged violence junkie, and not much further than that.

I looked over the first five books again.  Certain details and bits of characterization from the first book don't seem to hold up with the canon, so I'm not sure whether we definitely count anything from that or not (KAA was kind of experimenting and unsure in the beginning).  After he becomes a hawk, though, he barely talks with the group unless they address him directly, he's relaying or confirming mission information, or whispering with Rachel. 

I think you might be slightly misinformed on Autism spectrum, based on the way you throw the term around.  Marco almost certainly has some sort of issue contributing to his narcissism, as does Cassie, but it's definitely not Autism.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum  He's certainly no introvert either, with the way he hits on pretty much every girl he sees.  Maybe it's slight sociopathic tendencies, but I'm not sure.  Ax is really the only animorph that strikes me as the least bit Autistic, but that would be holding an Andalite's psychology up against human norms, and we only have a tiny sample of Andalites to compare it to so who even knows.

[KingAlanI]

heh, at first I thought the thread title was a typo for 'horny'.

I figured him being a dino nerd was just useful in Megamorphs #2.

He seems to have issues coming from a broken home and being stuck as a hawk rather than having mental illness per se.

[Dylan]

Wow, that's very interesting.  I don't think I'd lable Tobias as "Horney" though.

[NickDaGriff]

Wow, that's very interesting.  I don't think I'd lable Tobias as "Horney" though.

Horneyan, technically speaking.  Just a play on words just to get your attention.

[Dylan]

Wow, that's very interesting.  I don't think I'd lable Tobias as "Horney" though.

Horneyan, technically speaking.  Just a play on words just to get your attention.

oh, it got my attention

[NothingFromSomething]

Reading over all of this stuff again is pretty interesting.  Really disagree about the whole "Tobias doesn't talk to people unless he's addressed directly" thing, within the group itself.  He's a little aloof soon after being trapped, but even that doesn't last long.  He participates, he converses, he contributes.

I'd like to make a point about empathy, too, which is a huge part of the whole concept of the disorder.  You couldn't even remotely say Tobias can't empathize with people, that he doesn't grasp other people's concerns or is totally inward.  That's just not the case.

The "not projecting himself" thing really seems to be grasping, too.  It's an enormous jump from "introverted" (which even that I'd dispute of Tobias, outside of the first couple of books) to autistic or Asperger's-suffering.  If a doctor diagnosed someone based on the same stuff as you're doing of Tobias, they'd be borderline opening themselves to malpractice lawsuits, you have to be really careful with this stuff. 

The guy's fiercely loyal to his social group, has a pretty overt sense of humor, and is pretty much basically checking up on everyone else constantly to see how they're doing.  Ax primarily, but you see it a lot with the rest, too.  I just don't see any of this notion that Tobias has trouble functioning, doesn't understand social mores, or lives life turned inward without an ability to grasp other people's feelings or situations.  It's just not there.

Throwing around these terms so loosely is a dangerous road to walk, you simply don't want to overemphasize the existence of things like this.  That's how you get a generation brought up on Ritalin and the subsequent aftereffects, and a mass medical-wide apology for getting it wrong.  Might be good for business initially, but does a major disservice to the community as a whole.  Quiet & unassuming does not a socially-inept person make.

[NickDaGriff]

Again, I don't think he has Aspergers or autism, that's nowhere near what I was getting at.  And looking back on this thread, there's a lot of stuff I don't quite agree with anymore (I kinda misinterpreted a couple of the criteria for SPD, and my view on Rachel has changed since I wrote the original post).  I'll stand by my position that his upbringing caused him problems and gave him more introverted tendencies (tendencies is a very deliberately used word that people seemed to miss a lot in this thread) than he otherwise would have had, but yeah. 

I'm definitely not throwing around words lightly.  I do think he has difficulties relating to people who aren't Rachel, but nothing that medication would fix.  Often times, these kinds of things just need the individual to figure out a way past their shortcomings, on their own or with help.  And that, he did.  He became a hawk, and retreated into himself for a while.  Then he found his role in the group and was content with it.  Then Taylor tortured him, forcing him to use the hawk brain as a shield from the outside world until Rachel was able to help him mostly overcome his PTSD.  Then Rachel died, and he went straight back into his hawk shell and disappeared from the world.  The original post was me trying to pick apart his psyche so I could figure out what makes him tick, then put him back together in my writing.  Figure out what he needs to bond with someone again, and make it happen. 

[NothingFromSomething]

Right.  I'd almost agree with some form of PTSD, seems a little overstated but yeah, his upbringing would have definitely imprinted somewhat on the personality displayed in the early books.  But balancing that out, he does bond with the entire group pretty frickin' quickly, and comes out of his shell to be a contributing member in a pretty vocal sense.  He's not marginalized or "other", the hawk body (and subsequent obvious lifestyle changes) aside. 

[Tim Bruening]

Wow, that's very interesting.  I don't think I'd lable Tobias as "Horney" though.

Horneyan, technically speaking.  Just a play on words just to get your attention.

What are "Horney" and  "Horneyan" puns for?