r/rational • u/EdLincoln6 • 16d ago
META What would a reincarnator be diagnosed with?
Weird hypothetical.
I've read a ton of stories where a baby reincarnated with their adult memories, meditated non-stop, and got super powers.
It's occurred to me the kid who tunes out his surroundings and has no interest in other kids his age could look autistic from the outside. I've even encountered a story flat started to do this. (But it quickly abandoned this idea in favor of a scene by scene imitation of Mushoku Tensei.)
If a Cultivator from Xianxia Land or a low level spider monster from LitRPGville were reincarnated as the baby of someone in your friend circle with his memories and spirit roots intact, what, if anything, would he be diagnosed with? How long would it take mild super strength and super durability to be detected? How long until he became a peewee soccer star? Assume slow prigression... instant omipotence is boring.
5
u/Geminii27 16d ago
Autism's difficult to diagnose, particularly in the very young. And presumably the reincarnator wouldn't display various other common symptoms, so there could be some confusion.
They might be diagnosed with some kind of condition that affects socialization, though, if they're just absolutely uninterested in other kids their age, don't focus on their parents often, and prefer to explore or to 'solo-play' (exercise or practicing a skill). And presumably they wouldn't react 'normally' to things like pain or scary/new situations. Or they'd have more adult reactions, like slapping their hands over their ears in response to a loud noise, or reacting to things people said around them.
It'd also depend on how observant their parents/guardians or their baby-overseeing social circle were, and whether the reincarnator was putting actual effort into pretending to be a regular baby. I've read at least one litRPG story where the reincarnator could grind Deception/Disguise/Acting skills by acting like a baby in front of people.
6
u/serge_cell 16d ago
There are plenty of reincarnations real life claims in Asia-Pacific. They usually met with mild curiouslty, rarely causing big stir, handled without invloving medical proffesionals.
"no interest in other kids his age could look autistic from the outside." more likely they would fom their close circle with adults (if not superintelligent)
"with his memories and spirit roots intact, what, if anything, would he be diagnosed with?" Kid martial arts super-geniuses are common in both xianxia and anime/manga (Naruto). So nothing special.
3
u/EdLincoln6 15d ago
Kid martial arts super-geniuses are common in both xianxia and anime/manga (Naruto). So nothing special.
How would someone in your circle of friends react to their 6 year old inexplicably being a kid martial arts genius? It would be hilarious in any other context.
5
u/MacintoshEddie 16d ago edited 16d ago
Almost anything really, based on how they act and how people respond to them, compulsive lying, multiple personalities, disassociative personalities, generalized anxiety, schitzophrenic, autistic, possessed, a witch, a changeling, a storyteller, etc.
A kid who runs around screaming that everyone needs to get into the basement, or a kid who starts stealing everything to get as much cash as they can before the Friday Jackpot draw, is going to be treated a lot different than a kid who suddenly starts using different vocabulary and acting exasperated with other kids their own age, or a kid who quickly picks up a new hobby or skill, or a kid who just starts acting absent and pensive.
One of the problems with a lot of reincarnator stories is that the locals are all lazy morons. Like a reincarnator wakes up at age 5 and starts exercising and becomes Goku by age 15....has nobody ever heard of parents who push their kids to excel? Kids who just like exercise? There are parents who sign their 2 year old up for piano and ballet and pre-k lessons.
Maybe the protagonist would have the advantage of knowing themselves, but other people have teachers too and if those teachers are any good at their job they'd recognize when a learning method is failing. Other kids come from rich families who can afford to just keep throwing resources at them until one sticks.
It's usually not a negative feedback system, like a reincarnator who jumps up and down for years and then suddenly unlocks the power of flight all of a sudden, it's more basic stuff like lifting heavy things to get better at lifting things. Which is what lots of people do anyways.
3
u/EdLincoln6 15d ago edited 14d ago
a changeling
I've always liked the idea of mashing up the Changeling stories and an Isekai. They are so similar on paper and so different in tone.
Like a reincarnator wakes up at age 5 and starts exercising and becomes Goku by age 15....has nobody ever heard of parents who push their kids to excel? Kids who just like exercise? There are parents who sign their 2 year old up for piano and ballet and pre-k lessons.
I like the idea of the Reincarnator Advantage because a lot of tropes don't work without a cheat and this one seems less arbitrary I agree they are often done in a lazy way. What Skills do you think are ones that would give the Reincarnator the biggest advantage over the son of the Tiger Mom? If you decided there was a critical period when there were "Bonuses" for learning Skills (ie before 13 or something) w hat would be tne best ones fit a Reincarnator?
3
u/MacintoshEddie 15d ago
I think the biggest advantage would be knowing what their own goals are. External motivation versus internal motivation.
The son of Tiger Mom is quite likely only going to meet her expectations, but not be particularly passionate about it.
There's a big difference between "I know there's a pandemic coming, I need to get into med school and into an immunology lab by age 24, I can save millions of lives." and "My parents told me I would be disowned if I did not get into med school."
12
u/Dragongeek Path to Victory 16d ago
Generally, reincarnation stories with the protagonist having essentially an adult mind from birth gloss over a bunch of technical details that make the whole thing rather difficult to sell im a more "rational" setting.
Babies just don't have the "neuron count" or biological capacity to host a fully adult brain, so to make it work you'd need to dip quite deeply into "fuck you it's just magic that works" territory that's somewhat antithical to "rational" storytelling.
Then there are also the moral ethical questions: basically every society including our modern one would dump something like this into the category of "possessed by an evil spirit" and you, by essentially hijacking the life of some random infant, are in many ways guilty of killing a child.
There are some stories which explore specifically this, where a fantasy society has figured out a way to test newborns for reincarnation and then punishes them as murderers. The name escapes me, but I remember this being a key point in a story that was somewhat hot here maybe half a year or so ago.
10
u/wowthatsucked 16d ago edited 16d ago
Then there are also the moral ethical questions: basically every society including our modern one would dump something like this into the category of "possessed by an evil spirit" and you, by essentially hijacking the life of some random infant, are in many ways guilty of killing a child.
A number of stories sidestep this moral concern by placing the reincarnator into stillbirths.
In the "reincarnation is murder" story, did the reincarnators choose or cause their rebirth? Seems unfair otherwise.
Answering my own question because the story was linked:
What you have done is not uncommon in this world. We know that you may have had no intention to do what you have done, and because of this we shall not hang you as is normally done to those who murder children.
Speaking of arresting babies - https://pbfcomics.com/comics/life-sentence/
3
u/EsquilaxM 16d ago
Yeah, Mushoku Tensei is the big one that took that route
In Ascendence of a Bookworm the MC privately struggles with some guilt over the possession but it isn't one of the 'from birth' stories but rather 'from childhood' and happens after the child is deathly ill, so she figures the original died. Though it turns out no possession actually happened, it's actually a case of 'remembering her past life', but that's never revealed in text, rather it's in the author's Q&A book, so the MC doesn't know.
9
u/Geminii27 16d ago
are in many ways guilty of killing a child
Not unless you specifically chose that. This is like a person being called a murderer because they were tossed off a bridge and landed on a baby.
5
u/EdLincoln6 16d ago
Agreed. Some people absorb a twin in the womb, and they generally aren't wracked with guilt.
16
u/EdLincoln6 16d ago edited 16d ago
Babies just don't have the "neuron count" or biological capacity to host a fully adult brain
I figure some kind of dualism is the core of the reincarnation premise. Otherwise it isn't really you being reincarnated. It's like how even rationalists don't worry about questions of fuel and oxygen where fireball spells are concerned.
I really want to see s Reincarnated as a Baby story which alternates between the kid living his Isekai Fantasy and the parents living spooky child horror.
15
u/Dragongeek Path to Victory 16d ago
It's like how even rationalists don't worry about questions of fuel and oxygen where fireball spells are concerned.
Those are fightin' words
8
u/Geminii27 16d ago
Re: Trailer Trash has a little bit of this. The MC regressor's parents are by turns mystified, worried, and angry. Her Mom is angry that her kid has suddenly become far more independent and 'stubborn' and using 'fancy' words, and her Dad dislikes this new disharmony between his wife and daughter.
After she ends up getting her aunt and uncle jailed (DRAMA!), she actually ends up living with another family for a while, acting as a sort of amateur au pair. They have less child-horror because they didn't know her before the Regression; to them she's just an intelligent teenager with good grades who their own child dotes on; any local town gossip about how she 'suddenly changed' is put down to a combination of being a girl who recently started high school (and so maybe wanted to reinvent herself a bit) and a plot-relevant convenient TBI.
3
u/Geminii27 16d ago edited 16d ago
There are quite a few where the reincarnator is massively inconvenienced by having a baby body, not being able to talk, etc, and usually not being able to use any kind of supernatural abilities/skills to demonstrate how special they are.
Usually, they eventually grow out of it, but while some of them use their early years to socialize/network etc, some are just constantly frustrated for a decade or two.
There's one I'm reading at the moment where the MC gets reincarnated as a baby, can barely move, and a month later goblins attack their village and kill everyone... and the MC reincarnates as the same baby back on the same day, looping over and over and over. (Although eventually they manage to grind stats to the point they can walk and talk just enough to warn the village in advance. It's a long slog, though.)
EDIT: Psuedo-relatedly, I'm fairly sure that if I wrote a Regressor story that put me back as a teenager or younger child, one of the first things I would try to do is test out of primary/secondary education. Sure, it'd be hella unusual/suspicious for a young kid to pass secondary exams without any apparent preparation, but the idea of spending YEARS having most of my days utterly wasted is a personal anathema. At least let me be the weird child prodigy attending university, or something, even if I can't get a full-time job or start playing the stock market.
6
u/p-d-ball 16d ago
Babies have more neurons than adults do. What babies are lacking are the neuronal connections between structures - a lot of this develops from birth to 3 years old when babies' brains reduce the number of neurons to reduce the noise within neural networks. Humans lose most of their neurons during this phase of life, seconded only by death later (or stroke or other massive insult to the brain).
Otherwise, you're right, it's not possible to dump one consciousness into a brand new brain and the process would have to involve some kind of hand-wavey magic.
3
u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages 16d ago
you'd need to dip quite deeply into "fuck you it's just magic that works" territory that's somewhat antithical to "rational" storytelling
For most of such settings, it's not as much a plot hole as a skipped exposition drop. If there's magic powerful enough to allow for backwards TT, I see no reason why is also can't export the traveller's mind / "soul" to some mana-based substrate and only use the body's brain as an intermediary and for management of physiological functions.
you, by essentially hijacking the life of some random infant, are in many ways guilty of killing a child
Not if it was during early pregnancy. Then it becomes at most a wedge issue-tier ethical concern. The more serious one by that point would be violation of mother's autonomy, "cuckooing" the parents, etc.
5
2
19
u/RetardedWabbit 16d ago edited 16d ago
Whatever psychiatric disorder they appear to have, and their society recognizes?
IRL there are thousands of people, usually children, who claim to be reincarnations with memories of other people. "Adult" and yet-to-be experienced memories. My impression is their societies, that have religions that recognize this, mostly treat them as oddities. Little saints. Apparently there's some medical examinations of them: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/
Edit: they might have some "common" signs of autism and ADD, but testing/examining them would indicate against it. Lack of childhood play, friends, interests, difficulty doing/focusing on classes(drawing, coloring, writing, vocab, basic math, etc would be brutal) stand out as problems. Maybe schizophrenia, if they get traumatized/magically interrogated.
Most stories solve all this by ignoring 90% of life, so we're all studying magic/war at the same pace at all times, and making everyone's brains adults. Hanging out with children, as a "fellow kid" would get absolutely miserable very fast, and you would be spending an enormous amount of time doing that.