Ben is not a Sociopath (part 2)

(Part 1)

Because I really don’t understand why people are still somehow equating

to SOCIOPATHIC KILLERS SUCH AS 

(Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc.)

…

Qualities of a Sociopath and why they supposedly apply to Ben Tennyson according to @emperorsfoot

I wasn’t aware that being attractive and having other people decide on their own that they are attracted to you (whether it be genuine or because of his status) makes you a sociopath. Ben never did anything to “charm” these girls into falling for him, aside from literally just being himself. 

(also when was Kai ‘smitten’ with him?? like did I miss something)

(I also have this essay where I go in depth about how this harem is not quite his fault…here)

For this example, they have referred to the Alien Force episode “Pet Project.”

And to explain why this is wrong, I’d like to give credit to @b10rewatch as they pointed out a very important thing about Ben’s refusal to want to bring Julie along to save Ship in this post.

“In this case, when Ben tells Julie to stay behind, he’s right to do so!

Don’t believe me?  Stop and think about it for a minute:  Up until now, Julie’s entire experience with battling aliens is running away from them at the Pier.  She goes on this rescue mission with no powers and no weapons.  She is literally there to be in danger and then talk Ship down.  Otherwise, she gets in the way and almost gets the main trio killed.  Ben knows what the Knights are like, and he knows they’ll use her to handicap his team.  He’s making a good call as a leader to keep not just a civilian safe but his teammates, too. Even in the car when he’s telling Julie that she has no idea what she’s dealing with, he’s still right!  Julie knows Ship as a pet and a friend, but Ben knows what Ship is really capable of.  Therefore he knows that whatever the Knights are doing to Ship likely isn’t going to go well for anyone, especially if they arrive too late to stop the Knights before they finish. Gwen and Kevin have the same amount of experience and know-how as Ben, fully understand the risks, know Julie is jumping into a situation where she’s likely to get everybody killed, and what do they do?  They give Ben these looks as if he’s the one who has to give. Why?  Any other person pulling that kind of bull, and they likely would’ve sided with Ben, assuming they weren’t the ones to say those things first. But apparently Julie is some sort of bizarre special case because…reasons.”

Julie is literally the one being unreasonable and manipulative in this case.

Ben: We’re not talking because?

Julie: Because I am upset with you, for being upset with me about Ship.

Ben: Julie, we aren’t talking about a poodle from the local pound. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.

Julie: Yes I do. I’m dealing with a person who is incredibly mean to poor little Ship, and who obviously does not trust me!

Ben: This isn’t about trust…

And to further prove how reliable he actually is…I recommend this post.

So basically it would have been smarter to let the Forever Knights cause whatever trouble they may because Julie’s tennis game is more important than DOING THE JOB EXPECTED OF YOU. 

Credit to @b10rewatch for their very insightful and reasonable observation in this post:

This episode actually had a very good message underneath it all: “He who tries to please everybody pleases nobody.”  Ben is trying to juggle being a public superhero, a boyfriend, and just plain old Ben.  He makes a seriously bad call in this, but his heart was in the right place.  The fact that he was trying to uphold his duties as a hero while still being able to spend time with Julie is admirable.  The fact that he wanted to go do something for himself is also understandable since, if him just showing up to a tennis match gets him mobbed, he probably doesn’t get to do that as much any more.  But, as I said before, he makes a really bad call in how he goes about achieving these goals.  At least he seems to learn from it since he never tries to pull that stunt again though he probably would’ve been a literal one man army if he ever mastered that trick.

While I applaud Kevin for focusing on the real problem–the Forever Knights–I wanted to scream at Gwen the entire episode. She even admits in her argument with Kevin that the Knights are constantly trying to take over the world. She admits this. She knows they’re bad guys, has seen what they’re capable of since she was ten, and she thinks a tennis match is the priority?!  Are you serious?!

On top of that, she jumps down Ben’s throat about his priorities from the very start of the episode.  She calls him in the middle of a fight with the Knights and tells him to basically get his butt to the match right now instead of finishing off the Knights.  He is doing exactly what he should be doing, but he’s somehow in trouble for it.  Then when all he does is walk in and he gets mobbed, he’s in trouble for that, too, even though he wasn’t trying to get attention.  You wanted him to show up at the match, Gwen.  You likely know he gets mobbed on a regular basis.  You are sending so many mixed signals it’s ridiculous.

I’m sorry, but Gwen made, on some levels, even worse calls than Ben did this episode.  Ben’s trying to please everybody went horribly wrong, but given how every answer was apparently the wrong one, I have to give some of the blame to Gwen for pushing him to even attempt the cloning thing.

And how many times did Ben tell Kevin to stop? Do you really think that would have been enough to stop him on it’s own? 

Once again, @b10rewatch, from this post.

“There’s no ‘we’. Not this time. I’m the one who put Kevin in the position where he had to absorb that energy; it’s my fault that he lost control.  And everything he’s done since, all those people he’s hurt, all those people he’s going to hurt, that’s my fault, too.” – Ben

In the previous episode, Ben accused Gwen of thinking that Kevin going mad was his fault, and she’d agreed with that.  Here we have Ben taking on that blame completely, telling her that if she wants to put it all on him, fine, he accepts it.  She may hate him forever for it, but he’s still going to do their job.

This is what Ben means when he says he takes the blame for “all those people (Kevin’s) going to hurt” since allegedly “ULTIMATE KEVIN WAS NEVER A THREAT TO THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.”

And when Kevin regains his sanity and he and Ben talk, I like how there’s no hard feelings between them:  Kevin understands what Ben was doing and why, even tells Ben that if the positions were reversed, he’d do the same thing…though he does call Ben a wuss for not finishing him off. 

Yeah. Kevin literally said he would have also killed Ben if the roles were reversed. In fact, here’s the direct quote:

Kevin: If I were you, I wouldn’t have been such a wuss. If you ever lost it like I did, I would have taken you down right away.

Which he had already tried doing many times in the past, but who cares about that, right? 

I wonder how Gwen would react to Kevin wanting to kill her cousin AGAIN. 

Would she call him a sociopath?

And as for the “lack of remorse/shame” and “not caring” about Kevin…

He very clearly looks concerned. 

Honestly, is there anybody in the world who makes a mistake once, learns their lesson, and then never makes the same mistake again?

If there is, I’d really like to know because I keep on hearing the same argument over and over again. It’s not valid. 

And just as a side-note, in the end of “Absolute Power part 2″, Ben did something that you all like to constantly accuse him of never doing (aka never learning his lesson). 

Max: 

You don’t know the half of it. We expected heatblast and the others to get their powers back.

Julie: 

But even the energy Aggregor stole went back where it belongs.

Ra’ad: 

And returned us from oblivion. Thank you, Ben Tennyson.

Ben: 

Wasn’t me this time. It was all of us.

The reason why I didn’t add some of those qualities to my initial list to debunk this idea is because I didn’t believe they applied to him. But clearly I’ve been proven wrong – people can very easily twist things so far that it can be completely misunderstood.

So, no, Ben is not a sociopath. 

Because if he was then the Universe really would be in trouble.