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Coach

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"I love your work, you're doing great stuff, really, but I've just got a few tips for you that I think could really help you achieve your potential." Very encouraging words from a teacher, or mentor, or parent, or maybe even a colleague. Less so from a random person on the street -- or the Internet.

I'm not just talking about unsolicited advice ("You need to read The Secret!") or weird criticism ("You use the word 'the' too much!"), which is bad enough already, but all of that plus putting on a weird artificial character I picture as Coach (from Coach).

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You younger kids might recognize him better as the voice of Mr. Incredible, or I think he is on Parenthood now or something.

The difference between a normal person going around giving unwanted advice to people and a Coach type is whether you can easily add "champ" to their statements without it seeming out of place. "I've read a lot of your writing, champ, and I'm really encouraged by how you've been improving. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, sport, but there's a few problems you really need to tackle to become that awesome writer we both know you can be. I know you can do it, so keep at it, tiger!"

5

A Real Character

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There are genuine "what a character" personalities in every community, online and off; people who naturally think differently or have a charmingly distinctive way of expressing themselves. And then there's people who pretend to be those people.

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Spartacus

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Nobody likes being singled out for some stupid thing they did, and this person's coping mechanism is to create a fantasy where it's not just them. They imagine a whole group of oppressed compatriots they are bravely standing up for.

Say a guy complains about how George Orwell's Animal Farm should no longer be part of high school curriculums because it was about the Vietnam War, and is no longer relevant. (Unlike the other all-animal treatment of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Meow.)

I make this photoshop and then I find out it's actually a thing. Well.

When he is inevitably informed of how stupid he is, he might figure it out and laugh it off, he might cry and run away or, if he is a Spartacus type, he will create a cause around it. This isn't some people laughing at him for his individual mistakes, this is oppression against newbies, or outsiders, or Orwell haters.

This way he's not a sad little dude who is all hurt and vulnerable, he is a brave voice speaking up for the imaginary throng of new people who, like him, came to this online community looking to express their opinions on how the best scene in Star Wars is when Han Solo has to outrun a boulder. For all the misunderstood people out there quivering in fear, who dared to say Brave New World was better than 1984. Or that Prince's "1999" was better than Apple's 1984 commercial.

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You decide!

It's an easy way to try to convince themselves (and hopefully others) that this is about something bigger than themselves -- a fight for justice -- and not about themselves and getting their feelings hurt. Even though it is.

3

Philosopher

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Another thing people love to be seen as is a philosopher. I don't know why. Philosophers are awful. At least the kind they're trying to play.

This is a character who supposedly looks at his cup of coffee in the morning and it causes him to think about how we all got here, or Plato's Allegory of the Cave, or something. Every fucking thing in life allegedly triggers some deep exploration of one of the issues that is covered in a freshman philosophy class.

Waiting for the train? Determinism. Cat peed on your bed? The problem of evil. Someone drank all the milk and put the carton back in the fridge? Consequentialism. Maybe euthanasia.

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And this makes me think about censorship.

The Philosopher constantly starts discussions of far-fetched hypothetical ethical situations (if you had to pull a switch and a train would run over either an old woman with cancer or a young girl with cystic fibrosis) and retarded, abstract pie-in-the-sky discussions (which quantum mechanics particles God would be made out of if God existed and was female).

Some people are genuinely interested in these stupid questions, which is fine. I think it's a waste of time, but me playing computer games is a waste of time, too, so who's to judge? The Philosopher character, though, doesn't really care that much about these questions. He or she cares about looking like a person who cares about these questions.

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Insider

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Another selection in the "let's pretend" cast of characters is the Insider -- the person who has "connections" in the "biz." One of the most common bizzes they pretend to be in on is the movie industry, although politics is a popular one, too.

Usually Insiders do not really have the balls to straight out lie and say they work in Hollywood, because that leads to specifics -- "What studio do you work at?" or "If you've really blown Tom Cruise, what is the birthmark on his left testicle shaped like?" -- and they know they're going to get tripped up sooner or later.

Instead, they just adopt the language of a Hollywood insider, including many of the stupid slang terms used in industry rag Variety, like "prexy" for "president" or "sesh" for "session," because busy Hollywood types don't have time for wasteful syllables.

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I couldn't even tell if this was positive or negative at first.

Or maybe they adopt the habits of another well-known insider source like Ain't It Cool News and the way they capitalize movie titles. Or both. Then they just write like they're slightly drunk and breathless, as if they just came back from a post-premiere cocktail party and they're good as gold.

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Master Manipulator

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One of the worst things about the popularity of NLP, the pickup artist community and hypnotist shows is that they have stupid, socially inept people convinced that they are puppet masters.

These are people who are terrible at getting people to do things the normal way -- by maintaining a good relationship with them and having enough emotional awareness to know when it's appropriate to ask for things -- so they get excited at the thought that they can get people to do things by sitting in a certain posture or tracking eye movements or whatever.

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"You are now my slave!"

On the Internet, people also try to pass themselves off as "manipulators." Some people do it deliberately after having messed up and taken a lot of flak, finding a safe cover story in "It was all a social experiment! Got you all!"

"Haha, I was testing you!" they might say. "I wanted to see how you might react to someone saying Jews weren't people! You all passed, brilliantly! I couldn't be more pleased with how my experiment turned out!"

But some people actually believe their own story about how they are good at manipulating others, which involves a lot of seeing what other people do and then inventing a reason why that's what you wanted them to do the whole time. It's a lot easier to fool yourself on the Internet, where usually the worst that can happen (if you're careful about your privacy) is some negative words, which you can convince yourself you were totally "trolling" for. It's harder to convince yourself you really wanted certain kinds of real-life consequences, like a kick in the balls.

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"Haha! You ... played right ... into my hands. Oh God. Call a doctor."

I can understand why a person who doesn't have a lot of control in their daily life would be sorely tempted by the chance to pretend they are a wizard or puppet master among strangers. Unfortunately, you have a better chance of opening an old book and getting sucked into a fantasy world where you can find a luckdragon you can bring back with you to scare off the kids who were bullying you than of being able to actually manipulate the bullies, or anyone else, using psychology. (Exception: parents. Parents can manipulate their own children pretty damn well.)

So that's my advice to everyone who wants so hard to be someone they're not: Get off the Internet and start flipping through every antique book you can find. Hurry! Before someone else finds it!

For more from Christina, check out 6 Double Standards We're All Guilty Of and 5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People Are Magic.