#anyways. i'm angry because i saw transmisogyny on my dash. hope that helps <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[a-flickering-soul]

girlie, why are you so angry....

Hey, thanks for sending in an ask! I really do think Rabbit is specifically a really interesting character to me personally specifically due to the way she subverts the revenge fantasy character. I really love revenge fantasy characters (specifically queer revenge narratives, which I'm sure if you were here circa winter/spring 2021 you would remember), and when I initially read Red Core (or what's published of it now, anyways), I was both delighted and confused because?? Rabbit has pretty much all the components of a queer revenge fantasy character but?? There is no revenge to speak of??

To elaborate, Rabbit is a very interesting character because her backstory is elaborate on the scale of "oh you're someone's special little OC and everything happens to you because your author loves you so so so so much and also you're a reflection of your author" (I say this lovingly because I do the same thing). Very briefly, she was forcibly closeted by her father/creator, physically hurt by him, and told to drop the subject of her gender and gender presentation or she'll be disassembled (if not in as many words). Despite this, she loves her father, and out of all of her siblings she is the only one known to actively still mourn him and honor his memory. More than a century later, old blueprints were found by the descendant of her creator confirming what Rabbit had been barred from saying all along--that she sure was a girl! And deserved to be seen as such! And--the rest of the details we don't know yet, only that she was able to transition and be respected and loved in truth.

I say Rabbit is a subverted revenge fantasy character purely because she has no desire for revenge, despite the abuse she underwent and the lack of...not so much closure, but apologies and acknowledgement that she was hurt, and she was made to be ashamed and silenced, and reassurance that none of it was her fault. Initially, (taking Red Core as a complete work) I was left a little nonplussed at the lack of rage and anger and hurt I saw on Rabbit's end. As a known revenge fantasy enjoyer, I really wanted to see her have that realization that she was allowed to be angry and hurt and that she did get hurt by someone she trusted implicitly. But the more I thought about it, and then about Rabbit as a whole, the songs she creates and the persona she puts on onstage, the more I realized she doesn't need a revenge arc and in fact she doesn't want one either!

One of my favorite pieces of character analysis when it comes to Rabbit is that she saw the century of enforced silence and closeting and misgendering and decided to let it go. She has no reason to want closure from another person when she found it herself. She took her flaws, the damage done to her system, her malfunctions, and built herself around those imperfections. Her stutter after Peter Walter I ripped her jaw off, her core power fluctuations after it was cracked and stolen, her own identity as a trans woman--all of these things are core parts of who she is now. They appear in her songs, her stage presence, in everything she does. And she is lighter for it. She chose to put down the weight of the past 118 years and chose herself instead. She chose to make the errors that deemed her faulty core parts of her personality. She chose to be silly, and weird, and dumb, and to make other people laugh. She subverts the queer revenge fantasy trope in choosing internal closure, rather than external, in a way that feels not only satisfying narratively, but character-wise as well.