#be raped/ assaulted narrative

[opheliasam]

I think kripke should be in extensive therapy and i personally don’t want jared on that set i just hope things work out for the best however.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

i think it’s very important that curly's an extremely flawed person who has misogynistic biases, but also, like, not an inherently terrible or ill meaning one. curly is the average man in a patriarchal system, basically- he benefits from the system and sees it as normal and as such perpetuates it. he genuinely wants to help anya and wasn’t trying to throw her to the wolves but his deeply ingrained ideas that his friend couldn’t do something so horrible (bc rape has to be this monstrous evil thing that’s only done by monsters who hurt everyone in their path, right?) and that anya must be in some way over-emotional and in need of calming down more than legit protection lead to him basically doing that. he isn’t trying to cause harm, but he's a reflection of the harmful system he comes from. even genuinely well meaning men participate in the patriarchy, and conversely, the patriarchy self-cannibalises to stay alive. it as a system ultimately did not save curly from abuse because it’s not designed to. the system needs abusive men, as much as it needs passive enforcers, and it doesn’t particularly care who those men brutalise if it keeps women down.

[h0n3yk1tt3n]

"Dywh served no narrative purpose outside of breaking up puppylove and upstage because it's never brought up again in any meaningful way and really should've been replaced and/or written differently" and "male victims of s/a from female perpetrators need their stories to be told and taken seriously instead of being relegated to a scene set up seemingly for shock value (see sexy baby costume and no effort to address the trauma of this scene later as bmc was never going to Be A Story About That)" and "Chloe is a tragic and complex character that pins most if not all of her self-worth on being desirable as a conventionally attractive teenage girl and it makes her act out in cruel ways (bringing down the other girls around her and trying to sleep with her best friend's boyfriend on her ex's parents' bed to rile up said ex)" and "while Chloe should've backed off sooner and the alcohol is no excuse for her actions, her drunken mind had very little way of knowing that Jeremy wasn't interested as the squip FORCED him to participate in something he didn't want and is MORE at fault for deliberately ignoring his pleas to 'make it stop' than Chloe getting mixed messages and not understanding what Jeremy wanted when the squip MADE him stay, drink, and kiss her" are all sentences that can and should coexist.

Including the tags in the actual post because I'm not gonna have anyone try to twist my words against me

[theghostiedyke]

Hmm... thoughts about a piece of media that is so flawed but had so much potential.

cw for references to rape

Sighs dramatically looking out the window.

19 year old Derek Hale still reeling from a barely addressed trauma on trauma on trauma. His uncle manipulating him to use a werewolf's fangs [body] as a tool. For acceptance. Paige dying as a result. His own body being used by Kate Argent. He is a means to an end and tool to get information. He is meat. A body to be used and discarded.

Returning to beacon hills and being treated as meat again and again. By teens. By adults. By himself. By the audience. He is a scapegoat. A beast. Untethered. Eyecandy.

He is forced to kill his only remaining family member [that he knows of]. This is. Ironically his choice but the other options are what. A teen committing murder? The same Hunter family taking more of his family? Its his choice and not his choice all at once.

He inherents a power he was never meant to. Never trained to. He still doesn't address any of the barely repressed trauma. He seeks out traumatized teens. Does he see himself in them? Are they a means to an end like he was? Is? They're given a choice, the bite is a gift. But what is informed consent? When power is seductive to the powerless. To the ones who have had power taken from them again and again. Is it wrong to want back some power? To hurt back when they hurt you first?

His impulsive decisions coming back to bite (claw. drown. paralyze.) him in the ass. Powerlessness magnifying. Lashing out at everything that can be perceived as a threat. Survival mode. What's another death worth really. There is no time to be safe. Feel safe. Safety is a fairy tale. Not something afforded to those like him.

His body is used as a weapon. His first beta's body is literally a weapon to be wielded. If the bite shows whats on the inside is it a two way mirror back to the Bite's source? Having the control of who gets bitten torn from him by circumstance of necessity and circumstance of betrayal. How can someone who was forcibly bit understand that repeating the cycle in reverse isn't better. But it is means to an end. A weapon to propped up and used when necessary.

He is a body. A weapon. A means to an end. A novel concept to added to a collection of rarities. Even those he surrounded himself with chose to abandon him. He pushes away the last ones who had the potential to care. Whats the point? He is a body. A weapon. A danger to himself and others. Not worthy of being saved. He is used again and again for his power. His status. His body. His potential as a weapon. His power can finally be used to save. He takes it. He is not worth saving but. His younger sister is. She isn't the reason their whole family is dead. (He is.) He is so tired. The power he was never meant to inherent weighing heavily. It's a relief to give it up. Its the first bit of relief in years. The first step to healing maybe. A lifting of responsibilities he barely handled.

[fayevalcntine]

Any time I think about how some fans insist on Claudia's rape being important and how other fans just go against it because Bruce is used as a comparison to Lestat (in a scene that blatantly hints at Louis also being sexually assaulted by him) I get so angry.

None of these discussions take into consideration how the placement of Claudia's rape also makes it seem as if the assault itself "fixes" her. Bruce found her because she was careless with her kills and didn't hide the bodies well. She objects to his advances just as he hands her a book on how ladies should "behave" properly, and in return gets her leg twisted before being raped. After that scene, it's so clearly visible how she tries to hide more. She stores a victim's body in the wall of a university library where she reads, as opposed to previously having left them on the desks where they would be found. Even her wardrobe is completely changed by the time she comes back into Louis' life: she wears a longer coat and hat which are presumably from a male victim. The final scene is the only time we ever see her with overalls that aren't in a more feminine color, not to mention the oversized coat again.

Even her first lines towards Lestat? "I wasn't right in my head. I am now." Again, coming directly after being raped which likely jump-started her codependency towards Louis at this point, because she tried to roam about on her own and ended up getting hurt in the process. One could technically say that it's a brutally honest portrayal of how Black girls will always be punished for displaying any kind of behavior that isn't approved of, except for one blatant difference: the fact that her emotional instability/outbursts seem to be completely gone by the time she comes back to Rue Royale. The next episode is where we see Claudia in almost complete polarity as to how she behaved before Bruce: she's only ever loving, nurturing, and seemingly wiser even beyond her human years. She has apparently fully put her issues with Louis behind her and doesn't even judge him for bringing their abuser back into the house.

The way that the previous episode is structured, with the utter lack of information on what Claudia was reading or researching before her assault, how she may have viewed her parents as some time went on, makes it appear as though her being raped is what "fixes" her emotional instability that we saw when she left Rue Royale. Even if you have seemingly no issue with the insertion of her being raped, that doesn't make the narrative timeline any better in its apparent message that all Claudia "needed" in order to mature from her rightful hatred towards both of her parents is being assaulted and made aware of how she, as a teenage vampire, can never go around the world on her own. It's also even more offensive in how the only time we ever see it being discussed again in length, is in a scene where Lestat belittles her being raped. It further makes the assault itself look like a neat little plot-point that was put in last minute without considering how Claudia would be affected by it in the long run. I don't need Claudia to talk extensively about her experience, but the way the writers and narrative in turn handles it isn't any better for me.

[cruelsister-moved2]

been cosigned by the bi women in my life to say this but i think the whole ‘bi women are 100000x more likely to be victims of partner abuse’ thing gets...almost victim blamey if u think abt it too hard. do we believe that there are men who are totally fine to date as a straight woman but if you’re bi they become Abusers or are we just avoiding thinking too hard about the reality of dating a guy who would hypothetically be beating u if u were bi. are we saying the abuse happens because they’re bi? anyway the elephant in the room is that we’re talking about self-reported statistics here and bi women are more likely to be feminists and informed about consent and coercion and so on in order to RECOGNISE abuse. meanwhile a majority of straight women don’t even believe in marital rape and we know a lot about the lengths people can go to avoid labelling what they experienced/are experiencing as abuse. + DUH sexuality is self reported too so of course going through abuse at the hands of men can be a factor in a woman unpacking compulsory heterosexuality and realising she isn’t straight.

i think it’s important because in one narrative, victim-blaming myths about IPV are subtly reinforced in the name of advocating for bi women while the other recognises that abuse can happen to anyone but bi women are informed and autonomous and not just helpless victims with no choice but to play dating life russian roulette 

[echidnana]

some more thoughts about mouthwashing and how amazing it is. the fact that the protagonist/player characters are jimmy and curly serves to highlight the central message so well. the way anya is pushed to the side, barely treated as a relevant side character despite the fact that her presence is arguably one of the most important elements to the situation. and the way anya's pregnancy is obviously a huge thing to her, probably on her mind 24/7, while jimmy is never shown directly interacting with the fact that she's pregnant in any way. he never acknowledges her pregnancy, always cuts her off before she happens to bring it up. jimmy and anya both knew she was pregnant the whole time after the crash, but because you are playing as jimmy, the fact that she is pregnant is literally never brought up. she mentions being nauseous, not drinking alcohol, and jimmy brushes this all aside in favor of ignoring her. and playing as curly, going around the ship, his role as captain and the man responsible for everything that happens, as well as being jimmy's friend. and when he does find out very clearly about what jimmy has done, about what curly ALLOWED to happen, his first reaction is to go to jimmy and talk. and tell him everything would be ok. that they would figure it out. by playing as jimmy and curly you see exactly how anya's abuse is allowed and her personhood is ignored. aside from anya saying the words "I'm pregnant" to curly, nothing that happened to her is ever directly said. she never even says jimmy is the one who got her pregnant, curly fills in the blanks himself. because the story is told through the eyes of curly and jimmy, and you start out being empathetic towards them just by nature of them being the player characters, so you are able to see firsthand the exact environment these men have created that allowed anya's abuse to occur and be ignored.

[arabian-batboy]

This is why Zionists spent months spreading lies and propaganda about rabid Palestinian men going on a raping spree against any innocent Jewish woman they could see on October 7th, to perpetuate this narrative that sexual violence committed by Palestinians against Israelis is a serious wide-spread issue because Palestinian men (or just brown men in general) are savage animals who breath and live solely for raping women, when in reality its the other way around.

By doing so, they embedded this caricature about Palestinian/Arab men into people's mind that makes them view them inherently as rapists, but never in a million year as a rape victim and that if they don't quickly rush to "condemn" these fake evidence-less rape allegations (not a single of each have been proven to happen by any reliable sources) then they're terrible people and rape-supporting anti-semites. Needless to say, those same people are definitely NOT in any rush to condemn these actually proven and verified rape cases by Israeli settlers.

All of which makes it easier for Zionists to continue their decades long history of sexual violence against Palestinians by having these concentration camps where Palestinian men and boys, just like Palestinian women and girls, regularly go through horrendous forms of torture and sexual abuse that don't receive a fraction of the attention, disclosure, sympathy and condemnation as all of those fake and already-debunked cases of Israeli women being brutally raped by Palestinian men, because everyone has decided that rape is something that's always committed by (brown) men and its victims are always (white) women.

This isn't anything new or exclusive to only Palestinian men, on top of the Israeli concentration camps, many innocent Muslim and Middle Eastern men over the years who have been subjugated through demeaning torture and sexual assault in other concentration camps such as Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo with no consequences for the perpetuators. Not even when we have real documented footage of those sexual crimes, that are literally posted online by the American or Israeli rapist-soldiers (often female soldiers) where they're shown smiling and laughing with their faces clearly seen as they torture the prisoners, because they know that as long as the victim is a Palestinian/Arab/Muslim man, there will be no consequences for them or any justice for their victims.

And people will just go on believing the notion that all Middle Eastern men are sexually-deprived raping machines who can't control themselves when they see a woman showing her ankle, when in reality foreigners occupiers and soldiers target them as much as they do to Middle Eastern women and subjugate them to the same level of sexual crimes, yet those foreigner occupiers and soldiers are never the ones who get associated with the words "rapist" or "terrorist" despite their long documented history of rape and other sexual crimes.

Find a protest near you here: X, X, X, X & X

Donate or join Palestine action here: PALESTINE ACTION

[iamthescalesofjustice]

controversial perhaps but i would literally rather people emulate that person whose dedication to their annoying typing quirk extended to also posting all of their fic with the typing quirk included than clumsily censor words midfic in a way that derails the story

[moidsmalding]

Rapists are often spoken of in such a distanced way. Especially by males. They will act like these men are uncanny and otherworldly, as if only a small minority of them are the ones committing all these crimes. As if some spooky boogeyman is lurking in some dark alley assaulting and killing thousands of women at once.

Most men won't even call their actions rape. A man can wheedle and coax a reluctant woman into having sex with him and won't think anything wrong with it, a man would climb onto his sleeping wife and go "but we're married!", a man will purposely shower a woman with gifts and then say "now you owe me".

Rape is opportunistic. Even a man who has no track record or ever entertained the thought will jump on the chance once he thinks he can get away with it. There's no physical trait associated with it. A man could be courteous and kind and make you feel safe and then turn around and assault you. There is no way to predict which man is a rapist.

And it's because there's no way to tell, that they maintain this narrative of rapists being beastlike and abnormal. It's just another way of refusing to take accountability.

[hughmunculus]

I think what a lot of people miss about Mouthwashing is that it is still, ultimately, a character study of Jimmy. A person that has been made so corrupt and destructive not simply due to his own individual actions but how those actions are fueled masculinity and the desperation bred by capitalism.

Jimmy is unable to see himself as anything but the hero of his story, and every moment in his life the temporary setback to his own self-fulfillment. Both capitalism and patriarchy make men see themselves as temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, patriarchs, romantic leads or success stories. Its why he can't reflect on his actions, and when he inevitably confronts the fact that he cannot "fix it", that there is no "good ending" he kills himself. His worldview is just fundamentally incompatible with reality.

However, this self-deception doesn't make him happy, it doesn't mean he isn't charging forward with no doubts or fears. He is miserable and pitiable. Every time he tries to trick himself into thinking he's in the right he dives headfirst into a nightmare sequence where his conscience is desperately trying to tell him he's in a hell of his own making. But every time he is confronted he chooses to go deeper and deeper into delusion to avoid the reality that he causes harm.

Not to say this patriarchal hell doesn't trap the other male characters too; Swansea is only happy in the oblivion of alcohol because the nuclear family was the only "right" way to live presented to him, and Curly utterly fails to recognize Jimmy's assault of Anya for what it is because the invasive nature of workplace abuse and rape culture exists to him as a systemic concept; but he could never fathom it happening anywhere close to him and especially not a friend.

Jimmy's actions make him both a figure of disgust and sympathy in the narrative and I think that's part of the point: desperation, fear, delusion and self-aggrandizement: that can happen to anyone. And we all currently live in a societal pressure cooker designed to bring out those worst parts of us.

We have to do the difficult task that the narrative asked us to do as we played it, and one Jimmy was fundamentally incapable of doing until the very end: empathize, reflect, choose justice and create a more compassionate world.

[lemonhemlock]

the reason why i don't think blood & cheese works without maelor is because it undermines the gravity of helaena's choice

in the books, as we all know, she has to choose which son to sacrifice. blood & cheese are going to kill one either way, so, whatever happens, if you want to get cynical about it, aegon will still be left with a male heir of his body. no, the horribleness of the choice lies not really in dynastic matters, but in basic humanity: which of your children are you willing to condemn to death? and helaena truly does try to make the best out of a bad situation, she picks not because she loves jaehaerys more, but because maelor is so tiny that she hopes he won't understand what's going to happen to him.

and she absolutely has to choose, because b&c threaten to rape her daughter if she doesn't. it's psychological torture. b&c just want to fuck her up in the head as much as possible and helaena tries her goddamnest to minimize the harm done to her family. to further compound on the tragedy, b&c kill the opposite child, so now she has to live out the rest of her days knowing that the son left alive is the son SHE herself marked for the axe. which is what understandably drives her to lose her mind

now, in the show, the "problem" blood & cheese have doesn't exist at all: that they can't supposedly tell the twins apart. but (as awful as it sounds, since it involves sexual assault) they could very easily check which child has male genitalia and be done with it. it's a "problem" that takes literal seconds to solve. they don't need helaena at all! it becomes irrelevant which child she points towards - b&c can always just check! she can't save jaehaerys in this situation no matter what she does, because b&c were never interested in jaehaera in the first place. in the books, she has the ability to save one child and this exact horrible "agency" bestowed on her torments her for the rest of her days. in the show, even had she pointed towards jaehaera, it would have been a narrative plot hole for the writers to have killed her without checking

likewise, in the books, she begs them to kill her instead, but, in the show, she offers them a necklace? you can't deny that the dramatic stakes are lowered substantially by making that change. which one of these options would have been more filled with pathos? personally, it just feels like this was phia's moment to shine and, while she did a good job with what she had, every narrative choice was somehow made to subdue this horrible event and left her only crumbs to work with. cinematically-speaking, this scene (as it was executed) does not even come close to the iconic moments that cemented GoT into the collective consciousness, which is very strange, as the subject matter is anything but mediocre

and that's not even getting into the rest of the plot holes that others have already pointed out, like:

- why are there no guards at helaena's door or anywhere else for that matter? not just on that hallway, but on many other hallways, she has to run quite a lot to get to alicent's chambers

- why is her room unlocked at the very least

- why is ALICENT's room unlocked, for that matter? she is having secret guilty sex with criston and she forgets to lock her door in a castle full of spies? anyone could have walked in

- not even getting into this whole thing just being one huge misunderstanding + minimizing daemon's and mysaria's roles :))

- NOT EVEN mentioning removing the trauma of alicent witnessing all of this, gagged and bound on her own bed, not being able to help or intervene in any way

i can understand the likelihood of these elements happening sometimes (maybe someone does forget to lock their door from time to time, maybe a guard does shirk their duties from time to time), but you can't write all of them at once without it turning all looney tunes. if you introduce too many aspects that defy logic in your story, it ceases to be believable and just becomes bad writing

___________________________________________

also, "they killed <the boy>"? not "my son" or "jaehaerys"? it sounds so removed, don't you think? helaena out there on her mother's floor dropping exposition for the audience 🥲

[allforthegayphase]

TW: rape

Something I really appreciated about The Sunshine Court was its nauseatingly realistic depiction of rape culture.

Jean’s (repeated, violent) sexual assault isn’t treated as something horrific; in the toxic environment of The Nest, it’s normalized. The real story — Riko ordering 5 male players to rape Jean as a sadistic way to ‘break him in’ — is quickly twisted by his abusers; Jean is seen as a calculating vixen who slept his way to the top, for a Perfect Court number:

They continuously mock and taunt Jean with senseless jokes about it. There is an element of jealousy at play; Jean is a prodigy player, and, as he says himself at some point in the book, his older teammates didn’t enjoy being shown up by a child. They certainly enjoyed knocking him down a peg, though, by humiliating him and creating an illusion that he only got his spot on the team for sleeping around, not his talent:

Even one of his rapists, Grayson, continues this false narrative despite knowing the truth (or maybe he even convinced himself this narrative is the truth; that Jean ‘seduced’ him for a spot on the starting lineup):

Other ravens who don’t know the truth seem to quickly believe the narrative that a 16 yo chose to sleep with a bunch of his superiors for a personal gain; that is certainly easier than entertaining the thought that your teammates (friends?) are capable of something this horrific. Or maybe they simply don’t question it too hard; after all, Jean can’t tell his side of the story.

The rumors eventually spread outside the Nest. Jean’s reputation is tarnished to the point that this is one of the first things strangers on the internet learn about him:

The most heartbreaking detail about it all is Jean’s age. He was a 16 boy on the college team, the youngest player on the lineup; a foreigner who couldn’t even speak English when he arrived; an outsider. Despite the fact that his young age is something that even the ravens find particularly scandalous about the whole situation, Jean’s agency is never questioned. He’s not seen as a minor who was taken advantage of by older, superior men — and most of them are quite significantly older, having already graduated by the time Jean’s 19; Grayson seems to be the youngest of them and he’s at least three years older than Jean.

As many victims of SA, Jean had no choice but to continue living with his abusers side by side, pretending like nothing happened. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing he can do.

The first time someone voices concern over the questionable circumstances surrounding the whole situation happens in this conversation with Jeremy (to be fair, it seems like Jean's age isn't public knowledge but the ravens obviously know):

And as many victims, Jean internalized his experience as something he deserved on some level:

TLDR: Sexual assault is, unfortunately, a very big part of our culture; it’s not just something that happens in the dark alleys; rapists aren't just scary strangers. They're also your friends, peers, teammates. The way the Nest (and the general public as a whole) turns a blind eye at best and mocks and humiliates the victim at worst is a microcosm of how SA is largely treated in real life. It was genuinely fascinating to see it depicted so realistically, even though it made for a heavy read at several points. I hope Nora keeps up the good work, and we'll see further exploration of the topic and Jean dealing with his trauma in the next book.

[problematic-yuri-poll]

Problematic Yuri Tournament Season 2 - Round 3

Murciélago vs. Malcatras' Maiden

Murciélago (manga by Yoshimurakana)

action, comedy

Sexual Content: HIGH; Gore: HIGH; Violence: HIGH

Submitted 2 times.

Submitted problematic elements:

Main character is a serial killer lesbian. theres incest, rape, body horror, emotional manipulation, among others

Protagonist is a serial killer, sexual predator, and a pedophile. She's basically the worst woman of all time. She also manipulates several women into sleeping with her.

Submitted content warnings:

oh yeah i mean tw for violence, incest, rape, bullying, children in peril and others

Extreme violence and gore, explicit sex, sexual assault, pedophilia, child murder, cannibalism, and just a general mess of nasty stuff

Submitted propaganda:

Its got an actually evil lesbian MC who has a lot of depth. Its funny as fuck and its got really interesting narrative, amazing action and compelling characters. Its also very sexy and beautifully drawn

Kuroko Koumori is the best character in yuri history and absolutely nobody does it like her.

Malcatras' Maiden (visual novel by Nadia Nova)

thriller, action, erotica

Sexual Content: HIGH; Gore: MODERATE; Violence: HIGH // Note: contents in question are mainly described in text.

Mod submission.

Mod-submitted problematic elements:

A doggirl maid is in love with her master and adoptive mother, and overall navigates complicated and toxic relationships with her family.

Official content warnings:

Malcatras' Maiden is a game for adult audiences only. This work contains intense themes of toxic relationships, manipulation, child abuse, regular abuse, dubiously consensual sexual acts, incestuous themes and explicit bloody acts of heavy violence, including death and murder.

Mod-submitted propaganda:

Battle maid visual novel with cool powers... We love messy relationships and toxic incest yuri and messed up broken maid girls... we love Liliana.... trans puppygirl maid who just wants a place to belong..

[severussnapemylove]

Sometimes I wonder if JKR even realises she wrote Snape as a victim of sexual assault. Because he unambiguously is, and she writes him as traumatised by the incident. So it seems mad to suggest that she might not have thought through the implications of her own writing, but if she did get it, I am baffled by how sympathetic she remains to James. Harry is never really made to confront how vile his actions were, because he looks for comfort from Remus and Sirius rather than telling Hermione who would react in horror and disgust, and he gets to skip over it completely in The Prince’s Tale. JKR clearly considers James a hero, and has confirmed that in interviews. She’s even more sympathetic to Lily, who is portrayed as an absolute paragon of goodness, morality and virtue, despite her being attracted enough to James *after* he publicly commits sexual assault on a less privileged kid to marry him! What a malfunctioning moral compass. JKR also has no sympathy at all for Tom Riddle Sr, who is a victim of rape, and his rapist Merope Gaunt, who is herself strongly implied to be a victim of incestual abuse, is condemned by Dumbledore and the narrative not for what she did to Tom but for not being as courageous as nice, pretty, middle class Lily Evans because Merope committed the crime of…dying in childbirth. The only conclusions I can draw from this is that JKR is the sort of ´feminist’ who doesn’t believe men can be the victims of sexual crimes, and that deep down she thinks being a member of the underclass who can’t drag themselves out of it alone is indicative of moral failure.

This! All of this!

I don't think she puts it together at all. She's incredibly tone deaf about a lot of the abuse she puts these characters through. And with the blasé attitude she has about male victims of SA in the books definitely goes along her brand of toxic radical "feminism". It looks like she just doesn't recognise the severity of what happens to these characters. On top of Severus's attack and Tom Riddle Sr, remember that Ron was roofied with love spell that was intended for Harry, and Moaning Myrtle is incredible predatory towards the boys. Sadly, this attitude carries over from the author to a chunk of the fandom too. I've seen so much dismissiveness of the assaults against the male characters, especially Severus. And it's even more disappointing when I see people who have experienced abuse saying that what Severus endured "didn't count" as abuse. Had someone today on another platform having an absolute meltdown at me, saying that what happened in SWM wasn't sa, and that he wasn't traumatised from his abuse and if his anger was caused by trauma then why wasn't Harry the same. Seriously, you can't tell another person that what they experienced wasn't "bad enough to be abuse", that's a very warped mentality. Survivors are supposed to support each other, not belittle each other's trauma. Also, what book did they read that they think Harry doesn't have issues from the life he endured? He has different issues than Severus, yes, because he had different life experiences and everyone's reactions to trauma are different.

"Merope Riddle chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother's courage."

WTF is this!!!??? This is just plain victim blaming. "Your mothers' courage"? Lily had supportive, loving parents, was loved by her peers, admired by her teachers, had a very comfortable, secure life. Merope was physically and mentally abused for her whole life. They really criticized the poverty stricken, abuse victim for not being as "strong" as the Mary Sue of the Wizarding World??? Toxic as hell. Personally, as someone who has dealt with self-harm, mental illness and generational trauma in my family, this attitude of "they weren't strong enough" is nauseating and infuriating.

There really is a disturbing trend of extreme poverty equalling a dead-end life with no hope. Which is again an extremally toxic and judgmental attitude and a very dangerous message to put in a book aimed to children. The attitude towards abuse, poverty and indecent assault of men is beyond problematic, not only in the books but in far too many members of the fandom.

I could rant more but this will go on for pages.