#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

[unalloyedmiquella]

people will watch a horror movie and be like “this made me uncomfortable therefore it should be banned and destroyed” like ….. horror movies are supposed to be shocking sorry guys idk what to tell you.

[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.

[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.

[zarathelonewolf]

Sorry for putting the written out loud part after the tags, but in the written out loud part I am merely gonna suggest a few plots one might use as reference that target loss of autonomy/vulnerability/violation which AREN'T SA/miscarriage/forced pregnancy/forced motherhood:

-Forced family. It could be that someone is kidnapped and forced to be a part of a family that does not let them leave; or maybe, they have always lived in this family, but they discovered a secret about the family and they want to leave but they don't know how. A theme that could be faced includes trauma of adoption, since for most people in the system it wasn't an event that went smoothly. It could also be a way to speak about the consequences of kidnapping and isolation. It is ultimately also a way of tackling abuse: you feel like you are forced into a family where it isn't safe for you to exist in anymore

-Child abuse: self explanatory, somewhat, at least. There are so many ways children are abused that don't include SA. Why does no one ever focus ONLY on emotional abuse and manipulation, since it is (at least based on very personal experience) one of THE most subtle forms of abuse? One of the few that did it very well recently I believe is Skinamarink...

-There Is A Creature In The Basement/Somewhere™: remember Babadook? Yeah, you don't have to make a copy, the monster can represent something different. The loss of a toy that can still haunt a kid after YEARS that it happened, or child abuse that happened by locking someone in the basement... A lot of things can be tackled by putting a creature that haunts the house. Divorce maybe? When the kid visits the house of a parent their parent seems... Different? And suddenly they understand why they divorced... Or maybe... Two kids being separated by child protective services? One of the kids sees a demonized version fo the other that hates them for "abandoning them" but the demonized sibling is pacified when the real siblings meet again? Events like the ones described can cause a lot of bad feelings in someone, either in childhood or once they have grown up. The theme specifically tackled is separation, isolation, vulnerability...

Plots that can be used for horror but I don't see around often or that don't necessarily regard loss of autonomy and a violation of the self include:

-Loss: ah, a classic! Make it... Loss of a pet! Knowing that the breed of cat or dog you chose to have with you was destined to have a series of illnesses and now being haunted by their loss, which you could have prevented... Or maybe not? Or a cat getting out of the house and not coming back... Or is it its meow you just heard out the window? Then why is the cat looking back so different? And why do you feel it hates you? Should you really follow it? The forest looks too dark but you tread on... (This can tackle irresponsible treatment of pets by human beings: keep your cats indoors people)

-Transformation=Why Am I Growing Up, I Wish I Wasn't™: I personally experience a longing to look more grown up and have more defined shapes, but that's not always the same for a lot of people, whether it is girls or boys of all flavors or nonbinary people who experience it while they are going through puberty or adulthood. It could be a horror tackling personal perception VS external perception. I feel weird and I look weird... I look in the mirror and the more the days pass, the more I see a completely different person... But why do the others not notice? Am I the only one who sees it? What does this say about me? I have turned into someone with a donkey head but nobody notices!

-Transformation=Transformation Into Creature And All That Entails And That's It, No Metaphor, I Just Want A Creepy Creature™: whether it is a bloodthirsty creature or a misunderstood one, someone turns into it and the transformation is described, with all the consequences unto a person's sense of self and instincts included.

This type of stuff sound interesting to me. I dunno. I do not write horror, I write stories with scary monsters at best, but horror? I do not write horror, so my suggestions come from an outsider perspective.

Just thought to myself "can't women have a bad time in fiction without rape being involved" which really shows you how much you're in the fucking trenches if you are both a horror fan and women fan

[problematic-yuri-poll]

Problematic Yuri Tournament Season 2 - Finals

Malcatras' Maiden vs. Murciélago

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..

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.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The New York Times has killed an investigation by one of its own reporters into Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam earlier this month. In an internal Times email inadvertently shared with The Electronic Intifada, Dutch reporter Christiaan Triebert explained to a manager that he had pitched “a visual investigation I was conducting into the events of [6-8 November] in Amsterdam.” “Unfortunately, that story was killed,” he wrote. “I regret that the planned moment-by-moment visual investigation was not further pursued.” “This has been very frustrating, to say the least,” Triebert wrote. The email was addressed to senior Times manager Charlie Stadtlander – a former senior press officer for the US National Security Agency and for the US army. Triebert appeared interested in carrying out reporting that would set the record straight, remediating the false narrative insistently advanced by his own newspaper – that the Israeli fans were victims of mob violence motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.

[...]

To date, The New York Times has published more than a dozen articles substantially focused on the violence in Amsterdam. This is an astonishingly high number compared, say, to how the newspaper has ignored or consistently downplayed grave crimes perpetrated by Israelis in Palestine, including systematic and well-documented sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces. The Times coverage not only includes numerous news articles baselessly spinning the Amsterdam violence as “anti-Semitic,” but opinion columns with inflammatory headlines such as “Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred – and Gaza,” “A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’” and “The Age of the Pogrom Returns.” The willingness of the Times to falsely portray Israel and Israelis as victims in this case is reminiscent of how it has insistently advanced the debunked narrative of “mass rapes” by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023, including false reporting by its star correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman. Such atrocity propaganda masquerading as journalism has been used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

18 November 2024

[heliza24]

Consent and Abuse in The Vampire Chronicles (and how it explains things like Daniel and Louis's disappearances)

TW: discussions of abuse, sexual abuse and rape, and CSA throughout this meta.

I’ve now read the first six Vampire Chronicles books, and I want to talk about the role that consent, or more importantly, the lack thereof, plays in the morality the books espouse. When I was a few books in, I discovered this post by @diasdelasombra, which uses excerpts from several scholarly texts to create a schema that helps us understand who Anne Rice considered a “worthy” victim of abuse. To summarize, the characters that Anne favors and who are featured in the narrative were violated against their will, but don’t whine about their misfortune. Instead they extend grace and forgiveness to their abuser. (Think of David or Lestat) The characters who are portrayed as conniving, wicked, or who are punished by the narrative are those who don’t adequately protest their assault, or who harbor anger or plans of revenge towards their abuser (think of Claudia).

When I say abuse here, I am specifically talking about sexual abuse and rape, but also being turned into a vampire against your will. Being bitten by a vampire is obviously sexually coded, and being transformed into a fledgling vampire nonconsensually is a metaphor for a rape. So I’m going to spend this meta talking about nonconsensual turnings interchangeably with rape.

When I read about the dichotomy of victimhood detailed in the original post, the books suddenly shifted in my mind, and I felt like I understood Anne as a writer for the first time. I love these books and their resulting adaptations, but I do believe that Anne had many flawed beliefs, and this insistence that the only proper response to assault is complete and total forgiveness of the perpetrator is certainly one of them. I want to take the theory put forward by the original post one step further, and propose that in addition to imperfect victims, Anne also struggled to write about characters that engaged in sex/vampirism consensually. This feels very Catholic to me; you’re allowed to enjoy sex, but only if you didn’t ask for it. It’s the lust and the longing that’s sinful. It’s this discomfort with consensual desire, along with the insistence that victims must forgive their abusers, that is at the heart of many of the most frustrating aspects of the Vampire Chronicles. It also drives some of the conflict I see in the fandom, and has the potential to impact the TV adaptation in interesting ways. I talk about all of that in detail below the cut:

We can see this central belief about abuse and worthy victims easily in the characters Anne chooses to feature. Lestat, David, and Marius were all turned against their will, but crucially do not linger, protest, or whine once the act is done. Lestat is incapable of holding any kind of grudge, Marius approaches vampirism and eternity with calm stoicism, and David immediately forgives Lestat for turning him against his will.

I think this is key when we try to understand why Anne wanted to replace Louis with David as a companion for Lestat. Louis’s turning is complicated; you get the sense that he did consent to it, even as he tells Daniel that he “can’t say that [he] decided” to become a vampire. And even though he does forgive Lestat at the end of IwtV, the telling of the story in that book is filled with resentment and anger. Louis is not a perfect bastion of forgiveness by any means. Anne talked about how she wanted to move on from the grief that Louis represented and also the passivity he embodies as a character (which she classifies as uniquely feminine, which adds another dimension of meaning to who is allowed to consent to sexual acts and remain angry at abuse) but I also have to assume that she wanted to move on from his anger. Which is actually a huge disservice to Louis, Lestat, and the complexity of the narrative.

The other characters who are turned consensually are all abandoned by the narrative. Madeleine is killed, Gabrielle largely disappears after TVL, Nicki kills himself, and Daniel goes mad and is then simply forgotten.

My love of Daniel is the reason why I started stringing this theory together. Daniel is the most clear-cut case in the entire chronicles of a consenting adult who deeply desires to become a vampire. He has no reservations, no resistance. The Devil’s Minion chapter is unique in that it lingers on Daniel's love and desire. Daniel is briefly allowed to want something unabashedly that is also coded as sinful and evil. And once the consummation of his desire happens, Anne simply doesn’t know how to continue to writing him. Armand’s insistence that fledglings will come to hate their makers seems in some ways to be a result of Anne’s worldview, that desire cannot cannot endure unpunished, rather than something Armand would believe in-universe (he never hated Marius, after all). When fans rail at the way Daniel’s story seems to disappear from the page, this is what we are protesting: Daniel’s desire deserved to be shown, Daniel deserved to evolve, and Daniel’s willingness does not require rebuke.

There is of course another interpretation of the Devil’s Minion chapter, which is that it is Armand playing out his and Marius’s relationship, but this time with Armand in control. In some ways I think the Devil’s Minion chapter is the one successful attempt Anne makes to subvert the cycle of abuse. Yes, Armand is re-enacting many of the things done to him, but Daniel is happy to do this role play with him, at least for a while. While far from perfect, their relationship manages to turn abusive history into present day kink, and exist in a context of mutual care.

Armand himself is probably the most interesting edge case in terms of Anne’s dichotomy of worthy and unworthy victims. He asks to be turned into a vampire, but he’s also a child, which makes his ability to consent unclear. (Whether Anne even believed that child sexual abuse was possible at all is up for debate; she wrote a message on her “fan voice mail” that is still transcribed on her website that defends a convicted pedophile and seems to argue that 14 and 15 year olds are effectively adults and therefore cannot be abused. Yikes yikes yikes.) This kind of uncertainty seems to be reflected in the changing way Anne writes Armand throughout the series. He’s evil at first in the same way that Claudia is evil; a conniving forever child who is smart and vicious enough that what was done to him can be justified. But Anne softened on Armand after Queen of the Damned. As the series goes on, Armand comes to resemble Anne’s perfect victim more and more. He forgives Marius relatively quickly, for instance, for turning Benji and Sybelle without his consent.

For Marius (and Lestat) overcoming victim status also means becoming the abuser, the rapist, the perpetrator of the dark trick. The only way to not be trapped under the cycle of abuse is to perpetrate it. Even though it is hidden in a lot of language about love and forgiveness, this theme is ever present in the Chronicles and to me it’s where the true horror of the books lies.

We see these values begin to be applied to world building and the book’s overarching philosophy more and more as the series progresses. Akasha is the big bad in Queen of the Damned because she represents the ultimate lack of forgiveness. She is angry at all the men in the world for their collective abuses (a world view that seems to originate at least partially from the overly protective and restrictive way Enkil treats her, in my opinion) and seeks to kill them. She is an unquestioned evil, in a way that most characters aren’t in The Chronicles. And Maharet and Mekare, who are much more forgiving towards Khayman, one of the perpetrators of their own rape, are the ones able to defeat Akasha. Forgiveness and grace trumps righteous anger every time.

Memnoch the Devil is an interesting book (even if it is not a *good* one, imo) because it spends its pages interrogating this idea of abuse and forgiveness, but blows it up to a theological scale. Memnoch’s main argument with God is that he lets humans suffer needlessly. Memnoch feels that all that is good and holy amongst humans can be found in the way we love each other and find joy in sex, art, food, and celebration. But God requires humans to suffer through disease and death, and sometimes even violence brought about by religion. When Memnoch is put in charge of hell, he makes souls worthy of heaven by working on them until they are ready to forgive God for the suffering they had to endure during life. That’s what makes you worthy of heaven: forgiveness. I find this so interesting because it almost feels like Anne is arguing with herself over philosophy and religion. Memnoch is very convincing and his belief that joy without guilt is good is given due weight by the narrative. In some ways it’s what these books are about- sensual pleasure without guilt. But on the other hand, Memnoch is the devil (if that- Lestat is never quite sure if he’s really the devil or just a malignant spirit) which means we shouldn’t trust what he says. The idea of God as the ultimate abuser— the person who puts humanity through unspeakable horrors on a wide scale, and then requires our forgiveness in order to find peace— really chimes with the way that Anne writes about abuse in the rest of the series. According to this view, the cycle of abuse is absolutely inescapable. It is decreed by the almighty, and the only way to not be completely crushed by it is to accept its omnipresence and embrace its perpetrators without anger.

This focus on forgiveness is clearly a huge part of Anne’s (and therefore the vampires’) worldview, and I of course find that pretty problematic. But I also think it hurts the reader’s ability to connect to the characters and can have the unfortunate side effect of draining the books of the conflict needed to create a propulsive plot. The vampires’ inclination to completely forgive those who have wronged them, and to not linger at all in any feelings of anger, grief, or resentment, sometimes leads to baffling situations where conflicts that loom large in one book are completely forgotten in the next. The most jarring example of this to me is Armand casually playing chess with Santino in Queen of the Damned. Santino! The vampire who kidnapped him, forced him to eat his best friend, and generally tortured him. And they simply never address this. They just start playing a casual game of chess on Night Island after Akasha has been defeated. Situations like this can make character seem like they are acting completely out of character, and it makes it hard to understand their motives. Yes, there’s the in-universe explanation that time heals all wounds and eventually vampires just live long enough that they can’t hold any grudges. But I still think it’s reasonable to assume that Armand would hesitate before casually engaging with Santino again, no matter how long has passed. This kind of automatic forgiveness also means that we skip over so many conflicts that that would be fascinating to read about. If Armand and Santino really do need to reconcile, I want to see what that looks like. I want to see Armand remember Ricardo when he looks at Santino. I want to see what David and Lestat mending their relationship after Lestat’s violation looks like. But we don’t get any of that and instead the vampires move seamlessly on to something else, which is often much less interesting than these interpersonal conflicts that Anne ignores. And because of that, I think this focus on forgiveness creates books that are less fulfilling than they could be.

I think this focus on forgiveness is also at the heart of some of the conflict I see between book readers and show-only fans. I often see book readers talking about how Armand and Louis come back to each other later in the books, that Louis forgives Armand enough to live with him again for a time. And this makes sense in a book universe that prioritizes forgiveness above all else. In fact it actually signifies positive character growth for Louis, as it means he is becoming closer to Anne’s definition of a worthy victim who can forgive those who wronged him.

Fans of the show insist that the TV version of Louis will never forgive Armand, and for all I know they might be right. The TV show has shown that it’s very capable of taking the events and themes that Anne presented and reframing them. The show is already presenting a more critical depiction of CSA, in my opinion, by doing things like eliminating the incest subtext between Louis and Claudia and making it clear that Marius groomed Armand. I also think the show does a better job of keeping emotional stakes consistent. Louis may forgive Armand, but something more substantial than time passing will have to happen to facilitate that in the TV show. So show Louis may indeed never forgive Armand, given those new parameters.

In its efforts to reframe some of Anne’s themes, I believe the television show is shifting the emphasis on forgiveness slightly. Louis’s arc over the first two seasons depends on him reaching a state of forgiveness, not for an abuser, but for himself. He extends grace to Lestat as part of this process, but I really believe that the catharsis comes from Louis embracing his own failings and his own power, and moving forward with confidence. He has not forgotten his anger or the things that were taken from him, but he has the ability to face the rest of eternity now without self-recrimination. I imagine moving forward that this is going to be a major theme of the show. No matter if you sought vampirism out or had it thrust upon you, you must learn to how to deal with its horrors and its perks. You must learn to embrace your own monstrosity and not shrink from it. And you must find a way to accept the love that those around you are willing to offer, whether or not you always perfectly deserve it. I think these are lessons that Lestat, Armand, and even Daniel have yet to learn in the television show. Those character arcs are going to fuel the show through its coming seasons, and I for one cannot wait to see it unfold.

I’m interested to hear from other readers to see if they picked up on these themes, and how they anticipate the show will adapt them. Please tell me your thoughts! And thank you for reading this far.

[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.