#defs not saying ur wrong anon i just want to elaborate on why i approach this storyline the way i do

[dabistits]

1) Reading some of your meta on the Todorokis made me finally watch The Handmaiden for which I’m forever grateful so I hope you don’t mind me adding my thoughts. See, I agree on Horikoshi sucking at abuse/power imbalance narratives (to the point of living in fear of Dabi’s villainy being used to further “humanize” the Dumpster Fire) and Rei and Fuyumi’s forgiveness being particularly foul but from a Watsonian point their reaction makes a sad sad amount of sense because of a sad sad truth: no one

(cut for length and tw for discussion about fictional domestic violence)

2) ever believes the victims. Even before her hospitalization Endeavour had to have been the Number Two Hero for a long-ass time, meanwhile Rei was basically sold to him by her own family (of whom we never hear again even tho their only canon interaction is her begging them for help before her breakdown). But afterwards she was “that crazy woman who permanently scarred her son”. She literally has no other option that resigned acceptance and not rocking the boat yet. Meanwhile, the kids had lost

3) their mother, Natsuo was an understandably pissed child, Touya “died”, Enji continued to be neglectful to everyone but Shouto and Fuyumi was the oldest. Even tho they apparently had a butler madame too that’s a position that requires serving the head of the house or being fired and being no help anyway. It’s not hard to see Fuyumi trying to step up Katara-style to fill the hole their mother left; given the asshole’s indifference to their children I doubt he’d care enough to force her to live

4) with them, meaning she’s only doing it to stay close to Shouto. So of course after their mother starts feeling well enough to be part of their lives again she’d see it as a positive thing and support her. Nothing will give them back their childhoods but at least this would give her a chance to live for herself a little more. So yeah, they are narratively stuck on a shitty position and while Natsuo definitely has a point his outbursts aren’t of any real help to them.

heya anon! first i’m glad you watched the handmaiden it is a fantastic movie and it deserves to be on the lesbian movies canon forever.

second, i don’t disagree with you at all! of course abuse victims have complex reactions to their abuse and complex relationships to their abusers, which can be even further complicated by their material circumstances. my criticism of this as a narrative decision is two-fold: one is the fairly basic criticism that it’s more indication of horikoshi’s misogyny that he isn’t capable of writing women outside of merciful and nurturing roles (it’s not a coincidence that the tdrks who choose to forgive are the women, while the men seem to have—at the very least—complicated feelings), and the second is that while we may very much want to believe that rei and fuyumi have complex and fully fleshed-out reasons for feeling as they do towards their abuser, we simply don’t know because horikoshi has not shown us!

i get on hori’s case a lot for not showing, particularly in regard to the world-building, but in the case of writing abuse narratives i think it’s absolutely a matter of doing justice to show the complexity of emotions that come with the experience of abuse. without taking the time to show that complexity, especially if you want to write a non-resentful victim (but even if you want to write a resentful one tbh), the narrative very easily skews towards “forgiveness is the right way to deal with someone who wronged you” as a moral, rather than “abuse is often fraught and complicated and sometimes victims make decisions for their own sake that may involve reconciliation and forgiveness or may involve never forgiving.” i’m not the biggest fan of narratives that only choose to explore forgiveness+reconciliation, because i do believe that path is valorized undoubtedly because it’s more comfortable to abusers and their allies, but i can accept it as long as it’s well done and it prioritizes the feelings and motivations of the abuse victim without cutting the abuser any slack.

the problem with horikoshi is that… he doesn’t do any of the work that would make for a fully fleshed-out abuse narrative. as much as we might want to make up headcanons to explain it, the fact of the matter is that we don’t know why rei forgives her abuser. we don’t know why fuyumi wants to reconcile with him. the pro hero arc was all about centering the abuser and what he thought about his crimes and what he feels about them, inserting us into his perspective in order to stir up the reader’s sympathies for him. just because a character’s reaction to abuse makes sense and may mirror real peoples’ reactions to their abuse doesn’t mean that it’s written with good intentions.

we should always question why a narrative is written a certain way and whose purpose it ultimately serves. rei’s forgiveness was not written for her sake. it’s not for the sake of abuse survivors out there (who are surely salivating for yet another character who forgives their abuser for no apparent reason). hell, shouto’s breakdown while watching his abuser fight on television was not for his sake, because those scenes were shown in the context of the narrative trying to stir up sympathy for his abuser and showing him as heroic. that doesn’t mean shouto’s reaction wasn’t realistic; it means we should question why it was shown at that time, and why it was shown outside of the context of his abuse. couldn’t a better statement about abuse be achieved if we saw that scene from shouto’s perspective, coupled with his flashbacks of his childhood?

so anon, i totally understand the watsonian explanation for why rei and fuyumi are like that. i think it works as a fine explanation for people who want to flesh out those characters for their own sake, or who want to write about them in their fanfiction and needs those motivations. my concern and much of my criticism, however, lies at the doylist level, because i don’t believe in using my headcanons to do hori’s work for him. that’s why i very rarely involve headcanons in my meta and try to stick purely to what’s been presented to us in-text. i don’t want to end up in the situation where i say “rei and fuyumi’s characters are badly written and are basically there to advance abuse apologism, but it’s realistic!” because whether or not it’s realistic is sort of beside the point. the question for me is, as always, what purpose does it serve and why did the author put it there?

in this case, the answer to those questions doesn’t reflect well on horikoshi.