#it's voldemort joseph vs umbridge joseph

[abeautifulblog]

My contribution to the discourse.

[abeautifulblog]

My thoughts on the cult ending

So I'm glad the devs decided against the cult ending, though not for the same reason that Joseph-apologists are.

Because I do think that Joseph is evil -- but he's evil in both incarnations. It's not wholesome cinnamon roll (canon) vs. ~slanderous defamation of character~!! (cult), it's mundane evil vs. cartoon evil.

A really insightful comment that I got on "This House Just Sings (This House Just Screams)" was someone who compared canon vs. cult Joseph to the difference between Dolores Umbridge and Voldemort. That nobody reading the Harry Potter books ever had as visceral a reaction to Voldemort as they did to Umbridge, because he was cartoonishly over-the-top -- whereas she was insidiously plausible. Rowling captured the creeping horror of being at the mercy of an abusive authority figure, the powerlessness. The moment when you realize what this person is capable of, this person who you thought was normal, was safe. The I will not tell lies scene hits harder than anything Voldemort ever does.

And that's why I'm glad they walked back the cult thing, because as soon as you take Joseph out of a romcom and put him in a horror movie, the threat he represents ceases to be real. He's entertaining as a freaky cult leader, but he's not believable. He's not genuinely scary anymore, because it's hard to imagine him actually existing.

When the fact is, people like Joseph are very real, and very dangerous. Abusers don't have to be dramatic to destroy people's lives.

Abusers will take full advantage of the trust that honest, good-natured people unthinkingly extend to others, and they'll do it very skillfully.

Abusers will groom their victims over an extended period of time in preparation for the abuse -- to make them more compliant and less likely to recognize it as abuse; to make them feel complicit in it.

Abusers will cultivate a positive public image that lowers people's guard, and that puts them above suspicion from the rest of the community.

And abusers will absolutely target people whose mental illnesses make them easy to manipulate -- mental illnesses that also make them easy to discredit if they ever try to come forward about it. (This is why the conversation you have with Joseph about Robert sends me into towering, table-flipping rage.)

*

So yeah. That's canon Joseph. The Dadsona got off light.