#perfect victims

[livingdoll13]

catradora and the perfect victim complex

(i literally fucking think about this all the time so this just gonna be a rant lol)

i really, truly think that people in general don’t put the effort into understanding characters who are imperfect victims. for them, it destroys the appeal of victimhood. victimhood (especially when the victims in question are girls, women, femme presenting people, etc.) needs to be beautiful and tragic. think characters like ophelia, snow white, odette, juliet, the lisbon sisters. otherwise, their victimhood is no longer attractive.

catra is an imperfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse did not make her soft, weak, timid, or fragile. it made her bitter, angry, and resentful.

i once saw a catra anti saying some bullshit about how they might’ve liked catra more if the writers had spent more screen time showing shadow weaver abusing her, specifically her when she was a kid.

this person wanted to see catra’s pain as beautiful. they wanted to see her ONLY as a child to be pitied, the little kid who cowered in fear instead of fighting back, and not have to acknowledge catra’s more complicated character traits.

i also think this is why these same people often talk like they love adora, like “adora deserves better than catra” and all that shit. adora (to them) is easier to see as a perfect victim. shadow weaver’s abuse made her obedient and self-sacrificing. it made her put others before herself, even to the point of fucking death. adora is selfless and brave. she’s so determined to be a perfect hero, to protect people, to care for people, to love people. these traits are easier to romanticize. it makes her seem beautiful.

if you ask me, this is a really fucked up way of viewing adora. i don’t love adora bc she’s a “perfect victim”, i love adora bc she, like catra, is also flawed. adora’s determination to be perfect leads her to abandoning catra. her inability to empathize with catra leads her to behaving the way she did in taking control. adora isn’t fucking perfect.

(for context i do also think that catra was in the wrong in that episode too, but i feel like we don’t talk enough about how badly adora was handling the situation. like seriously girl catra is here basically telling her “i don’t trust you bc i don’t believe that you could ever love me bc i’m inherently fucked up and unlovable” and adora’s immediate reaction is to blow up at her. it makes sense given what adora has just done for her, but it’s another example of adora being incapable of empathizing with catra. also calling her a stubborn brat? yeah uh that wasn’t funny adora, especially not with the ways that shadow weaver talked about catra.)

but i love that adora is flawed, and i love that catra is flawed. they’re not archetypes. no real person experiences abuse like they did and comes out perfect. catra’s intense fear of abandonment and resentment issues are a very fucking real response to the way she was traumatized. regardless of how ugly it is.

at the end of the day, i think that people can’t wrap their brains around this concept and refuse to empathize with imperfect victims bc they don’t want to admit that they, too, are imperfect victims. the perfect victim isn’t real. it’s a fucking myth.

in real life, people are messy and complicated, like catra and adora. it’s why i love them :)

ugh i could literally go on about this FOREVER i swear.

[amphiptere]

I do love though that so many of Jean's survival mechanisms and trauma responses are harmful to others. He's not a docile sweet little uwu boy, he's someone who's been through a lot and survived it by, among other things, helping torture someone, and now occasionally reacts instinctively to triggers by being verbally cruel or physically attacking others. He's really messy and while he does tend towards staying silent and dealing with trauma by hurting himself more than anyone else, he doesn't always. cause like you do what you have to to survive but recovery can be messy and inconsistent too.

[haunted-xander]

I've been making my big sib play Ace Attorney with me while their visiting for the week :D So here's a redraw of an old thing

[sharkrocket]

I'm on a ride, on a ride, on a ride and it's first class I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm alright, it's just a heart attack

[jewish-microwave-laser]

And here is the most devastating fact of Frank's posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don't want to hear it.

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." These words are "inspiring," by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her "legacy." It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being "truly good at heart" before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank's diary's fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don't insult their persecutors The work that came closest to achieving Frank's international fame might be Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank's diary, recounting the tortures of a fifteen-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Was Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story told in Night, but it exploded with rage against his family's murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version under the new title La Nuit—a work that repositioned the young survivor's rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how this society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame G[-]d. This approach earned Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as, years later, selection for Oprah's Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank's. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

from "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 9–10

[rottingcheng]

ok jiang cheng renaissance time. back to basics. hard-edged steel-grade-dignified turning-up-his-nose jiang cheng who spits venom takes names and doesn't care to be outwardly soft because it was never his strong point anyway. a jiang cheng who's gruff and starts fights with anyone who'll try him, yes partly because he's standing up for his sect but at this point it's mostly because he just likes to yell and incite fear and he doesn't need a noble reason to be a bitch he can just be an argumentative asshole because he wants to be and he's got the flourishing sect to back him up on it now.

i want him to be in the wrong sometimes and never sorry for it. i want him to use a nasty tone and not give a fuck and not change himself because he's already succeeding as the person he is and hell if he'd lower his head to anyone for old luxuries like closure. time was his closure. he's done, he's mean, he's allowed to be. he was born full of barbs, grew up full of barbs, and flourished full of barbs. if he feels fulfilled and satisfied as he is, why should he ever change? he can fix his problems in his own way. he can find peace without sanding down his edges. he likes his edges. so what? so what? who says his happiness is wrong just because he doesn't fold and become sweet and gentle upon finding it? he'll do whatever he wants and that might include making you cry and never apologising for it. so what? so what? that's jiang-zongzhu to you.

[dreadfuldevotee]

The fundamental issue with how people talk about Louis is that people think he needs to be coerced and magic'd into making bad decisions. Don't let his proximity to the two craziest fuckers in this universe make you forget that he saw Lestat freeze time in their second meeting and was not only un-phased, but actively attracted to it. Claudia, came to him and told him Armand was using the knowledge of Lestat against her and Louis scoffed and went "Nah he wouldn't do that" like that's some shit his sisterdaughter, of all people, would lie about. I proooomise he is more than capable of making delusional, dickmatized moves with the best of them, I pinky swear.

[lambmotifz]

the reason why sam and dean’s unhealthy dynamic doesn’t need to be fixed is because they both (unconsciously) crave power imbalance but for completely different reasons

dean didn’t have much power when he was younger since john took his control away from him. which is why he seeks power/control via hunting, violence and his relationship with sam. dean’s repressed sadistic tendencies, his love for hunting, his enjoyment of torturing & killing souls in hell come from his repressed need to be in control

and sam, as jared said, wants to restrain his physical power. not only because he doesn’t feel comfortable in his body, being too big and intimidating on the outside but feeling smaller and craving safety on the inside. but also because of his guilt and wanting to prove to himself, and to dean, that he’s good. that dean can trust him. it makes him seek comfort in being punished, in being restrained and feeling smaller than he is, but dean is the only person who can give him what he needs because dean is also the only person sam trusts and submits to. as twisted as it may be, but dean’s control over him is the only thing that gives him a feeling of safety he’s always craved

they complement each other in this fucked up way, that’s why their dynamic cannot exist without a certain amount of power imbalance

[konigsblog]

crazy, how the majority of my haters are either hypocrites, or are just straight up LYING. lmfao, i've written rape before and i apply appropriate warnings, but i've never ever written PEDOPHILIA. 😬

their username on tumblr is @asgardswinter, they have continuously mentioned me on their blog. it's literally creepy and clearly obsessive, lmfao, and lying about me writing pedophilia is real fucking weird considering they don't apply any further context or include any evidence to back up this claim...

i'd appreciate it if you reported their twitter account or blog for like harassment 😮‍💨

[cecilscribbles]

@localcanadiancreature62 i think people forget that ford's anger was never about the machine or the school itself. it was because he'd had a really rough childhood (growing up in pretty poor conditions, horrific bullying, alienation from his peers, etc) but he was always told he was going to be great, he was going places. and then the one person he trusted more than anything - from his perspective - purposefully took away that opportunity because he wanted to go sailing. i think the stan o' war plan seemed pretty childish to ford now he was a little older, and resentment had already been building for a while at this point, so it was basically an opportunity to justify all the bitterness he had at stan. to ford, that wasn't just a machine and a school - that was his trust, his future, and a big part of his identity, all going to shit.

i'm not great at explaining things sorry!! but i am a diehard ford defender and i think you'd have to be... i don't even know how you could not be angry in his situation ^^;

[statice-arts]

no thoughts. head empty. would never commit crimes against vampire society. just a little guy.

[seagreenstardust]

“When toxic behavior is portrayed as romantic, it’s problematic. When problematic behavior is portrayed as a character flaw for a character to work through, it’s good storytelling.”

Katsuki Bakugou, my friends.

His behavior was problematic but never once portrayed as romantic at the same time. Katsuki said and did awful abusive things, and he also chose to be better when he was given the chance. If you’re still hung up on chapter 1 Katsuki now then I don’t think you’ve been reading the same story I have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m not shipping Izuku with an irredeemable abuser. I’m shipping him with his most important person. His narrative foil. His childhood friend who made awful mistakes and then made it right when he saw he was wrong. The person Izuku looks up to and strives to emulate, despite their past struggles.

Bakudeku is so good because of how flawed these boys are, and how hard they’ve worked to get over it, and how much they matter to each other after it all

[patchworkcuddlebug]

Never to Return

[This story contains dubious consent.]

Sugar's witch, only having recently come into possession of her first doll, wanted to make her manor look the part. She wanted a flower garden in her front yard, and a vegetable garden in her backyard. In addition to the seeds, Sugar bought some of the necessary tools to-

"Casey!"

The doll turned to the name being called, seeing a person it recognized. She was running towards it, and nearly tackled it to the ground with a hug, making it stumble and drop its bag.

"Oh my god Casey, I missed you so much!" The person pulled her hug tighter. "I'm so, so sorry about everything I ever did, I never wanted to drive you away like this!"

"You were subletting for this one, yes?" Sugar gave the person three encouraging pats on the back. "You are forgiven."

The person pulled her head out away from the embrace, instead grabbing the doll by the shoulders and staring into its face.

"Case, is everything okay? You..."

She trailed of, her eyes darting across the doll's face.

"No. No, no, no... you're not one of those... things. You can't be." She pulled her hands away, stepping back. "Wh... why would you...?"

"Please calm down, Henri." Sugar calmly explained, bending down to pick up its bag of gardening supplies. "This one simply sought out a witch becau-"

"No, no, shut UP! You're even talking like one of them!" The person reached out and grabbed Sugar by the wrist, leading it in the opposite direction of the bus stop it was heading to. "You're coming back with me, a-and we're figuring out how to turn you back! We'll, we'll find a different witch, or-"

"This one doesn't want to change back."

"No, shut up, yes you do." She didn't even turn around, simply walking forward with a figuratively iron grip on the doll. "I don't care what the doll has to say, you have too much to live for! You had a job, and friends, and-"

Sugar stopped moving. The person turned back at the doll, frozen in place. She tried tugging on its arm again, and it stayed anchored.

"Henri... this is the best I've ever felt in my life."

Sugar looked up into the person's eyes, with an expression of calm serenity. "Even if I could, I would never, ever go back. Not for anything."

The person pulled her hand away, cowering. She didn't dare move. "Oh, god, it's... it's really you, isn't it? You... you can't be, this isn't..." Her voice hitches. "How could you be happy like this? As some... thing?"

The doll shook its head. It was starting to feel sick of this. "It's rather simple. This one doesn't have any of those dismal aspirations to try and cling on to its dead-end job, those sickening so-called 'friends', and any of that false hope that things would just get better if it stayed out of trouble and kept to itself."

Henri took a step back, moments from collapsing in on herself. The doll reached out and grabbed her wrist, letting the bag drop to the floor. For the first time, Henri could truly feel the coldness of that... thing's skin, as its joints tightened around it.

"No, let me go, let me go!" the person shrieked, its voice shrill and terrified. "This isn't you, you can't-!"

"You have no right to talk about who this one was. You don't understand how awful humanity felt." Pulling her closer. "You can't comprehend the sheer bliss this one feels from having a purpose, from being able to serve its Miss." Pulling her closer. "You rude, disobedient people think you have the perfect life by living for yourself and forsaking those around you, you... you..."

An arm around her back, pulling her torso against its. Faces inches apart, Henri's hysterics have faded into silent terror. What was once collected frustration quickly morphed into a dawning realization, a polite smile creeping across Sugar's face.

"You should be a doll, too."

She didn't respond. She whimpered, trying fruitlessly to leave the doll's grasp, but she knew it was useless.

Sugar grabbed the back of her hair, forcing her into eye contact. Good dolls are polite, good dolls help their miss, good dolls follow their purpose, and this one was being such a good fucking doll.

"This one saw the way you would always talk with your... friends. The way you'd coddle at them, shrinking your personality away, too scared to ever risk disappointing them. A compassion you'd never spend on this one. You were always the one working to please them." There was a bite to the doll's words, the final remnants of a long-steeped poison finally allowed to seep out.

"You're an empty space too, just a people-pleasing reaction to those around you." Its face, its voice, were dripping with a cold seriousness. "You need to be emptied. Freed from that egotistical self-service. Freed from the cowardice that bars you from true companionship. Taught the real purpose of service."

The thrashing stopped.

"N... I-I..."

She tries to steady her breathing, but can't. She's trying to focus, but can't. She's trying to say anything, but she can't.

"Why are you doing this? Please, I just-"

"You can't say no. Good doll."

Henri shuddered, her breath hitching. The chill in her spine felt like it could melt her, as her knees threatened to give out.

"Yes, YES, you feel it! That submission, that empty fluttering in your chest, the feeling of losing your identity all for the sake of another." Sugar barely restrained a frenzied smile as it released the person from its grip. She stumbled backwards from the lack of support, taking a moment to regain her balance. "That's what being a doll feels like, all the time."

Quick, heavy breathing. Arms at her front, a fear reflex.

"Kneel."

Her knees hit the ground hard, staring at the doll like an insect at god. Her hands were on her chest, trying to soothe her racing heart.

Sugar crouches to match. It places a hand on the person's cheek, compassionately brushing her hair out of her face, just like Miss did to it. "You would make such a good doll for this one's Miss, darling. Please, follow this one to the manor. All those sad, overwhelming parts of life will fade away into stillness. All you have to do is say yes."

She's paralyzed.

"Good dolls say yes."

She does as she's told.

[decepti-geek]

i think I've reached the point where I must acknowledge that Fanny Price from Mansfield Park is now a fully-fledged blorbo of mine