#product of rape

[thoughtfulqueerwizard]

Idk if this is how you do or are supposed to do this, but TRIGGER WARNING for mentions of rape.

My mom told me recently that I was a product of date rape. She didn't use those words, but when she described it to me and I told her that sounds like date rape, she said well, you have to think about the times.

Looking it up, spousal rape wasn't even recognized in NY state until like 1995 or something, so I assume other states followed after that, and the with difference between being married vs dating, she essentially said she didn't feel comfortable trying to report it, especially given her history with the police.

I now get to spend the rest of my life knowing that I shouldn't exist, that I am the product and the cause of their misery, marriage, and divorce. I'm also directly responsible for my brother's existence (conceived on their honeymoon, they married because my mom got pregnant with me) and his trauma from the insanity of my parents.

The most fucked up thing is I've felt this way literally my whole life, that I was the cause of my parents marriage, my brothers existence, and their divorce, and now knowing that I literally was right.. just damn. I just feel bad for existing.

If anyone else can relate or recommend resources for processing this, that would be appreciated.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

tw: sexual violence. this essay by ananya pandya is really good, here are some excerpts

her instagram is @/jesuswasajock

[thinkingofausername]

mouthwashing has truly showed me that we haven't evolved from the fucking witch trials. people can only ever point fingers, judge, hate, condemn, root for damnation. how the fuck do you look at a game about capitalism, psychological instability, complex characters, endless nuance and get out of the experience with the braindead take "curly horrible. anya, daisuke and swansea wonderful. jimmy bad." too many people haven't moved on from the reasoning of five year olds and disney - hero good and villain bad. people aren't fucking cartoon characters. we're not only good or bad. media literacy is truly dead and gone.

[tealmoth]

i’m watching through 2003 fma right now and on one hand it’s really good, but on the other hand there are some parts of it that feel like someone’s darkfic au that got out of control

[sarafangirlart]

We aren’t recognizing that angst potential of that one myth where Hera is Prometheus’s mother.

[haveyouthoughtaboutcomicstoday]

The thing about having Ollie as your favourite character is that you feel like you need to defend him constantly. People are beefing with that man all the time including writers. Especially writers!

I expected this when I became a Guy Gardner fan. It doesn’t even bother me that much when people misconstrue him because yk, fair enough.

But Ollie?

Note: this isn’t about anything in particular. Sometimes I think about him for 5 seconds and get mad again

[h0ney8ee]

i really have to just get off the internet bc its so difficult to tell what is real and what is people being dramatic because theyre emotional

[thedeafprophet]

Remembered the take that the light fingers ending 'wasn't that bad' and that therewa worse things in fl, and complaining how annoying people saying there's only one ending is and I am taking 1D6 psychic damage rn

[beevean]

the hallmark of Peak Fiction is shoehorning a very serious conversation about a very serious past conflict in an unrelated scene, in the form of snarky banter played for laughs, so that the writer can pretend they listen to audience feedback, while not needing to fully think of addressing the issue and fully sweeping it under the rug because it would be inconvenient to paint the involved characters as dumbasses/vile. Bonus points if it literally goes nowhere and it can be removed from the scene without affecting the flow of the dialogue.

And if it makes me want to eat my own bones because I feel the urge to beat the involved characters to death with a nailed bat, that's just a plus :)

[lowpawly]

sorry I just saw a youtube short of someone showing how easy it is to spike peoples drinks and then at the end it turned out to be an ad for a product that is a silicone lid to put over drinks to prevent getting drugged????? what the fuck?????

[princesssarcastia]

the thing that is SO interesting to me about alicent is that, well. how do you love your son when he turns out to be just like his father?

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Edward Scissorhands (1990, Tim Burton)

28/03/2024

[skaruresonic]

I heard people have explained to you Hector's deal in the show :)

This is my most hated part of it. Not only because Hector in his game is my favorite character, but because even on his own terms, the one in the show is treated in such a vile way, and I see nothing but terrible takes on it that make me think "y'all wouldn't be so horny over this if he was a woman".

So, to summarize his plotline in Season 3. After being manipulated into betraying his master, getting the shit beaten out of him in graphic detail, and dragged through the snow barefoot for a month, the dude is thrown into a jail because he needs to work for the OC #girlboss villains. The idea is to send a diplomat to manipulate him again into trusting them.

The first thing that happens between them is that Hector threatens to kill Lenore, and Lenore beats the shit out of him: you've seen this scene. You can also see how Hector is framed as being a weak idiot for underestimating the cute vampire, because she's actually super stronk and badass. In-universe, this logically means that Hector learns quickly that she could torture him at any time. (also yes it's a repeat of his beating in S2, at the hands of another vampire)

Then Lenore, between one manipulation and the other (she basically says "yeah you're in a cell but it's better than serving Dracula, right?") starts to treat him like a dog, putting him on a leash, calling him "good boy" and taking him on "walkies <3". This is presented in an erotic way, even though Hector isn't very enthusiastic about being dehumanized.

And by the finale, Lenore says something on the effect of "I can't betray my sisters, but I like you and we could run away together". Somehow, Hector doesn't notice the blatant contraddiction, and when Lenore kisses him, he reciprocates and the two have sex. This is for the sole purpose of coaxing him into pledging loyalty to Lenore, and slipping that cursed ring that would bind him and his creatures to the #girlboss vampires. Next scene, Lenore is bragging to her sisters that she wants to train Hector because he's good at fucking.

Side note, the fact that Hector "consented" to sex is used as proof that he wasn't raped. Even though Lenore could have beaten him to death at any moment, even though he spent more than a month in dehumanizing conditions, even though he get frequently described as being "a child in a man's body" who only craves love. but yeah he didn't say no so that's okay.

And none of this matters in Season 4, because Lenore has become a whining brat making dick jokes around Hector when he works, and the story tries to draw parallels between them to show that oh, they Understand each other deep down, and also Hector protects her from another character who is rampaging through the castle, and chooses to stay with her.

Fun fact, at one point she complains that Hector was "the last problem she had to solve", Hector sarcastically thanks her for the ring, she responds with "oh shush you were having fun", and he replies with "until the end". She might as well have said "shut up you were hard what are you complaining about?" and he agreed. Literal female-on-rape apologism in my Castlevania show.

Lenore then steps into the sun because she refuses to live in a cage and she says "I'm sorry for everything you went through" to Hector, the most bastard of non-apologies of all time. And that's it. This is how Hector/Lenore became one of the most popular ships in the franchise, full of people who cry that they deserved a happy ending together, swear that Lenore did nothing wrong and really she treated Hector well, or are simply horny for the cute girl domming the simp boy.

The fact that Warren Ellis was accused of being a sex pest makes the rape fetishism just a little more uncomfortable :)

Needless to say that the games are far less sexualized. Worthy of note is that in Symphony of the Night, Alucard gets tormented by a succubus, but not by giving him erotic vision: by making him relive the day that his mom died. Just saying.

We can talk about respect for the games all we want. We can talk about the poor pacing, the forced swearing and rude jokes, the twisting of characters. But this? This is indefensible to me. I will never, ever shut up about how this acclaimed show has rape apologism in it, and people defend it because it's from a woman against a man - because the story frames it as something hot and that the man deserved for being "evil" (he wanted to turn humanity into livestock for vampires because he was severely abused by humans, and that means he deserved being enslaved to show him what his plan would have entailed. Real argument I've seen. That and "Hector loved in a possessive way like a vampire, so he understood that Lenore enslaved him out of fondness". I can link to you the post if you don't believe me)

Yeah, all of this has been A Lot to unpack. I started reading the Many of Us website after learning of Warren Ellis'… indiscretions… and I really feel like it's colored my understanding of the show, and I wasn't that hot on the show to begin with. I can't imagine how it would feel to be a fan of the games and have them be adapted by this immature hack piece of shit.

Cross-referencing clips of Hector's behavior in Curse of Darkness and Hector's behavior in the show, the disparity was such that I asked Spinning and Woodchipp, "Why is this show so sex-brained?" Some sexualization is to be expected in vampire fiction, but to this degree? Why does goofy St. Germain have to say "God is going to have sex again?" bruh this is "I'm 14 and this is deep" levels of writing. How could anybody take it seriously?

And it's weird too because everywhere I looked on Reddit, people were praising Ellis' comic writing genius. In all honesty, though, he seems like a huge edgelord. The standard for comics writing tends to be rather low, where more often than not gritty shock-value writing tends to be conflated with good writing, so I don't exactly trust that he's this ~hon-hon oh so geniuese~ fauxteur everyone's portraying him as. Especially if THIS is any indication of how he usually writes.

On the subject of Hector's assault… (tw for discussions of assault and rape) I'll be honest, when Spinning and Woodchipp described the ways people have tried to downplay it, a shudder went through me. I refuse to believe there are people in this world who would defend such a thing, much less try to normalize it.

I apologize for mentioning this, but I think it's worth bringing up because this is what the scene reminded me of. When a man wears a condom during sex but takes it off without his partner's permission or knowledge, it is rape by deception.

It's a fitting parallel because Leonore slipped the ring on Hector's finger without his knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter if he'd consented to the sex before then, he didn't consent to wearing the ring. Consent is an ongoing process, not a "well, you consented to ride the roller coaster, now you can't get off" sort of thing. Just because you consent to sex in the moment doesn't mean you consent to everything that happens after it starts.

And since the ring represents further suppression of his free will, it reinforces the notion that his consent is an afterthought at best, second to Leonore's enjoyment. This isn't even getting into the fact that being imprisoned and tortured in the first place means he was inherently set up to suffer a breakdown of free will.

Furthermore, rape is not about sex, it's about power. It's about denying a person their bodily agency. Ask yourself, would Leonore have had to slip the ring onto his finger if she hadn't chained him and beaten him down first?

I have no idea how the scene could be read as anything other than rape. It's rape. I'm sorry. It just is. There's nothing Leonore can say or do after the fact that will render it not-rape because rape is not something that can be edited in post, assholes. To claim otherwise is rape apologia. "You liked it afterwards" is not an excuse, nor is "you didn't say no."

…and then, as if that weren't bad enough, Spinning said another major character got raped by OCs. That, to me, is a big red flag that the creators held an active disdain towards the source material. Because nowadays writing advice urges you, if you can avoid rape-as-backstory, if you can find a more suitable motivation, you ought to do it. The alternative is hurting the rape survivors in your audience with a blasé portrayal of their trauma, or worse, a fetishization of it.

Why is it that writers who are least equipped to handle rape as a subject matter tend to sprinkle it as some sort of Spicy Garnish in their writing? Like you said, CV doesn't really focus that much on sex or rape in the first place. It's almost as though by making the games characters say "fuck" and suffer rape (with little actual repercussions, 'cause God forbid we have Consequences), the creators childishly believed they could make their writing seem much more Dark and Mature than it actually is.

And then people have the gall to defend it. It's so fucking gross, dude.

because the story frames it as something hot and that the man deserved for being "evil"

I actually ranted at length about how disgusting this mindset is and I'm shocked it still appears in the year of our Lord 2023. Rape is not a punishment. Nobody deserves rape. No, not even the worst person you can think of. If you consider rape a punishment someone can earn by behaving badly enough, like seriously, get the fuck away from me lol.

That and "Hector loved in a possessive way like a vampire, so he understood that Lenore enslaved him out of fondness."

[20001541]

I saw somewhere a Headcanon that the Shigaraki twins' father is a European tourist

not a bad headcanon and entirely possible imo. I know this panel had some people wondering if he had some european blood in him when it first came out.

we'll never learn anything about their father so he's a blank slate anyone's free to imagine anything about.

[bbygirl-aemond]

alicent, to aemond: i love you (affectionate)

alicent, to helaena: i love you (affectionate)

alicent, to aegon: i love you (derogatory)

[theskyexists]

I'm reading an incredible manwha called Getting to Know Grace. And damn. mild spoilers.... Good worldbuilding for once. Almost completely seamless pseudo European worldbuilding (comparatively). But thats not whats good. What's good is that it's about a girl and her war prisoner slave.. (they really call them slaves, but the manwha has quite late modern aesthetics, so... interesting, and their phenotypical stigma/defining trait is blonde and blue eyes which i love) And especially the first few chapters where Herta navigates her fury at her helplessness and the cruelties inflicted on her and forced and faked devotion to her mistress versus Andy Grace's navigation of her fear of dying, loneliness, jealousy and thorough acknowledgement of her power over Herta, and her MISUSE of that power, and her rather constant knowledge that she cannot force Herta to love her back, even if she put in that condition for her protection and help (and then so totally reneges on that too in her efforts to reunite Herta's family and get them to safety) Anyway and then she goes absolutely fucking apeshit

This is like the best of the best. There's societal extreme power differential. Seeing the consequences of that and trying to defy that, but the narrative hits the perfect balance on titillation and dreamy love interest. My favourite scene is when - as Andy later puts it so perfectly and correctly - Herta takes herself hostage when Andy does something completely horrible and unacceptable. That SCENE, Herta literally really does the equivalent of going: you have a knife to my throat, so i cannot help but beg for forgiveness. And she basically grabs the knife and cuts herself on it to show Andy that the knife is THERE and she is wielding it against Herta, someone she claims to love

WAAAGGHHHGG