#this character is a survivor of a terrible abuse;;you have to view him that way when you approach the matter in that direction

[yuseirra]

This really bugs me, I don't understand why people would want hikaru to interact with taiki. Would you do the same if something similar happened to Ai? Why would he have to? What he's gone through is terrifying, just because the character isn't aggressive about it doesn't mean they aren't traumatized, maybe some can be 'okay' about meeting their children born that way and form a lovely relationship, that's admirable and incredible of them, but I don't think people are obliged to do so. Rather, I think he's already done quite well by refraining from showing any hostility towards Taiki. That's more than enough. If you think about it, that's also what's let him feel he isn't worth Ai's love and it's what he thought was the reason she left him.

He was seriously too, extremely young and didn't have any say in the matter. He's a pure victim in that situation. I feel it's something other people cannot and should not say anything about the matter. We clearly see the character in so much pain when he's reminded of it, it broke him once, it's actually what's led to a lot of disaster that's happened onwards so why? I can't really tell if people can't see the severity of the situation or I'm overreacting over a fictional material but I feel people may have been way more careful on approaching it if it was Ai that was going through the same thing(I'm so glad she isn't by the way and she loves her children and who she had them with)

I don't need those two to interact in order for this to be a good story. Actually, I'm getting worried that they might after having received a few inquiries, it's something that's never crossed my head but I'm starting to think it's maybe what some people want? But it's terrible... What happened is frightening. It's not a subject I can discuss with passion... The comic shouldn't, either.

+ To add, I'm making it clear that there could also be people born from such relationships, it's never their fault and they deserve a happy life as much as anyone else on the planet. It's neither of their fault, the situation is just something that can be very painful and you can't assume people will be so okay and accepting about it. It's something that's very challenging to feel that way about and it's okay if they cannot cope.

++one more thing, I appreciate that this manga DIDN'T make what he's gone through define him as a character(make him a woman-hater/a serial killer to avenge on women etc) if that's what happened, I'd have been so frustrated and moreover, it would have felt disrespectful for people who've gone through similar experiences in their life. That sort of thing is not a "simple device" and should be handled well if it has to. He's working for what he thinks is for his love and regardless of whether he's good or bad, he's his own person. That sort of experience is what struck him and what he had to endure, but it's not supposed to be THE thing that everything about that character should be built upon. It would be so rude for people to assume people in real-life would be that way, and this manga handles psychology in a realistic way so I end up having a pretty serious approach on this too. I feel they're doing decent in that area. So I believe the author will keep illustrating that part of the story well, as painful as it can get sometimes..

[sky-fire-forever]

Being a Our Flag Means Death fan whose favorite characters are Izzy AND Ed is wild. Because I'll be in the Izzy Hands tag and I'll see posts about how horrible Ed is and how you shouldn't like him and how his arc sucked and actually he's terrible and unforgivable

And then I'll be in the Edward Teach tag and I'll see posts about how Izzy is the real villain and how him dying is so good for his arc and Ed is finally free of him

I genuinely think people who try to make either Izzy or Ed into the perfect victims who never did anything wrong are kinda... boring? I dunno. Imo pretending that either of them are completely innocent is a disservice to their characters. But so is acting like either of them are terrible, unforgivable people

Ed abused Izzy. He was nasty to him and incredibly physically violent towards him as a routine. He abused not only Izzy, but the entire crew. He was beyond cruel. He struggles with understanding the severity of his own actions and disassociates to deal with his more horrific crimes. He drives Izzy to a suicide attempt after abusing him directly and mutilating him repeatedly. He gives a non-apology and is grumpy when the people he tortured don't automatically forgive him

Ed is also a survivor of his own abuse, both from his father and Hornigold. He's someone who desperately wants to be a better person, but doesn't understand how. He's someone who loves people a lot, but who also genuinely doesn't understand what love IS. He doesn't understand romance or gentleness or how to exist in a world without violence. But he tries really hard to become something that doesn't come naturally to him. He tries to learn how to become a good person and gets frustrated when he makes mistakes

Ed constantly relapses into abusive tendencies or doesn't realize that his behavior is wrong. But he very genuinely TRIES. He's someone who clearly struggles with empathy, with understanding that what's fun for him is traumatizing to others. He struggles with understanding that just because he's ready to move on, that doesn't mean everyone else has to

I don't think that's a flaw in his writing! I think that's a character flaw and it's actually something about Ed that really, really interests me!

(I do think there's some issue in the way the narrative presents it, with the crew going along with Ed's non-apology and then Lucius being shamed for still being traumatized, but that's not the point of this particular post)

And then with Izzy

Izzy is a fucking dick. He's a jerk who lashes out against people who aren't part of the group he's deemed worthy of his protection. He views people as either allies or enemies, with very little room for something in between. His allies are only the people in his crew and everyone else can get fucked. He's quite selfish in certain ways and he doesn't care who gets hurt as long as it isn't himself or the people he cares about. He holds himself and others to standards of extremely toxic masculinity. He despises change and resorts to allying with his literal worst enemies just so he can get the guy he likes to be with him again. He's cruel and abusive towards those who are lower than him in rank, constantly making other people feel insecure.

He's also someone who is fiercely loyal, even to his own detriment. He's someone who admits when he's wrong and always tries to fix his own mistakes. When he loses the duel with Stede, he asks Ed to let him stay, but he doesn't actually fight it. He goes peacefully, even if he whines about it. He holds himself accountable to his word and to his bond. He's loyal to Ed as his captain and as his friend/lover. He's loyal to his own crew first and foremost. When he has the British attack The Revenge, it appears as though he saves Ivan and Fang, not just Ed. He expresses disappointment when members of their crew die saving Stede from the Spanish. He protects the Kraken Crew from Ed and even stands up to Ed when he realizes things have gone too far. He's someone who has longed for community, but has only found it recently

Izzy as a character is loyal to a fault. Loyal to Ed to the point where he'll get Stede killed rather than let Ed go soft and betray who he is. And I do genuinely think Izzy thinks Stede dying is the best possible course of action because he's an idiot who is going to get Ed killed because he's a fucking idiot. And Ed being so soft snd not being a pirate is also super dangerous when he's like. The most wanted pirate there is. Izzy is loyal to Ed and to his crew. He's someone who cares too much, but tries to act like he doesn't care at all. He covers up his own insecurity by insulting others and he has a LOT of insecurity

They're both just.... such great characters and I love them both. But neither of them are perfect. They're both so fucked up and that's part of why I love them

[mauesartetc]

I've observed that some HB fans with trauma feel so attached to the characters and the show that they defend every writing decision and take any criticism as a personal attack. I can understand relating to and feeling sympathy for a character because of personal experiences, but Helluva Boss is a terrible media for emotionally vulnerable teenagers and young adults to uncritically consume.

It just pisses me off that so many people will praise HB for representing abuse with Stolas and Stella, yet ignore the unhealthy relationship dynamics, abusive behaviors portrayed in a positive light and bad writing in general.

Real talk: Speaking as an emotional abuse survivor myself, it pisses me off to no end that Helluva Boss has failed to represent this subject with any sensitivity or subtlety.

It's important to remember that abusers are often charming and charismatic, and they exhibit positive traits (at least early on) that make the other person want to salvage the relationship.

What the hell are Stella's positive traits? In what little screentime she's had thus far, she's been elitist, rude, destructive, pouty, murderous, sadistic, and a little stupid (failing to consider that if Stolas died, Octavia would inherit all his wealth and leave her with nothing). While there's evidence to support the claim that she acted like she was in love early on in her marriage (she's smiling in the Loo Loo Land photo, sleeps in the same bed as Stolas in a flashback and has stated she used to pretend to want to fuck him), there's nothing to suggest her personality was ever anything but odious. Even when Stolas first sees her photo as a child, it portrays an awful little brat.

It's pretty clear Stolas has never had any reason to love her, so why does he stay?

He says it's because he wants Octavia to have "a normal life", aka a two-parent household. But how exactly does that benefit her when those parents are constantly fighting? You might think "Well, that's a lot of parents' excuse for not getting divorced, but that doesn't mean it's right", but the show never challenges his stance on this. There's never a moment when he realizes, "Oh shit, maybe my definition of 'normal' is actually hurting my daughter". He only declares he wants a divorce after his first tryst with Blitzo and on the balcony when he tells Stella he "can't do this anymore". He's doing it entirely for his benefit, not because it would improve Octavia's life.

(And because the writers blatantly favor Stolas and everything he says, I have to wonder if they actually believe the standard nuclear family represents a "normal"- implied in this case to be good and desirable - life by default, regardless of how miserable everyone in the family is. On the off-chance that is indeed the case, as someone who lost a parent at a young age: Fuck all the way off with that, show.)

Also, we're not lead to believe divorce was never an option at any point. If a royal in this world gets divorced, what are the consequences? Would Stolas lose his title? Would he be executed? The whole point of this marriage was to have a kid, so literally what was stopping them from splitting up after she was born (other than the bullshit "normal life" excuse)? Why can't Stolas just visit Octavia? Why does he have to live with her? Plenty of kids with divorced parents still get quality time with both of them. The solution was right there all along, but Stolas felt the need to wait until his daughter was seventeen to split with his wife? For some reason?? The writers try to pass it off as some noble sacrifice he's making, but in reality, he's just being a dumbass.

Okay, so maybe he's just afraid to leave, like many abused people are. I'll have to call bullshit on that, since he never even tried to keep his affair a secret. He's openly flirted with Blitzo in public (at Loo Loo Land and the Harvest Moon Festival, in front of dozens of witnesses) and met Blitzo at a couples-only nightclub, where they sat in plain view of everyone else there. Couldn't even bother using your powers to disguise yourself, bud? Or does that only work when it's convenient to the plot? If Stolas were the least bit threatened by Stella or what the Goetia family would think, he wouldn't be this bloody obvious. While it's possible this is a self-sabotage sort of thing, the show has never given us evidence that Stolas has those kinds of tendencies.

In short, Stella's a hamfisted, stereotypical portrayal of an abuser, and Stolas just doesn't come off like the abuse affects him at all (or at least not until the episode where it needs to for plot reasons). Obviously not all abusers or abuse survivors in real life will fit into the same mold, but there's straight-up zero logic to these characters' behavior. I've mentioned this very astute video before, but here's one quote that perfectly sums up how poorly this show handles character motivations:

There's a... character consistency issue that results from having these characters exist only to dispense abuse. Their actions stop adding up... [Stella's] thing is that she wants to be away from Stolas... Why does she repeatedly show up to the house just when Stolas is around to torment him? This behavior is quite strange. She does not like him. She does not want to be around him... We're to assume that Stella wants to feel mad, wants to feel bad, and that's what she wants to do with her life.

This isn't how real people act. And of course fictional characters aren't real people and any sense of agency they have is just an illusion at the end of the day. But ideally they should feel real to the audience.

I now fully understand why I was leery of these writers potentially exploring a character's addiction. It's because they've shown they can't be trusted to give serious subject matter the care and weight it deserves.

[maxphilippa]

max having thoughts about lucy and how the fandom treated her. this also goes alongside with the way people treated rex

just generally it comes iffy to me how people downgrade lucy's character to her stereotype and don't understand that tlm is based around deconstructing said stereotypes and that people are much more complex than you think and trying to put them on a black or white perspective completely misses the point

and how they either don't recognize that her behaviours towards emmet weren't the best, or they do but completely take it only to the extreme

this also applies to rex's character although leaning more on the second one, since he is the antagonist per say

what troubles me the most i think is that i think that both rex and lucy are really good at deconstructing the stereotypes/main ideas they're based on and people demonizing or not focussing on it sucks ass.

like with lucy they genuinely do forget the implications of her genuinely being happy pre-wyldstyle until everything went down and how the guilt is eating her alive since something she created with so much love caused so much pain at the same time. like the reason as to why she's like that for almost all of the two movies is because the pain and guilt is still there with her and it fucking sucks. it gets worse on the second movie because she does genuinely think that they're on danger and meanwhile she genuinely wants to protect emmet, she also forgot that they're a team and that proper communication is the key. that's why her arc goes around growth and opening her heart again. she took the wyldstyle persona so she wouldn't be hurt again anymore, and possibly so people don't view her as weak.

so that's why her losing her hair dye means so much to her actually growing. she can't keep hiding herself any longer and she has to accept that hey, maybe, she has to be more versatile on her point of view. that things can still change. just like emmet said. she genuinely cares about her friends and didn't take the best decisions because of that but that is okay ultimately. she is not perfect but like that's the thing. she doesn't have to be. the second movie allowed her to grow and to heal.

which is also a parallel with rex.

but we do know already that people constantly treat rex as a monster just for having terrible mental health and shitty copying mechanisms when like. depression does that to you. being isolated does that to you. thinking that your friends left you behind does that to you. and like that is super messed up actually. people more than often don't get that the reasons as to why rex got to that extreme was because he genuinely didn't want emmet to be hurt the same way he was on the past. he cares about emmet. he is so hurt by seeing lucy but he doesn't hate her. he is a mess of emotions and thoughts and the way people demonized his struggles with mental health is genuinely fucked up.

because. yeah. rex DID shitty stuff. but he had very fair reasons. he was badly hurt and left behind. he thought that his friends left him just like that. he thought that they never cared. hell, his whole persona is an copying mechanism because he didn't want to be hurt again.

he was emmet once. and people forget that always. he is not abusive nor is he a terrible person nor is he completely innocent he's hurt and tired and angry and sad and misses his friends. and lucy isn't cold hearted or uncaring or one dimensional,hell, even if we go by the hints of her band, you can even argue that she's going through survivor's guilt.

what i'm saying is that the tlm fandom doesn't understand that mental health can be awful and shitty and that it won't get better unless said people who are going through it have a support system or are trying themselves and that struggling and making bad decisions, especially with good intentions, doesn't make you a bad person.

hell the whole theme of the movie is about CHANGE and GROWTH. rex and lucy ALSO had those. but anyway what do i know i barely remember anything of the movies as of now but as someone who kind of is going through the same thing. having a character portrayed as abusive for having terrible mental health and making bad choices that DID HAVE GOOD INTENTIONS MIND YOU is terrible and i genuinely hope people get that at one point. like hell rex didn't even. fucking want to hurt emmet. sure he lied but that's because he thought it was for the best. same goes for lucy.

tldr: shut up about your twink (benny) and actually start focussing on rex and lucy on the proper way

[stranger-rants]

"Billy is not that person" but to me, he is that person, I cant just pretend he isn't

Then do not engage in content with Billy in it. Do not post about Billy. Block all mentions of Billy. If your trauma compels you to make terrible comments about abuse survivors like him, then it is better for you and for us if you don’t talk about him at all. What will happen if you do talk about him in such a way is that people will criticize you for it, and you can’t fall back on “I was traumatized by someone like him” to avoid accountability for any harmful statements you may make about him. Ultimately, no fictional character is your abuser. There are those who remind us of our abusers, but that could literally be any fictional character. There are qualities Eddie has that my father has, but it would be unfair of me to say Eddie is my abuser and I’m going to project all the horrible traits from my abuser onto him because that isn’t canon and he’s not the same person. Steve has some similarities with my friend’s rapist, but I’m also not going to treat him like their rapist because he isn’t that person and again it wouldn’t be fair. If your trauma doesn’t allow you to view Billy as he is in canon and/or it pushes you to project harmful qualities onto him that he doesn’t have then you need to avoid content of him.

[anthropos-metronff]

Question for ya:

I agree that at the end of the day, Vincent is not at fault for what happened to Sephiroth/what he became.

But do you think he still blames himself anyway? Does he feel like he could have done something different and harbor guilt over it? That was my thinking, that he would feel some level of responsibility for the JENOVA project, but there isn't much out there that focuses on Vincent in this regard.

(Also yeah "pure and unsullied" to describe a child soldier is a little...😬)

I think you're looking for a potential headcanon reading here which is in fact canon. In the original game it's very obvious from your first meeting with Vincent that he's absolutely swimming in guilt, self-recrimination and a completely collaped and ruined self-image. And he locates the cause of this, right there in the basement, as stemming from his inability to stop the Jenova project, and the resulting impact this had on someone who he loved. (Lucrecia)

When you tell him about Sephiroth, he basically says 'Well, I didn't know about all that until just now, but that's another reason why I'm terrible'.

So yeah I think it's very obvious he blames himself for the Jenova project and Sephiroth.

I think it's important to establish, though, that FF7 is a game where character self-perspectives are both fallible and mutable. And this? All the above?^^ I think it's very clearly a product of Vincent's trauma, not a considered view on his responsibility.

I think it's implied in the wider canon, though not stated outright, that he probably blames himself not just for the Jenova project, but also what happened to himself at the hands of Hojo. Which, y'know, is obviously nonsense, but is very much in line with what a lot of survivors of trauma and abuse feel.

But that's all not really dealt with properly by the game. He's an optional character and he suffers very badly from what we might call the Quistis phenomenon of So You Got One Chapter of Character Development, and Now You're Done.

The nearest he gets to a resolution is if you have him in your party when facing Hojo and Sephiroth. His reactions kind of come out of nowhere in developmental terms, but him coming to a self-realisation that You know, maybe it should have been a fuck like Hojo who needed punishment, not me, is still pretty cool for a character who has been weighed down by guilt and trauma and a very obvious struggle to emote previously.

Thank you for the kind words re: my take on that line from Nomura by the way. I think I got one like for that post so it's nice to know that at least two people feel the same as me on it.

[handfulofmuses]

One of the reasons why I love Watership Down so much is because of how it portrays trauma, fear and pain. Because it’s not always about being terrified or crying with despair. All these emotions have their ugly sides.

And every rabbit shows it in different ways.

Woundwort had his parents killed and later was captured, put in a cage. That is not something the netflix series and tv series randomly pulled out of their sleeve, it was already like that in the book.

Pipkin mentions it himself - all these terrible things Woundwort does, it’s because of his fear. Of humans and predators. Like Pipkin said, he was hurt and it made him hate the whole world. Even in season three, character development doesn’t have to mean changing for the better. Sometimes you change for the worst. He tried to stop the war, it failed, his warren ended up in ruins. So he thought destruction was his legacy.

And he is still afraid. Note that Spartina asks why Woundwort is so afraid of Hazel.

Even in the Netflix series, he claims he is not afraid. But his words contradict his actions, as I said before and that’s why Netflix Woundwort has grown on me. I just love when a characters words contradict their actions!

Hyzenthlay was suspicious, distant and cold towards new rabbits out of fear they could be a spy. She didn’t trust anybody that was not part of her family and she did make sure Clover was ostracized from the rest of the group.

Nelthilta, in her own way, is scared too. Yes, Hyzenthlay says she views everything as a game and the fact that she drops hints to their escape proves that. But Nelthilta also says it herself - the presence of officers overwhelms her. She’s excited to let everyone know she is friends with rebels because they might be stronger in numbers. Her cheeky behavior feels almost as if she hides her fear behind sass.

Nettle became a spy for Orchis out of fear the does would get hurt. It’s obvious she is upset over it, that she actually wants to escape as well. But we see the metaphorical chains Orchis has on her so she cannot stop. Heck, she tells him: “We are going to break out west side of the warren” not “they”. She doesn’t exclude herself from it. And she apologizes to Hyzenthlay - while still lying in the same breath.

Orchis became so blinded with rage for Hyzenthlay and the others after the death of his brother that he stuck with his General until the end - and he would lash out if someone would say something nice about the outsiders. He becomes more unhinged as it goes on.

Vervain would have done everything for his general. You can see how he has a majority of Woundwort’s bad traits. His fear causes him to abuse his power because the punishment of failing scares him. His rank goes to his head because the way Vervain treats his Owsla is exactly how Woundwort treats him and others all the time. He takes his own frustration out on them. His fear is what caused him to rejoin Woundwort as a survival tactic.

Campion became withdrawn from everyone and even downright depressed in season three to a point where he would have prefered to stay dead.

Blackavar‘s whole mental condition in the book is so bad, I don’t even know where to start. He’s with different rabbits now and his advice doesn’t get taken, so he just forgets about it like his opinion never mattered.

Bluebell was hiding behind jokes as a coping mechanism, to get himself and Holly going. Telling his story as the only survivor from underground is the only serious moment he has.

Hawkbit’s snark moments are almost always because he is afraid of the unknown and because he is stressed - it’s the whole reason he keeps lashing out at Fiver. His visions are cryptic.

Pipkin, no matter what he goes through, remains full with kindness. He is good at talking to people, he is good at getting them to open up. But he never extends that kindness to himself. His issues usually fester and then he just blurts them out, something that becomes even worse when Campion makes him promise not to tell everyone he is alive.

“I did everything wrong,” he says when the promise is broken.

Pipkin is kind and forgiving towards others, but generally has a tendency to ignore his own issues and will be unnecessary harsh at himself for it. He would rather help others feel better. Even when he is angry when the war is over and everyone snaps at each other because the warren is filled, he runs off to cool down somewhere.

When he is upset, he deals with it on his own. He will answer when someone asks about it but generally never approaches first.

Blackberry's grief over losing Campion causes her to snap at others.

[a-student-out-of-time]

If you want a more analytical take on ‘Queen of Despair’ from me, personally I feel like the reason LINUJ went ‘BTW these two are terrible people’ in the narration is because Iroha’s and Syobai’s actions fall into ‘Pay Evil unto Evil.’ territory. Like oh no they are scamming people that’s bad. But…they’re scamming Despairs who are basically demons incarnate so they basically deserved to get all their money stolen. I feel like he was trying to avoid people developing that mindset. (1/2)

//That’s a different take and one I can see working

//The thing is, while it’s a problem both have as writers, I think LINUJ is actually worse than Kodaka in that respect. While Kodaka doesn’t really present a nuanced view, he at least lets the events of the stories and actions of the characters largely stand on their own. He presents the conflict in extremely good vs. evil terms, to be sure, but that’s more of a lack of nuance

//LINUJ has the problem of being able to present a more nuanced view, then backpedaling and specifying who was wrong, that they’re bad people and that we shouldn’t agree with them.

Some examples:

Kizuna finds out that Yuki and Akane were the masterminds and tries to kill them despite both of them being amnesic of their identities...oh, but she’s a gold-digger and a bully, so we can’t say she was doing the right thing

Syobai was abandoned by his parents in another country, nearly sold into slavery and had to get by through selling whatever he could to survive. Despite becoming a cold-blooded survivor, he still has a sense of honor and takes a stand in favor of helping the others over saving himself...oh, but he’s still human garbage, so we can’t like him.

Kokoro is a genius with Alexithymia who wants to study human emotions, and while she has some darker qualities to her goal, she still has a caring and compassionate side and it was that lack of emotional understanding that sadly got her killed...oh but she’s also an abusive mother and nothing anyone did could’ve gotten her to change.

The Voids are a group of scared, lost, desperate children who are seeking out the power of Utsuro because it’s the only thing that’ll allow them to survive once their Divine Luck flips, and they’ll either return to their old lives or die...oh, but they’re still the masterminds of the game and thus deserve every bad thing that happens to them. They’re fated to die regardless of what anyone does.

//And that’s not even touching on the fact that he completely rewrote his plans for Kanade because of V3′s third chapter, and then talked about how her entire character now revolves around her her creepy obsession with her sister, and how nothing anybody did would’ve changed how she turns out

//I know LINUJ has a very different view on human nature from me, and I’m not gonna say he’s wrong. I’ll stick to my views on storytelling and just say that I don’t much care for stories or authors that feel the need to spell out who you should and shouldn’t be rooting for

//It almost feels disrespectful to fans of those characters if you tell them that they’re wrong for liking them and sympathizing with them, and it exposes a sort of narrative insecurity where you feel like people won’t grasp that what they did was wrong. Not to mention the idea that none of them would ever change, which...I mean, I don’t want to get into it, but that’s not a take on humanity I agree with either.

//Kodaka, for all his flaws as a writer, at least is willing to let people like villainous or morally ambiguous characters, and doesn’t go out of his way to tell you who’s right or wrong, or that they never would’ve changed no matter the circumstance.

//But most of all, it’s a disappointing case of show, don’t tell. If you want me to believe that these characters were bad people incapable of true growth or redemption as people, it’s up to you as the creator to make that abundantly clear in the story itself and not just their character sheet or a Q/A

//Some details can be left as author’s notes, but when it’s core to them as characters or the stories, you need to bring your A-game and make that obvious within the narrative

[unofficialadamtaurus]

Like a week ago you answered an ask about how the black trailer could’ve hinted at Adam being an abuser etc etc and it made me realize how much my own projection colored my view of Adam. I project HARD onto Blake. I started watching RWBY right after volume 2 finished and I honestly interpreted him as an abusive ex from the beginning but only because things paralleled MY experience. My abuser would’ve caught me if I fell. I used to draw him sometimes as a coping mechanism to get him out of my head and because it was hard to let him go even when it was right thing. Ironically, I used to think then portrayal of Adam as an abuser and Blake as a victim was so well-done (though I always thought the way the white fang plot was handled was super racist. I never hated Adam as a character) but since I read that a week ago I’ve been thinking about it more and realized that I was just interpreting so much that simply was not actually in the show, lol

Part of the reason it took me so long to answer this ask is that it prompted some genuine reflection on my part. In the past, I've looked at the relationship between Blake and Adam, at the discussions and dissections of it and the theoretical abuse in the show, and wondered how anyone could see what the show presented as any kind of compelling arc of an abuse survivor breaking free and healing.

Any time someone brought up those kinds of sympathetic connections, I wondered if they were serious. If they were, I wondered how they could possibly find catharsis in RWBY's presentation. There are, I thought to myself, so many other shows that do these kinds of arcs better, so RWBY should not get any kind of credit for doing it badly.

Blake drawing Adam when he abused her? Confusing at best.

Blake's there-again-gone-again backbone when standing up to Adam? Terrible writing.

Adam catching Blake when she fell and never giving a single hint of that kind of character before the Beacon confrontation? More terrible writing.

But stepping back and looking at it from a different perspective - yours - I realize that I was being a callous asshole about it. Something being badly written doesn't stop people from forming attachments to it or seeing pieces of themselves in it. I mean, c'mon, the hypocrisy of me seeing bits of myself in Adam's self destructive rage yet refusing to see how someone could sympathize with Blake? You have to laugh.

Besides, abuse isn't a concrete experience. It's wrong of me to say that "Blake doing X means she cannot have been abused" because, as you've pointed out, there are abuse survivors out there who have undoubtedly done what she does. People are messy and complicated and the ways they deal with messy and complicated things don't always make sense to an outside observer.

That said, there is a chasm between fictional media and real life. I think there are many, many things the show could have done to better sell the abuse angle to the audience, which I stated in that post all those weeks ago. The show has the advantage of not being limited to Blake's perception of the world; one or two cutaways during scenes preceding Beacon, even in the Black trailer itself, could show Adam's supposed facade dropping when Blake is unaware. (And yes, much of this lacking foreshadowing/exposition is due to the issue that the abuse angle may not have been planned from the start.)

The abuse in canon is a black hole of supposition. There is as much evidence to support it as there is to refute it and much of the evidence on both sides falls to personal interpretation. Thus we get situations like this, situations in which you - someone with experience - fill in (subconsciously or otherwise) what the show does not have to strengthen the story in your own eyes. Then I, someone without that experience, look at the same show and, rather than filling in those gaps, trip over them.

I'll be more cognizant of this interplay between personal experience and canon in the future. I knew it existed, of course, but I didn't realize the extent to which it could affect someone's enjoyment of the show and its more lacking aspects.

I believe it would also be useful for people who enjoy the show and find themselves clashing with others over how "good" some aspect of it is to examine why they find a part of canon so compelling. Is it because what is strictly there in canon is compelling, or is it because they are filling in the gaps with personal experience and emotion?

Thanks for giving me a look behind a curtain I hadn't even realized warranted investigation.

[myrandomscribbling]

Cut for Moira MacTaggert rant, no one needs to see this.

"What about when Moira imprisoned her son? Huh? Huh? She was always awful!"

At the time, that was an act of desperation. And the purely pragmatic alternative would have been to run a chunk of iron through the brain of his current host to prevent him from killing anyone else. Was it right? No. It was awful. But it didn't make her a villain. Back then, before the retcon, it was her trying to save her son who was a murderous parasite the only way she thought she could.

Plus, I consider that the beginning of a progressively worse portrayal of the character, so I can award no points for that, anyway. It was problematic, but came from the same general time period as things like the Avengers wishing Carol Danvers well as she was whisked away by her r*pist. (That she even works with the Avengers at all shows that they've swept that under the rug, they should really have done the same for Moira in my opinion if they weren't going to outright retcon it). That people understandably view it as her being an abusive mother doesn't let the writers that decided that for her off the hook.

"What about her brainwashing Magnus?"

Yeah, definitely on solid ground with that one. "Let's portray Moira as brainwashing a Holocaust survival" was not a good look on the writers if they were trying to keep her vaguely sympathetic, and it's pretty clear they were. But it was still an act of desperation as opposed to murdering a baby she was afraid of or attempting to commit genocide.

Or changing an abuse survivor retroactively into the Abuser, Actually. Again, I put that on the writers.

If you think I didn't complain about those both at the time, you have another think coming. I haven't been comfortable with the direction the writers decided to take Moira in for a very long time, Moira X is just an awful culmination of those events. I think the whole thing was a terrible wast, horribly contrived, and that they should have just left her, with all her faults and crimes, dead rather than quadruple down on them.

Magnus has attempted to commit genocide and is a mass murderer, but he's generally presented as a hero now. Apocalypse and Sinister are both eugenicists and just generally terrible people. Charles has often not acquitted himself well, though the worst of it it looks like they've lightly retconned or tried to have him make up for. Don't get me started with Hank. But I'm supposed to think that Moira is just the worst of the worst? Come on.

Standard disclaimer: Yes, I get that those events in the past did her no favors, but the way they've geometrically doubled down over the last few years leaves even more of a bad taste in my mouth.

[hexentanzenigma]

Oh no, don't worry!

You're not rude at all, and I apologize because I misread part of your post on a side and not being a native English speaker, I think I wasn't able to convey in a proper way that my reply was most about others failing in seeing his three-dimensionality, not about what you said :)

I didn't mean to dismiss your frustration in any way or your knowledge about D&D lore. I'm not really this kind of person and I wouldn't dare to be so rude :)

Unfortunately I'm used to find people who are shallow and fail to see Cazador's three-dimensionality as a villain -big he is indeed three-dimensional considering how little screentime he has!- and I thought that beyond Cazador's Asian features, you were abnnoyed also by this. I did a 1+1 that wasn't really there, I'm sorry for that :/

My first thought when I read it was about how not only we are constantly judged and ostracized for liking him even if he's one of the many other well-written villains, but also Asian appreciators explaining how they related to the characters and questline have the same fate, unless they're explicitly hating on him. Like they weren't entitled to share their personal experiences about their cultures, especially with other Asian fellows and fans in a more open and constructive way.

However, not being Asian myself, I usually don't consider my place to talk too much about this, especially when risking to give the idea of speaking somehow on behalf of Asian people and telling how they should feel about him. I think this is also the reason why I instinctively avoided tha matter. Moreover being all the day, everyday, among people who like him as a character, Asian (from East Asia and South-East Asia too) and not Asian alike, his Asian features are for us just another side which we want to find headcanons to. Luckily I haven't stumbled into people insulting him for his Asian features for months (it did happen in the beginning tho, by a few feral Astarion fans/twt harassers, using IRL slurs used towards Asian people) and I hope it didn't happen again since. I wouldn't be surprised tho. Some corners of the fandom are terrible towards real people.).

Anyway, from my corner, I've never seen often people hating on him as a consequence of him not being white. Hope so, at least. I surely might be wrong or not seeing other parts of the fandoms, so my point of view is limited. Most of the hate we receive as fans is because of he's Astarion's abuser and because he's considered a rapist of his own spawns. Due to this, many tell us that this is the point where they drag the line: you can be a crazy murderer, a necrophiliac, a slaver, the cruelest creature out there or anything else, but not a rapist (and as I said, for Raphael there are explicit hints, for Cazador there aren't).

And here, usually, there is a list of horrible, harmful stereotypes towards SA survivors especially if they explore Cazador and Astarion past dynamics: I've seen people telling survivors that they're lying because if it was true they wouldn't dare to write about Astarion's trauma; that they wished it happened to them again because once it wasn't enough if they cope in that way/if they "shipped" a rapist with his victim; that SAd people would have preferred to die instead of being raped and if they weren't drawning into depression or having thoughts about ending their life they weren't really traumatized; etc.

However, this doesn't take anything away from the frustration of seeing the only standing-out Asian character being a villain and one of the worst kind: I knew people loving to see a villain they considered beautiful to be Asian, others have seen in him the "Yellow Peril" stereotypes especially when paired with Wyll considered a neglected character, others that doesn't care. That's why I'm not in the position to speak about it too much, not sharing the same ethnicity. Larian could have added more, if they wanted, that's for sure, as many other similar things. The game is beautiful but far from perfection.

I know there is Zarys, the Zentharim leader, being Asian too, but she's not "a good one" as well. I mean..we know that canon Zentharim are evil-aligned. She's very cool, tho. Beyond them, yes, I can't recall Asian of any character that isn't very minor/random :/ This said, unfortunately there is no real hint or info about why they did such a choice. If it was based on something that was then cut, like Amanita/Lady Incognita's story and the presence of the others 3 Szarrs (Fistula, Dralia and Blovark), all bloodkin. Maybe they had all Asian features and Amanita was the positive young girl, rebelling against his own family trying to force her to become what they wanted her to be. Sort of. But then everything was cut and Cazador was left as a final boss fight of a disconnected quest, with giant plotholes and missing characters. We were curious too, but Larian doesn't talk about him, doesn't share any meme about him like for others villains, there have been no Q&A in general and it's unlikely there will be any. It's something I'd have liked to ask them since the beginning.

I feel that rushing against Starfield release left Act3 in general very badly chopped, with terrible and weird side-quests, even more plotholes (like, Gortash's palace should have been the Grand Duke's one in the Upper City; Raphael never talks about him and vice versa, nothing is really connected between them two, there's just Nubaldin at the House of Hope and so on).

Sorry again for the misunderstanding :)

i love bg3, and i love being in the fandom but also. i have never felt more alone as someone who also happens to be chinese like.

i don’t like cazador. i don’t think the majority of bg3 fans do. but the fact that i’ve never seen the same amount of grace given to cazador that is given to gortash or even raphael, by fans or in the game, just fucking hurts.

consider gortash and cazador: both gortash and cazador have been hurt, and choose to perpetuate this cycle of hurt. gortash is widely crushed on and shipped with durge. in game, karlach (gortash’s victim, no less) expresses sympathy when she realises what was done to gortash. nothing remotely resembling this sympathy is given to cazador, regardless of in game or in fandom.

i’ve always gotten upset seeing people hate on cazador without allowing space for nuance, and haven’t been able to explain why until now—

characters like raphael and gortash can be loved, regardless of / including all the atrocities they commit. they’re pined after, and shipped, and loved. anytime someone likes cazador, on the other hand, fingers are pointed and everyone goes ‘but he’s an abuser!!’

and that’s just it: cazador is just ‘the abuser’. hatred towards the only memorable asian character never goes challenged or questioned, because he was quite literally written to be the most evil, most abusive character of all.

yes, he’s a terrible person, yes, he’s an abuser, yes, asian people can be abusive just like every other person on earth. it’s understandable why one would hate him, because he’s literally written to be, but the fact that he’s the only asian character i can name in bg3 just really fucking hurts.

fans who love raphael (me included) or gortash (me not included) are much more likely to be ‘excused’ or accepted, whereas any fans who even express an ounce of love for cazador immediately get shut down. why do you think this is. think about the implications of the only memorable asian in the game being the most abusive and most evil. (no, asian side characters and npcs with two lines of dialogue don’t count. no, the one asian face option for tav also doesn’t count)

again, i love bg3, and its changed my fucking life, but its just deeply upsetting to me that this character was written specifically to be hateable with no room for grace or remorse or empathy. nobody questions the blind, pure hatred for him. nobody questions why this hatred isn’t expressed quite as strongly for literally any other evil white character in the game.

i’m not asking for people who sympathize with / relate to astarion’s storyline to like cazador at all— that’s not the point of all this. i’m not telling you which characters to like or dislike. but racist beliefs / predispositions / inclinations do not magically become less racist when the character of color in question is written to be abusive, not to mention the fact that he’s the only asian character in bg3 that i can even name or remember.

growing up, i’ve always wanted to see myself in the fantasy stories that i loved. i’ve given up hoping that i will, but i’m really sad and disappointed that the one character who remotely looks like me in this game that i love with my whole heart is just evil. not nuanced, not tragic, not even a fucking person to most fans or even the creators, regardless of his canon backstory and his morally wrong similarities to other characters that are loved like gortash and raphael.

i love this game and this community so much, but i just feel so . i don’t know, stupid? LMAO maybe i’m just reading too much into it, but i just feel terribly alone in feeling this way

[clonazepammer]

The thing about “My brilliant friend” is that both Lenú and Lila are pretty fucked up women with a lot of issues and traumas. They both were raised up in a huge violent environment and basically if you read the novels it’s pretty clear that a very important part of the plot is showing all the different types of violence women are exposed to and how abuse and sexism can adopt different forms and levels, but are always kind of traumatic. So for understand both characters and their decisions it’s essential to remind this. Because for both (yeah, for Lenú too, even if she finally leave the neighborhood and became a middle-class woman) violence is deeply normalized in their way of seeing the world and many attitudes that the reader/viewer may find scandalous, for them are normal.

On the other hand, it is important to understand that Ferrante does not create characters to be liked or friendly. Except for Enzo (because Enzo is a saint) all the characters in the novels/series with any relevance have profoundly negative aspects. They all have selfish, narcissistic attitudes or do things that harm others. Even "positive" or "friendly" characters can be very unpleasant (Pasquale is a good example) This is something that is seen right away with Lila, who sometimes has very machiavellian and terrible attitudes (or maybe it is just Lenú exaggerating things, but I genuinely believe that Lila -at least in her youth- could become very horrible) and of course it happens with Lenú. Lenú is not a kind narrator or a sympathetic protagonist. This is something that is not noticed at first because all her self-centeredness is justified by being a self-conscious teenager. But when Lenú leaves the neighborhood and starts a life that her friends can't even dream of, a life full of opportunities, a life that she continues to despise because she thinks that Lila (her friend who has been mistreated, who doesn't have a penny and who is labor exploited) continues to live great adventures while she continues to be an insignificant observer, there we begin to realize how terribly narcissistic Lenú can be and the lack of total empathy that she sometimes shows. But you also have to understand how Lenú's mind works. Lenú was always someone he watched, who lived life through Lila. Lila is the practical, she is the part that reacts, that is pragmatic. Lenú is the emotional part, all of it is repressed emotions that constantly consume her. She is the world of overflowing ideas and feelings. Lenú continues to see Lila (even when they are both already thirty) as the teenager who ate up the world and could do anything. She has a very childish view of her friendship, stuck in the time of their adolescence. And that happens with everything, it also happens with love. Lenú tends to idealize situations and people, that's why she is totally consistent as a character with what happens with Nino. For her Nino is a childhood dream, it always has been. And she doesn't care what she's heard about him or is aware that he's a piece of shit. For her, Nino is still the boy she liked when she was little, just like Lila is the friend with whom she read books and played with dolls. Lenú's tragedy is that she achieves everything that Lila would have wanted to achieve if she had the opportunity, but she idealized her friend so much since she was little that his mind still thinks that Lila is the one who has the upper hand. The friendship between the two is tragic and beautiful at the same time. Terribly complex, like themselves. Throwing hate at these two characters makes no sense. They are not good or bad, they are just survivors.

[spockandawe]

hrhghrghfg i’ve spent an hour now writing a post about jiang cheng which is like half done, and i still can’t tell if it will set in the oven, but i am :[[[ about the number of posts I’ve tripped across in the last few days about him, complaining about people who like him and want him to have nice things, because he’s their uwu precious tsundere baby with a love language of violence.

That was literally the language in one of them, for the record. ‘love language of violence,’ and now i’m Bothered.

I have snipped like five rambling paragraphs because apparently I cannot shut up or be short-winded about this, gdi

My approximate point is that whether or not you think he’s abusive, whether or not you think he’s done an adequate job of correcting for the trauma of his own childhood, sincerely posting that his “love language is violence” is a fucked up thing to say about someone who almost watched his mother cut off his brother’s hand.

Interestingly, I regularly see discourse about how it’s fucked up for people to stan an abuser (often very loosely defined and/or supported), and never see discourse about whether it’s fucked up for people to stan a character who’s heavily implied to be a torturer, which is usually a lot less ambiguous. But then, maybe, there might be uncomfortable questions about how the fuck does anyone think it’s okay to like Wei Wuxian, a definite torturer, and want him to have nice things :V

(that’s a take i kind of want to see, because sometimes i like heaving a sigh so heavy it makes my chest hurt, but also it wouldn’t be all that novel after the transformers fandom *gestures at large cast consisting of war criminals and tailgate, a regular criminal*)

My point isn’t that Jiang Cheng did nothing wrong. He made some good-faith mistakes, and he did some fucked up shit because he was upset and lashing out. People’s personal lines vary on ‘well sometimes people do fucked up shit’ versus ‘okay these are toxic patterns of behavior’ versus ‘yeah now that is definitely abuse.’ But it’s very... unsettling to me that a character whose own childhood abuse was so heavily emphasized in the narrative (two characters, if we count jgy) is so prone to having fandom seize upon morally ambiguous/unclear/complicated/grey moments and interpret them in the worst possible light. And when Wei Wuxian had a comparably traumatic childhood and bounced out of it less traumatized than expected (partially thanks to a terrible memory), and he comes in for none of the same criticisms as jc or jgy, it feels like he’s being held up as a “““good survivor””” and that just feels extra, extra uncomfortable.

I do kind of get it. We’re in Wei Wuxian’s point of view. The narrative is able to be extra sympathetic to him in a way it isn’t to Jiang Cheng or Jin Guangyao. But also, like I’ve brought up before, the plot of this novel is literally about how framing is critical to how an onlooker perceives a story, how framing is critical to who onlookers define as the hero or the villain, and still we are apparently over here looking at a damaged man at least attempting to avoid passing along the trauma of his childhood, and brushing him off as an abusive asshole whose love language is violence.

[fieldoftulips]

a criticism of It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

before i begin, please note that this criticism discusses domestic violence, abuse, and contains spoilers for the novel. if you don't agree with what i have to say, simply scroll away, otherwise feel free to add your own thoughts!

It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover is one of the most popular and recommended books on BookTok. The community's appreciation for the novel and author is what encouraged me to read the book in the first place. I picked up the book immediately after reading The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which I thoroughly enjoyed, making my expectations for It Ends With Us to be really high.

It Ends With Us met all my expectations and more. I was enamored with the way Hoover wrote, weaving her words to make me feel so many emotions at once, even causing my heart to drop at some points, which no other pieces of literature has ever made me do. If you had asked me to criticize the novel after I read it, the only thing I could offer would be my dislike for the ending.

After months of mulling over the book and listening to different perspectives and interpretations of the novel, my stance has changed a lot and I'm able to offer more criticism. Before I offer any actual criticism, I want to state that I am not dismissing the voices of domestic violence (DV) survivors. I am merely pointing out a piece of media that did not execute the message of surviving DV very well. I understand that this book is based off the experiences of Hoover and her mother, however the way this book was framed takes away any value of the message It Ends With Us is trying to send. My criticism lies with the book solely.

The novel's theme is abuse, something that is not mentioned anywhere in the synopsis. This is something tiktok user @/miss_ipkiss_reads addresses in her review of It Ends With Us which I want to reiterate. I went into this novel completely blind, only knowing of what is told in the synopsis. The presence of abuse was shocking and unexpected. This book is marketed and framed as a romance with a love triangle, which is misleading. The problem does not lie with what readers view it as after reading it, but the way it is marketed. Goodreads labels the book under romance, offering no insight on the horrifying and heavy topics of the book.

The lack of trigger warnings further emphasizes the irresponsibility of Hoover. It's ironic that a book about DV survivors doesn't think for DV survivors who need the trigger warnings. Fans of the book defend this by saying that the shock effect is used to perpetuate what abusive relationships are: unexpected. Using DV as a mere plot twist strips the story of a meaningful message, reducing the issue of DV.

Circling back to my previous mention of the ending, I want to go in depth on why it was a terrible way to end the book. In the book, the main character, Lily becomes pregnant with the baby of her abusive husband, Ryle. Lily breaks things off with Ryle, to end the cycle of abuse, but still lets him see her daughter unsupervised. It takes away the whole point of ending the cycle. Ryle is known for being prone to blackouts and becoming violent and aggressive. Letting a child be within his proximity unsupervised and knowing (even experiencing) his violent episodes is irresponsible and an unsatisfying finish to a book where readers are supposed to root against him. Ryle is let off with barely any repercussions, creating a narrative in which abusers can go on with their lives without facing the consequences for their traumatizing actions. This goes hand-in-hand with Hoover's harmful message that there is no such thing as bad people, just people who sometimes do bad things.

Colleen Hoover is a brilliant author who writes books in a way which captivates me and makes me feel emotions that no other book has made me feel. My criticism of It Ends With Us does not take away what I initially felt for the book and vice-versa. Handling stories about such heavy topics needs to be executed in a careful and respectful manner that this book didn't accomplish. Overall, the message this book sends borders harmful and did not achieve what it wanted to achieve, creating an oversimplified outlook on abuse.

[the-resurrection-3d]

Nick seems to have a really complicated relationship with a number of people, some of which cast him in a sympathetic light. Is this a character you view as capable of anything good, or is he just pure malevolence? Or to put it another way: should we feel bad that Nick became something awful when he didn't have to, or was he always going to be a shitbag regardless of the circumstances of his life?

Me seeing this ask:

I absolutely think Nick as capable of good, which is part of why Alberto has a hard time actually thinking of him as his abuser. Yeah, he can make bitter jokes like changing Nick's name in his phone to "Patrick Bateman" or even telling Nick he "took advantage" of him when he was younger, but he has a hard time thinking of Nick as an abuser because he sees and has experienced Nick's glimpses of goodness. That’s the actual point of the Berlin fic: to show more sides of Nick and demonstrate why exactly Alberto is so attached to him. Nick literally is the reason Alberto is still alive to meet Luca at all.

There’s actually a scene where Nick outright says he thinks of his “real” self as having died a long time ago, because his dad dying and his uncle thus coming into his life to abuse him was clearly not supposed to have happened. I’ll post a little bit so you can see what I mean (unbeta’d plz no bully):

Nick reaches for Alberto's hand on the pillow, holding his fingers apart. I think I also keep it as a reminder of my real self. The person I was supposed to be. Which-- a joyless pop of laughter -- which I know is fucking stupid because I was four, but-- Nick taps the top of Alberto's finger, presses down so Alberto can feel his skin pull away from the nail -- you know.

A small shrug. Maybe I've been only myself. As fucking awful a thought that’d be. But don't you worry about that, too?

Alberto wants to tell Nick I don't think this is the real you, that the real you is the one who holds me after my nightmares and makes me pancakes with fresh strawberries and remembers something I wanted from five months ago and texts me just to tell me he misses me, but Nick asked him a question, didn't he? So instead Alberto says, voice low and slow, I just think I've been nothing but myself, and that's the problem. I mean-- He has to clear his throat-- I mean I'm not like you, my dad never liked me, and that's why he left.

Nick says, What a stupid motherfucker.

Alberto smiles and squeezes Nick's hand. You can say that again.

So as you can see, Nick himself struggles over the exact question you’re asking. I also think of this excerpt from Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery:

The child entrapped in this kind of horror develops the belief that she is somehow responsible for the crimes of her abusers. Simply by virtue of her existence on earth, she believes that she has driven the most powerful people in her world to do terrible things. Surely, then, her nature must be thoroughly evil. The language of the self becomes a language of abomination. . . In the words of an incest survivor: “I am filled with black slime. If I open my mouth it will pour out. I think of myself as the sewer silt that a snake would breed upon.”

Alberto, of course, struggles with reconciling how genuinely kind and thoughtful Nick can be with the rest of their relationship. Alberto wants to help Nick so badly, but obviously that’s something Nick has to want for himself ( the_masculine_urge_to_do_literally_anything_but_go_to_therapy.jpg). Alberto doesn’t have the script for when your abuser is an actual person with a wider range of emotions than “drunken anger” (which is largely all Alberto remembers of Bruno)—and similarly, Alberto doesn’t have the script for coercive rape. He only understands abuse as one person completely bulldozing the other with no room for love anywhere in-between, only understands rape as extreme and obvious violence.

(The whole “grammar of violence” thing has always referred to what Sharon Marcus calls a “rape script” wherein “one person auditions for the role of rapist and strives to maneuver another person into the role of victim” from her essay “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention.” Her use of the whole “script” idea never extends beyond man-on-woman with some gestures towards the nuances of race—which isn’t even really me complaining, because I understand why she did that—but obviously this whole idea that rape is a “script” has consequences outside of that one very specific dynamic. How many times have we heard that men are “incapable” of being raped by women?)

Alberto can’t bear to think of himself as Nick’s victim—I posted the full excerpt a day or two ago, but one of my favorite lines in the Berlin fic is, “If Nick happened to you, then you happened to him, too.” Furthermore, claiming titles like “rape victim” or even “rape survivor,” to Alberto, implicitly places his abuse in comparison to the genuinely fucking horrific shit Nick went through as a child, and he can’t bear that, either.

The actual reason behind all this is that people refusing to admit that abusers can have actual feelings too does nothing for helping others learn to recognize abuse in their own lives. In fact, it makes it more difficult. I’m not writing with the hopes that someone is going to read any of my stupid bullshit and suddenly “wake up” to the fact that they’re being abused, but it is something I feel passionate about. (If other people find comfort in my work, I’m genuinely glad, but mostly I just feel sad for them because the current fandom climate around work that’s even slightly “”messy”” about trauma is absolutely fucking vile. There’s so much better work than mine that could be made about these topics that won’t ever be—there’s a reason I haven’t said who the friend I’ve been writing all this out with actually is.)

So, to answer your question directly: yes, you’re supposed to feel a little bit bad that Nick turned out this way. Or at least understand why Alberto feels bad for him. I probably won't know which side y'all end up on because I'm honestly probably not going to read the comments on the Berlin fic if/when I ever post it, ayy lmao. Being called a pedophile/rapist/zoophile was only funny the first few times.

[itsclydebitches]

Another thing about how rwby views trauma survivors reacting to their abuse or unfortunate background is that it frames the solution to healing is by serving in armed forces. Weiss and Blake joined Beacon to escape their abuser. Ren and Nora joined Beacon after the loss of their families. Winter joined the military to escape Jacques and I'm assuming will become the new Atlas general after Ironwood's death. The Huntsmen Academies are all framed as these safe havens (literally with Mistral) for anyone who can carry a weapon, meanwhile anyone who can't or doesn't want to join, or joins a group outside of the institution is depicted as bad.

To say that this is all muddied would be a huge understatement because even if we put aside the complicated message of, "Overcome your abuse by learning to punch back," at this point the combined huntsmen-military is no longer presented as a means of escape. Rather, between the rewriting of Winter's history – she has apparently been manipulated by Ironwood this whole time rather than choosing the military as a means of escaping her abuser – as well as the military aligned huntsmen – FNKI aren't heroes like RWBYJNOR anymore, willingly protecting their home, they're children who have been forced into this conflict – there's now this major divide between fighters-on-their-own and fighters-as-part-of-the-institution. We could even read this as extending to the huntsmen academies themselves, given that one has fallen, one was destroyed, and the other lost its figurehead. They used to be presented as havens for struggling individuals... now, not so much. The plot's message is not that heroes win by banding together through established structures that were designed to help those coming from bad circumstances (note how aware Ozpin is of these backstories: Qrow's bandit tribe, Blake's White Fang history, looking into Ruby's defense of the store, etc.), but rather you win by rag-tag individuals making decisions based on friendship.

Yet simultaneously, that divide is by no means neat and tidy (since plenty of stories have that latter message). As we've discussed elsewhere, RWBYJNOR is ingrained in these structures despite the story rejecting them. They got their initial training at Beacon (how many fans have argued that they learned enough there? That they're basically full-fledged huntsmen already? So, that school was pretty important, yeah?). They worked with Ironwood for months. They're using the prestige of their licenses to get people to listen to them. They're hijacking military equipment to give the world orders to prepare for an attack. Ruby became a general in all but title in that moment, in the same way that Weiss became the Remnant equivalent of a cop when she tried to arrest her father. Volumes 6-8 suddenly wanted to send an anti-military message without considering the context of their story (what does a military mean in a world where unambiguously evil monsters attack, as opposed to a world where these "monsters" are minorities?) and they failed to separate the heroes from the structures they so passionately reject. You cannot have the group stand in opposition to Ironwood and everything he represents while also encouraging the audience to oohh and ahhh at Jaune whipping out his huntsmen license to lead a group of civilians to safety. The supposed cruelty of the former and supposed heroism of the latter are meant to exist simultaneously, despite the contradiction. We went from the message that huntsmen academies, including Atlas', are a haven from abuse, poverty, etc. but now, suddenly, certain types of escapes are no longer morally sound. So just ignore how many of the heroes took the "wrong" path.

And then on top of all of that we have Rhodes. RWBY is pushing the individualism message hard nowadays – that a group of friends is better than a general and his soldiers just ignore that Ruby is their leader and they all follow her orders – yet it's Rhodes' individuality that is criticized in Cinder's flashback. He, as a single person, tries to take on the complex situation of helping an abused child and he failed. The fandom's reaction to his efforts is pretty telling because most kept falling back on structural solutions: "Why didn't he just call CPS? Why didn't he get her admitted early like Ruby? Why didn't he approach some superior to fix all this?" Most fans seemed to grudgingly acknowledge that kidnapping Cinder and raising this traumatized kid on the road while hunting grimm was... not the best idea, so they turned to the very things they've rejected in Ruby's part of the story: laws that people have to follow, schools with an hierarchy that can serve as support, someone above you whose orders you follow and whose seniority can help you in a tough situation. In Cinder's flashback people wanted Remnant to have structural solutions because, clearly, leaving one flawed man to fix this situation on his own didn't turn out so well. They (and the writers) just don't want Ruby to have to obey those same structures because Ruby is the title hero they've grown to love over eight years. We feel like we know Ruby and we assume that if Ruby is in charge she'd totally make the best decision. But Rhodes? He's a stranger, someone we see for less than ten minutes, so his flaws are far easier to home in on. Few are willing to acknowledge that Ruby is Rhodes on a much larger scale, trying things because she wants to help, but ultimately doing far more harm because she's incredibly inexperienced and is just running on her own, individual ideas, not any of the structures in place that are meant to deal with such crises. Rhodes' "Idk what else to do, so I guess I'll teach a tortured kid how to defend herself and hope for the best" is Ruby's "Idk what else to do, so I guess I'll drop Atlas on Mantle, leave with the Relics, move everyone to Vacuo, and hope for the best." The primary difference is that while Rhodes is punished through his death and the narrative makes it clear that this was the wrong choice (Cinder murders everyone and becomes a villain), whereas Ruby's screwups are continually framed as heroic. And that's because the show can't make up its mind about this structural vs. individual approach. Do huntsmen need to be held responsible for their actions, or do they need complete freedom to do the right thing with the belief that anything that goes wrong was completely out of their hands (Yangs' take)? Well, that depends entirely on which huntsmen we're talking about. RWBY's idea that some people are intrinsically good and others intrinsically bad means that the writing – and the fandom – can demand rogue huntsmen be held accountable while simultaneously cheering the group running away from arrest; curse Clover for following orders while simultaneously gushing over how loyal the group is to Ruby; condemn lies that Ozpin gives while simultaneously justifying the ones Ruby gives, etc. RWBY has no clear message, just the insistence that whatever our heroes does is good. The path they've taken, learning to fight to escape horrific situation is a good thing. The path Rhodes laid out, teaching Cinder to fight to escape a horrific situation, is a bad thing. It comes down to the characters, not the situation.

Finally, yeah, there's a complete lack of acknowledgment that either option – structural or individual – alienates those who don't know how to fight. This is seen most clearly in Whitley who asks why he'd want to be a huntsmen when he can afford an army, yet when armies are painted as unquestionably bad, the story won't admit that this leaves Whitley stranded. He had no way to escape his abuse like Winter and Weiss did. He had no way to defend himself when Weiss shoved a weapon in his face. The story never had to grapple with where it's left characters who can't fight and who shouldn't make the evil choice of relying on soldiers because Whitley unexpectedly got on Weiss' good side and gained her protection. It doesn't matter anymore because Whitley is a Good Guy now who the group will take care of. But if he'd continued to disagree? Gone to his room instead of calling Klein? If, in the future, he does something that annoys his sisters and they decide to ignore him like they did before? Well, Whitley is screwed. In a world besieged by grimm – with attacks growing with each volume – he wanted to rely on an army to help solve these problems. But then that was said to be wrong, the general died, and the army, far as we can tell, was left behind to die as well. So what's left? Rely on the huntsmen. Just hope that there are enough (there aren't), that you get a good one (not a Lionheart, or a Raven, or a Cardin, or a Dudley, or...), and that the good ones care enough to bother protecting you. Even if the story hadn't gone out of its way to show how terribly flawed individual huntsmen are – from Lionheart's devastating betrayal to Qrow teaming up with Tyrian – from a practical perspective it's just not enough. Volume 8 showed without a doubt that in a war like this, one built on a witch's ability to summon endless grimm, an army is necessary. Salem would have been into Atlas in a second without those soldiers holding her forces back. Yang, Jaune, and Ren wouldn't have gotten to the whale without that army. Yet the story never acknowledges this, instead pretending like the few individuals we see – the limited numbers the characters keep admitting are horrendously limited – could have somehow saved the day without that assistance. Everything we're seeing nowadays – which characters can use these institutions to escape abuse, which can lie to help the war, which should rely on structures as opposed to their own ideas and physical power – is a mess of inconsistent, often contradictory messages.