#tw // abuse

[gin-juice-tonic]

I know I'm not the most eloquent writer so forgive me for if this sounds clunky

but I think Filbrick and Bill are both good mirrors in the way that they treat Ford.

They're both authority figures (one a father, and one a self purported sort of deity) who isolate him out as someone whose talents have earned their favor.

"You are the smarter son, so I'm going to pay closer attention to you and your achievements. I'll do whatever to make sure you keep furthering them." and "You are one of the smartest humans, so I'll be your muse. I'm going to guide you to keep furthering your achievements."

Meanwhile, they both had the exact same goal. "This guy is going to get me out of here."

Except, you know, one of them is talking about the nightmare realm and the other one is talking about New Jersey.

They both deliberately separate him from his only supports. Stan holds you back, he's getting kicked out. Fiddleford holds you back, you need to stop speaking with him.

And as soon as Ford makes one misstep, or even just a pause from that goal, the "favored" status he was given is held hostage. Suddenly he's nothing. If he doesn't step back in line quickly he'll continue to be nothing, or less than nothing. Will they ever care about him again? Next time, will he lose them forever?

Everything rides on Ford's shoulders, everything's his fault. With Filbrick, we saw what happened with Stan. Ford saw what happened with Stan. He knows how fast someone can just be dropped. With Bill we know he would ditch Ford for extended periods of time without notice. And we know Bill's retribution eventually furthered into explicitly shown violence.

I don't know how to end this train of thought. It's just all very terrible. And Bill knew Ford already had experience being treated this way. He was a calculated target.

[anonymouslymadebydesign]

I'm older now, so sometimes i dream of standing up to my abuser (my grandmother i lived with/was raised by) but then she scares me like she did all those years ago and suddenly im a teenager all over again beaten into submission

sometimes im embarrassed, this nearly 80 year old woman holds such power and put the fear of god into me and im only 25 year olds, ffs, I haven't even lived with her in 8 years and see her maybe once a year, IF that,,, ahhhh

rb with your most common recurring theme in your nightmares. mine is pregnancy

[mo-online]

On Thea Muldani

The first time she meets Jean Moreau, he smells like sweat and antiseptic, like gauze in desperate need of changing, like blood going sour beneath mounds of rotting bandage. She doesn’t even recognize him as a person at first — just another bruised, sharp-edged body among the wreckage Riko gathers like trophies. But then he looks up, and his face is all too wrong to be anything but real. Too young, too thin. His skin is swollen where it should be smooth, hollow where it should be full, like someone has carved him down to the bone just to see what would happen. His lip is split, the blood dry and flaking like rust, and when she shifts her weight between cleats, he flinches so sharply it’s like he’s already tasted the pain of it.

Jean Moreau is on her court, and he looks like something that has been left too long to rot. His wrists are too thin, his skin too pale except the violent hues that stain his sunken face — yellowed bruises, half-healed cuts, fresh red welts that still weep and ooze. The blood is drying black at the corner of his mouth, but he doesn’t wipe it away without permission. He doesn’t meet her eyes either, just stares somewhere past, like he’s been trained not to see. 

When Riko shoves him forward, his knees buckle, but he catches himself on instinct before he hits the ground. A mistake. His breath hitches, and she sees it — the way he braces for an impact that doesn’t yet come, the way his shoulders curl inward, waiting for unpredictable hands to leave their mark. 

“He’s fourteen,” Riko says, stalling it out before he finally gives into his own pressing cruelty; Moreau is on his knees before she can even raise a brow at the notion, blinking up with gray eyes as hollow as a chasm, wondering surely if she’ll be yet another captor to grind him into sand. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” 

“He’s fourteen,” Riko says, like it’s a joke, like Jean should be grateful he made it this far — and maybe he should be. There are worse things than being Riko’s pet. There are worse things than kneeling on this beautiful court, waiting to be told exactly where your worthless life belongs. Thea has seen what happens to the ones who don’t listen, the ones who don’t survive. So when Jean stays silent, when he doesn’t even dare to beg, she knows exactly why.

Fourteen. It’s not even a number that shocks her anymore — it just makes sense. Riko collects broken pieces. He likes watching them mend themselves back together in all the wrong ways. Jean Moreau is nothing new. Just another name to forget, another body to shape into something that could someday be useful. Fourteen means nothing when you’re standing on this court. Fifteen means nothing with a racquet in hand. He’ll be sixteen soon enough, and then what will it matter? Seventeen, eighteen, dead…

But Jean Moreau disgusts her. Not because of what’s happening to him — she knows better than to care — but because he’s still breathing, still moving, still existing silently despite it all. He’s already lost, already ruined, and yet he blinks up at her with those dull, stupid eyes like he thinks there’s something left to salvage. Like he thinks there’s a way out of this.

He doesn’t cry, and maybe that’s what gets her. He flinches, braces, with a desperate plea in his expression, but he doesn’t cry. Not even when Riko shoves him down again, not even when he lands hard on one wrist and something audibly crackles and pops. He just breathes through it, steady and practiced like a mantra or an oath. And Thea wonders — how much can one person take before they stop being a person at all?

Submission is vital for any Raven, but weakness is a vulnerability she knows best how to poke and prod at, peeling back each fraying thread until the toys she’s handed are far too unraveled to put back together. Riko rearranges the pieces until they’re too displaced to gild back together with anything pretty; Thea goes in for the kill. His violence breaks the body, her words warp the mind. They’re a team in all the worst ways; he’s a stepping stone to claw her way up the ranks.

Jean averts his gaze when Riko’s stare turns back on him, and he doesn’t look at her again. He doesn’t look at either of them. And Thea knows, without having to be told, that it’s only because he is simply not allowed. She wonders if she could make him flinch. If she reached out now, if she traced one of those ugly, half-healed bruises, would he break apart beneath her hands? If she peeled back the gause, gently traced the length of each open wound, tilted his chin ever so upward to meet her eyes. 

Jean is just another stray, another body thrown into the pit. He can wear a number on his cheek all he’d like, but he’ll never find his way off of the ground. 

“Well isn’t he cute?” she coos.

Jean doesn't react to her words, and she wonders briefly if he even knows how to anymore. If anyone has ever called him cute before, if the word even registers as an insult the way she intends it. His fingers twitch against the pristine court, curling slightly inward, but he keeps his head bowed, his shoulders tight. He’s waiting.

Thea’s thoughts wander, flicking briefly back to the green-eyed boy in her fondest memories. She can almost taste the sickening sweetness of the scenes that dance in tune with one another, how soft and pliable he was back then. She remembers Kevin as he was when they met, how his eyes were too bright and far too full of hope. He carried himself like he still believed in something, like he was so irrevocably important he could still be saved from this. She broke him in a different way — she breaks him in a different way, day in and day out, as Riko snickers to himself within earshot. Not with fists or kicks, but with that slow, delicate unraveling, making him bend to her with the kind of gentleness that would’ve made anyone else gag.

But Kevin didn’t. He doesn’t. He obeyed and obeys, folding under her, crumbling into her hands like softened clay. That has always been his weakness — his softness. Always too kind, too desperate to please. He’s “cute” in a way that makes Thea sick, a boy so eager to do anything to escape the mess he’d found himself in, so broken by his own desire to be loved.

She could test this boy. She could toe that decrepit line between suffocating fondness and gentle cruelty, could trace a finger along the underside of his swollen jaw just to watch him swallow back his instinct to flinch. She could tilt his gaze, force his eyes to meet hers, see if there’s even a person left in there or if Riko has already hollowed him out completely.

But she doesn’t.

She could test Jean, but briefly her mind flickers back to how intensely Kevin would retch at the cruelty. He’s never had the stomach for it Riko does, and building one inside of him is much more work than she has the patience for. 

Still, it makes her wonder. What would it have been like, if she had him the same way Riko has Jean? She could have done much more with that kind of softness. She could have made him the tool she needed, or maybe she could have shattered him completely. Kevin had never been the kind of broken that left pieces in his wake to scrape back together; he’s more like a ribbon, twisted and knotted until the shape of him is unrecognizable, and the tangles run far too deep to ever undo.

She pulls herself from the thought and focuses back on Jean. She taps her racquet against the ground, another idle movement that carries the quiet power of someone who knows they don’t have to act to control the room. Jean’s body is still bent, his head still low. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t break.

Instead of snapping the stick over the spinier point of his back, she exhales sharply through her nose and shifts her weight again like she’s already lost interest. If she acknowledges him for too long, it might come across as if she cares. And she doesn’t. She can’t. He isn’t worth the energy to pick at bit by bit, to torment and tease until he’s falling apart in her hands. 

Jean Moreau is just another broken thing, another body on the pile they’ll use to climb to the top. He’s fourteen, but what does that mean when you’re a Raven? He’ll learn like the rest of them. He’ll keep his mouth shut and his head down, and if he’s lucky, he won’t end up smeared across a locker room floor before he can be at least somewhat useful.

“Position?”

Thea watches Riko step forward, watches his shadow stretch long across Jean’s hunched form, and she doesn’t move to stop him. She never does.

“Backliner,” he sneers with a wild fury in his eyes. “Yours to train, if you can even stand him.”

There’s a brief moment, just before the first kick, where Jean presses his knees tight against his chest, like maybe he’s considering bracing for it, maybe he thinks if he moves just right it won’t hurt as much. But it will, it always will, and she will watch every time. She will watch with her arms folded and jaw clenched, eyes focused and expression blank. She will watch with every ounce of whoever she may have been before this turned off, shut out, lying next to the boy’s crumpled little body in a grave as shallow as the depths of her own empathy. 

She will watch, and maybe if he’s lucky, he will die.

She will watch, and maybe if he’s luckier, he’ll give in.

“I don’t know, boss. I’m already a bit sick of him.”

[wisegirl1448]

i was wondering about how it was possible that sally never saw the bruises that gabe surely left on percy and didn’t realize anything because he had to have left lots of bruises, and i think i finally figured it out: he would take showers.

“melody what are you going on about?” you probably ask.

he didn’t like that gave hit him cuz he was left to sit with his body and feel icky knowing gabe’s hands had been on him so he would go take a shower. water heals him. but he would have questions (obvi) so the mist comes into play. everyone (percy included) see the bruises but sally is clear-sighted. the mist doesn’t work on her. she sees nothing on his body.

and thus she never finds out (until they inevitably have a conversation abt it and they realize. cuz if you think percy wasn’t talking to sally abt all that troubled him (in the mortal sense), ur mistaken. sure he would keep it from her but never for long periods of time. they’re like rory and lorelei (s1-s2). they can never seem to keep anything from each other!!!)

[alittlevillainy]

can’t stop imagining tiny little host!vic getting pinched by nana for swearing and their mom asking where the marks came from and vic insisting it was steffi pops. their mom not believing them and telling them to stop blaming things on steffi.

can’t stop imagining their mom writing it off as weird little kid stuff instead of investigating any further, eventually getting so annoyed by vic’s “antics” she just stopped caring when they came back from nana’s house with marks - because every time little five year old vic told her it was steffi pops. though it crossed her mind, their mom refused to entertain the notion her mother was abusing her child.

throw in vivid childhood dreams and you get distorted memories of childhood, the internalization that maybe the pinching really was just a series of dreams they had as a kid about their weird doll.

anyways. steffi pops as a coping mechanism, a tulpa made of false memories and real abuse. nobody touch me

[classycookiexo]

[gin-juice-tonic]

Not to talk too much about it, but when I was younger I made a new friend. We got close fast and spent a ton of time together. We were always drawing things for each other and passing notes back and forth in class. We emailed back and forth nearly 24/7. She would tell me serious things about her life and I was the only one who knew them. We were best friends.

Except there were times where suddenly she'd just drop me. Say she didn't want to be friends anymore. Ignore me in public, not respond to my emails (I didnt have a phone). Speak callously to me when she did talk to me. I can't say what it actually was that made her decide when to do this, but when she was over at my house it seemed like the minute I was unable to entertain her that switch would be flipped. Suddenly she'd want nothing to do with me. I felt like I had to become more and more entertaining. I always had to have something planned to do. I always had to have something to talk about. I always had to make her smile. Or I'd run the risk of being dropped.

I was used to this idea. For the neighborhood kids I grew up with, if I wasn't able to make them laugh on my own, I would be used to make them laugh. They'd make fun of me till I ran home crying. About anything. For existing. I was always forced by my parents to go back out and apologize to them for ruining the fun. I knew how it went. I knew it was my fault.

To return to my best friend, I remember we sat next to each other at lunch. On one of the occasions where she was treating me coldly, she sat next to me but only talked to everyone at the table except for me. I cried at the table. Nobody there cared. This would repeat in other settings. At home. In the classroom. Wherever. I cried. Nobody cared.

She never re-joined the friendship on her own. I always had to get her to come back. Beg her to come back.

Something she used to say to me was "I wish I was somebody's favorite person." I'd tell her "You're one of my favorite people!" (I had another best friend at the time, so there was no number one slot). My response didn't matter. Or maybe i didnt matter. It felt like she was wanting me to say she was my absolute favorite. And I spent so much time trying to appease her it probably seemed that way. And it really did separate me from my other friend for a time.

This went on for several years.

Ford and Bill admittedly shoot me back to this time.

Getting sucked into a desperate bid to keep someones favor to the extent where you lose yourself can happen to anybody in any kind of relationship... I just wanted to share that. I know I talked too much about it in the end.

[cyberphuck]

you can't be thinking about it all the time, dude. I can't be in the grocery store and looking at the kind of peanut butter my mom used to buy, where there's oil on top and you stir it in, but she would dump out the oil so it was "healthier" for us, and go down a rabbit hole of all the shitty food shame habits that she stapled to me as a kid and teen, then start thinking about how any healthy step I took wasn't good enough for her and how she used to put supplements and pills in my food without telling me, and when they made me really sick she blamed my diet for it, and god that was so fucked up, it was really fucked up, I'm melting down in the grocery store and someone is asking me if I'm okay and I'm just shaking my head and pointing at the fucking peanut butter as if that explains decades of abuse, and kind people escort me back to my car while saying that their cousin was depressed and he turned out all right and I just had to keep my chin up, because I'll have to go home and curl up in a ball and sob for hours and that night when I get hungry there'll be nothing to eat because I couldn't finish my shopping. There is a time for healing, and there is a time for living, and lots of times you can't double-book. Just wince, look away, tell yourself "don't think about it right now" and get a different brand.

[wildbasil]

things haven't been great but i think they will be. eventually 🌻🌼🩷

[linktoo-doodles]

still not gonna hit you though

[animentality]

[scramratz]

Part 1

[temperheist]

mentorship was probably scary for him at first

[caliburn-the-sword]

"hur hur gabe wasn't as abusive as he was in the books" people can all shut up. percy's jaw TREMBLED when ares yelled at him, which had nothing at all to do with his god status - percy backtalks gods just fine. he had trauma response to ares yelling. ares didn't so much as lift a finger. that goes to speak volumes about what percy was experiencing at home

[fayevalcntine]

Claudia + Birds + "Baby Lulu" [insp.]

[abrillustrated]

something that i really like about blue eye samurai, now that im thinking about it, is that it discusses violence against women without becoming torture porn. like, in a lot of media that portrays women's issues, they show you that scene. like they give you this extended visual of a woman experiencing something traumatic and then laud themselves as feminist for doing so.

blue eye samurai doesn't do that. the whole show is set in a world that is extremely antagonistic toward women, and it makes a point to tell you that being a woman right now sucks, because they are property and are used sexually. but even though it doesn't shy away from this, it doesn't show you the violence itself, which you would almost expect it to because of how graphic the rest of the show is.

im thinking specifically of kinuyo. they very well could have shown us a scene of her being abused, but they didn't. they didn't show the abuse itself, but they did show how it affected her. they showed her seeing a doctor for her sores. they could have made this incredibly traumatic and grotesque scene a spectacle, showing us exactly how powerless she is and how powerful he is. they could have shown us this incredibly triggering event in full detail for our entertainment, but they didn't. they chose not to. and i think that's how it should be.

it is not necessary to have an extended visual and auditory reenactment of violence against women. we the audience understood the gravity of the situation and were able to empathize without needing that scene. having that scene would have completely detracted from the point they are trying to make. it would have turned something completely reprehensible that women everywhere fear because it's a very real issue into entertainment.