#i could say a LOT about how intensely fucking creepy ethan's dynamic with five is by itself | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

angorwhosebabyisthis · 2 years

Text

[talk of CSA, grooming, human trafficking, sex trafficking, victim-blaming and apologism for all of the above cw. i will be on about these books' bullshit @ five until the day i die and it just keeps getting worse lmao]

i hate the narrative's half-assed attempt at giving ethan a retroactive redemption arc for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that like. five is literally, non-metaphorically a survivor of human trafficking. he was just passed on to an alien cult instead of the kind of people he'd have ended up with in the real world. and that is before you add in the blatant, BLATANT thinly veiled metaphor for sex trafficking in specific.

(fun game: go through just about any scene of his that mentions power or importance once ethan comes in, and replace it with sex, sexuality, and being attractive/desirable. bring one bucket to heave into and another full of bleach for your eyeballs. enjoy!)

and like, there's so much to unpack here. so much! but the fact that these books try to make you feel more compassion for--try to get you to absolve of WAY more guilt--a sex trafficker who did it for his own gain, and to save his own skin, than the child we watched him traffic is just utterly, breathtakingly magical

#LL tag #LL crit tag #the crit files #LL number five #LL ethan #cws in post #holds a glass of icewater to my fuckin temple #at some point i will go into further detail about said metaphor copy-and-paste #but also it is deeply sad and upsetting and i keep having to take breaks when i sit down to work on it #so short summaryposts and being darkly pithy in them it is #i could say a LOT about how intensely fucking creepy ethan's dynamic with five is by itself #but even if we assume every single thing he did and said was totally involuntary and fed to him by the mogs #and he hated every second of it #motherfucker it is a hundred percent your fault that you are in this position. you made your decisions #as a whole grown ass man. you came up with the idea ALL on your own to involve yourself by throwing genocide survivors #half of them children; and the people who tried to help them under the bus; and realized too late you couldn't back out #if the choices you left yourself after that are between taking the L and doing what you did to a child: perish about it!#that's all there is to it!#and the writers may bite my Entire ass for trying to act like it was anything but fully deserved when he got the L handed to him anyway #let alone turning around and treating everything about five's side of it the way they did #but that is a very long and upsetting can of worms so i will save going into that for later too lmao #dyn: everything out there can be yours

3 notes · View notes