#the talking about victims or survivors or worst perpetrators like they are personal friends.

[gloomforrestrunes]

(This is so horribly worded, but I don't know how else to word this question.)

How do you write psychological manipulation/abuse so authentically? I've been in an abusive relationship before, and just reading snippets of Laxo/Nex's relationship in your posts is hitting very close to home for me. These are genuinely well thought out and written very respectfully to victims, and I applaud you for taking the time to accurately display how awful abuse can be and the effects it has on victims in your comic.

ah, thank you! i have very strong opinions on how abuse like this should be portrayed in media, which all comes down to centering the victim rather than the perpetrator or a "savior" character.

quick warning, im gonna go into some examples of poor depictions of abuse below, but no specific media is named and i dont go into too much detail

i am so, so tired and jaded from pieces of media who depict abusive relationships only to discard the victim in favor of focusing on either the abuser (attempting to go into the "sympathetic" villain route but is almost always done in a way thats tone-deaf at best or actively harmful and insulting to survivors at worst) or another character (usually the protagonist) who's only role is to "save" the victim from their abuser, depicting the victim as meek, submissive, naive, and unable to make decisions on their own. the victim's personal feelings are usually never explored, their trauma never properly addressed, and they are usually never defined outside of the abuse that was inflicted onto them, which is. bad!!! and gross!!! and extremely insulting!!

in runes, though, laxo is the protagonist. while yes, you will see him endure abuse from nex, you also see him outside of that context and outside of his trauma. he has a favorite color and weather and season and food, he's given an actual voice and personality. he is gentle, sure, but he isn't submissive. he's actually pretty playful and likes to tease a lot. he gets frustrated easily but is bad at showing it other than pouting. he snorts when he laughs. he loves to make things out of plants. he talks to flowers for comfort reasons. he loves so strongly and so much that it can overwhelm him.

his trauma effects him and inhibits him, but it doesnt define him.

while kane and nex are meant to be the antithesis of each other, kane isn't meant to be a "savior" who swoops laxo away from his abuser and everything is fine and perfect and laxo is suddenly completely healed. in reality, the most kane could, and does, do is gently guide laxo towards realizing that whats happening to him is wrong and not normal. but breaking a victim away from their abuser is never that easy. getting out of abusive relationships is never that easy.

ill go into more personal details as to why ive written runes the way i have under the cut. what ive written beneath here isnt an invitation to ask me for personal details unless i trust you.

runes, at its core, is a vent story. when it was previously named something else and the story and characters were completely different, i didnt take it too seriously. it was lighthearted and silly. but i was a really, really sad and traumatized child and didnt have the resources to do anything clinical about it.

eventually i created laxo as sort of a vent character, then he became, basically, a self-insert. i adored him so much to the point where he became the main character, and i rewrote the entire story to be about him. about me, in a way. the story slowly became darker as i daydreamed it in my head, projecting all of my awful feelings onto this character. then i created nex.

again, dont ask me for details. but nex is a mirror of my irl abusers, more so back then. an exaggerated frankenstein's monster of the people who hurt me in ways that im still in therapy for today. while he is a mirror of multiple people, his design (even his human design) and species even is taken from one person. my old childhood best friend's older brother was obsessed with wolves. so, nex is a wolf.

this is what i mean when i say that runes is a vent story. even though it has grown far past that point and these characters have blossomed into far more than what/who they were based on, there will always be that association. so i guess another answer to how i can write this stuff authentically is because ive lived it. even though what nex and laxo have is a bit different from the type of abuse i endured as a child, its also extremely similar.

this is a more personal reason as to why i may get snappy or otherwise upset when people say that they like nex (as a person, not as a character or a villain) or reduce him to a "yandere" (which has happened multiple times. ://) because he's not just a fictional character to me. he is a mirror of the real actual people that did awful, awful things to me. while there is a degree of separation now that the story and nex as a character has developed as i have (which is why im still open to talk about him as a character/analyze him/etc) there will always be that association.

even though runes is a vent story, however, that doesnt mean that it wont have a happy ending. im still here, arent i? and im healing, and im getting better, and im moving on. why shouldn't laxo, if we're essentially one and the same?

[magnus-and-the-dragon]

i have this problem where i genuinely think discussing ‘real’ cases is a good way to explore and better understand our world, but also, the culture around True Crime is so fucking gross I can’t stand most of the content it creates

[stxleslyds]

What do you think about the theories that Jason was sexually abused as a child? Or even possibly while he was comatose after his resurrection?

Implications of this theory include his conversation with Mia (Speedy) and Bruce's message (Battle for the Cowl). In addition, when he was Robin he expressed what was then considered uncharacteristic rage towards the perpetrators of sex crimes.

Garzonas - unrepentant rapist who got no consequences

When a woman killed her sister's rapist and murderer (because Batman's evidence was not admissible in court), Batman said that she went too far with murder. Jason's disagreed with "Good riddance". Good for you, Jason.

His recklessness when dealing with a child sex trafficking ring.

I highly doubt that DC would ever confirm this theory. I would rather they leave it ambiguous because I don't trust them to not botch Jason... much less respectfully address the subject matter.

I have read so many thoughts on Jason that they're starting to blend together. So I apologize if you've already answered this before.

Hello friend! Aside from the fact that I took way too much time to answer your ask, this was also a hard question to come up with an answer to, I wanted to remain respectful of the subjects at hand even though I don’t second this headcanon. But before we keep going, let me put some trigger warnings in this post.

trigger warning: mentions of sexual abuse, child abuse, rape.

First, I would like to bring up these two concepts because I oftentimes mix them up when talking about these “ideas”.

Theory: a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something; an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action.

Headcanon: Headcanon generally refers to ideas held by fans of series that are not explicitly supported by sanctioned text or other media. Fans maintain the ideas in their heads, outside of the accepted canon.

I think the idea of Jason having been sexually abused at any point in his lifetime is a mix between a theory and a headcanon. Why I am saying this? Because as you have put in the ask, there has been instances where fandom has found pieces of information that they have considered the base of this idea.

So, if we say that there is a piece of text that might support that idea and they build from that to justify a course of action we would be looking at a theory. In this case Jason having been abused would the reason as to why he acts in that strong and violent way towards cases of sexual abuse/harassment.

In the other hand those pieces of text might not support that idea so fandom headcanons that idea in order to build another layer to a character, in this case Jason having been abused would also justify his actions towards certain criminals.

The “text” (panels, issues, mentions) are most of the time ambiguous, which makes readers have different perspectives in what is being written and what then is made into a theory or headcanon.

Personally, I don’t like this theory or headcanon for various reasons (which I will explain later in the post), and I have read and understood those moments mentioned as Jason just having survived Crime Alley as something general, I don’t think he suffered that kind of abuse but I think he was made aware of that type of behaviour every day that he spent alone in the streets and that why we saw Jason in Batman #408 saying that he had “graduated a long time ago from the streets of crime alley”.

Having said that, I do understand that some of the moments mentioned can be seen as ambiguous and that’s what leads people to theorize/headcanon that idea, because of that I would like to show the panels mentioned in your ask so everyone can read them and make up their own conclusions and then I will talk about the reasons why I don’t like this particular theory/headcanon.

As Robin:

Batman (1940) #422

In these panels we can see Jason as Robin jumping in to defend a woman that was being attacked by a man. There I only see Jason acting like a vigilante would, maybe he was hitting too hard or whatever but Batman has hit people as much as Jason was doing it this time around, plus I, personally, don’t see any kind of problem with Jason beating a man that was harassing and threatening a woman with death.

Right beside we have Jason being on the side of the woman that killed her sister’s attacker. He didn’t see any problem with that woman seeking justice for her sister on her own when the police, Batman and himself couldn’t get the job done.

Here I see Jason having a big problem with authorities and justice system, which is not something new, in Batman #408, Jason says very clearly that he doesn’t trust the system in Gotham (the police, social workers and such), and he was also shown in that comic talking very fondly about his mother and about how much he cared for her when she was at her worst. Let’s remember that Jason loved his mother, he took care of her and resented his father for being abusive towards her and even introducing her to drugs.

Instead understanding these panels as Jason having been abused himself, I see it more as Jason having a humongous understanding of how much women and others suffer in Gotham due to the justice system’s lack of action. I also see Jason as the kind of boy that respected all women and could not sit and do nothing when people were hitting and abusing women just like his father did to his mother.

Batman (1940) #424

This issue starts by saying that Jason jumps into action as soon as he hears someone scream but that he wasn’t going to be prepared to see what was happening. This is the issue where all of us meet Felipe Garzonas, the abuser and rapist of many women. At first Jason doesn’t know what Felipe was doing but after he and Batman “defeat” Felipe, he goes to the room where he finds Gloria in a bed badly hurt and scared. Jason is shocked when he first finds her and after hearing her story in the police station, he becomes more and more happy about the fact that by having caught Felipe, he and Batman would be able to offer some peace and justice to Gloria after he goes to jail, but that doesn’t happen.

They had all the evidence to put Felipe in jail and the police could easily see that Gloria was the victim but because Felipe had someone to back his made-up story up, he was able to not be arrested and jailed.

Jason once again is baffled at the lack of action by the police or simply justice not being able to be made in favour of the true victim. Batman even says that he has noticed that Jason “had become to emotionally invested with the case” which could favour either idea (Jason having suffered sexual abuse or not), in my case I see this once again as Jason not being able to remain calm after doing everything to keep that woman safe and the justice system not being able to do it themselves in a more permanent way (jail time, or whatever).

But that’s not all because Jason being too emotional with that case was brought up as a way to show that Jason couldn’t see that Felipe had been under the influence of drugs, which is something that Jason can see in people very well (do to experience with his mother and his training with Batman). So, Felipe is now a rapist, an abuser, he does drugs and he also has a market for it.

Because Felipe was allowed to go back to his “normal” life he had Gloria be killed, and he kept abusing drugs and women, when Jason finds Gloria’s dead body and that Batman still seems to abide the justice system he snaps. He goes alone to see Felipe and that’s were this iconic panel comes from. The moments before Jason made his first kill and felt no remorse about it. I know this is kinda soft topic because Jason was a teenager, but good for him, kill that bitch. Gotham doesn’t need more people like him.

Batman (1940) #226

This is the issue where Jason attacks the men that were involved with some very nasty stuff involving children. Batman narrates and says that him and Jason had been working on this case for three weeks. Jason jumps into action suddenly and “recklessly” even though Batman considered their investigation wasn’t over, he also says that he thinks that Jason had been “acting oddly” and that he was very “moody, resentful and reckless” and that that attitude could “get him killed”.

This could be used as to add more proof of the abuse idea but I actually see it as build up to Jason’s death, that happened two issues later. Let’s remember that Jason found out of his birth mother and was desperate to find and save her from Joker, because he was a good son but also because he didn’t feel like Bruce loved, cared or appreciated him anymore. Ever since Jason made it clear that he didn’t see the world and justice in the same way that Batman did back in issue #422, Jason and Bruce’s relationship suffered, they just couldn’t see eye to eye on some subjects and Bruce’s neglect or lack of care for what Jason believed in drove Jason to act the way he did in the case involving his mother and the Joker.

Jason obviously has major issues with kids being abused and put in dangerous situations, he as the Red Hood (Winick’s Red Hood) is the same, he really wants kids to be taken far away from drugs so they cannot be manipulated, used and abused by Gotham’s Drug Lords. Here I can see some of the same thing, Jason being protective of those kids and getting fed up with how much time he and Batman had to wait to do anything about the subject, along side it I bet Jason wasn’t seeing the police or the justice system doing anything about the whole thing so that could have probably fuelled his desperate attack of those horrible people.

As Batman/Red Hood:

Batman: Battle for the Cowl #3

Battle for the Cowl… yeah I am going to be brutally honest about this, if anyone thinks that this is someway or somehow proof that Jason had been abused in the past then I think we have very different ways of thinking how survivors must be treated or written in comics and other media.

This to me is pure bad writing, this is some of the worst things I have seen being written in comics. Whether or not this implies Jason being abused or not, Bruce’s message is absolutely disgusting and not at all helpful, it is even worse when you realise that Dick, a canon sexual assault survivor, is the one playing the message to Jason even though Jason explicitly said that he didn’t want to hear it again. That Book, issue, page and panel are extremely badly written and is one of the most terrible Jason and Dick characterizations ever.

So, I don’t really care if this panel is supposed to offer support to that theory or headcanon, I really dislike that speech and if it is actually referencing Jason as being a survivor of child abuse, then Tony S. Daniel needs to make an apology from today to the day he dies.

“Of all my failures, you have been my biggest” “You were broken and I thought I could put the pieces back together. I thought I could do for you what could never be done for me. Make you whole” “What happened to you as a child… the terror, the pain, the horrors” “You needed repair and instead I gave you an outlet to act out on”

Absolute garbage writing. Me, as Bruce is number one hater, know that that speech is even out of character for Bruce. Listen, if Jason had been a victim of sexual assault or just being a kid living alone in Crime Alley, no one should leave a message like that, telling a victim that they were broken and needed fixing, what the hell? No, thank you, this issue proves nothing except that Battle for the Cowl was a mistake as a whole.

Green Arrow (2001) #72

Judd Winick is clever I will always say that, and while I do see why people think that Jason is making the “child abuse idea” canon I still think that the way that he talks is still fairly ambiguous if not just him playing mind games with Mia.

I know it sounds wrong, but hear me out, Winick, in this arc makes Batman say that Jason distracted him and Oliver just to take Mia as a “hostage” because that was Jason’s way to mess with him. This arc happens right after UtRH and Jason is a bit more unhinged than ever. But he doesn’t harm Mia, he just talks to her, he tries to make her see why he acts the way he does and to do that he talks about how much he sees of himself in her. Do I believe that Jason suffered the same things Mia did? No. Do I think that their past is similar? Yes.

But Jason doesn’t only use the fact that they have similar pasts to make Mia rebel against her “no killing ways” and Oliver like he did with Bruce, but he also brings up the fact that their past is incredibly different to the lives of Bruce and Oliver, and that those differences are of importance.

Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t see Jason bringing Mia’s past for anything other than manipulating her and kinda make her see Oliver in a negative light the way that he does Batman and Bruce. Jason was at a point in his life where all he wanted to do was deliver the same pain that he had gone through but he didn’t do it by physically harming anyone (Mia was left unscratched), he was just out there trying to play mind games so he could break more havoc in Batman’s name.

Mia’s past is just way too different to whatever we have seen in canon from Jason’s past. Maybe I am wrong, after all, I only read about Mia in that arc.

-

With all that having been said I think it’s pretty obvious that I just don’t think that Jason’ having been sexually abused as a child actually happened, and I also don’t like to think about his past in that way. His canon suffering could have made him act that violently against criminals involved with sexual attacks and drug-related crimes, but I also think that’s just how Jason was, he really disliked the justice system in Gotham and saw how much it failed to protect victims, so now that he had the training to help those who couldn’t do it for themselves, he tried his best to bring criminals to justice.

And when that didn’t work, he grew more and more frustrated with Batman’s methods which led him to be more unforgiving and violent.

I also don’t like the theory/headcanon as a whole because I think its one of those things that Fandom comes up with just for that extra angst factor in their favourite character’s story so they can make him suffer more and because of that no other Robin or character as a whole can ever understand his pain or whatever. In this fandom there is a lot of “competitive trauma” going on and I honestly dislike it a lot.

About Jason having been assaulted while he was in a coma, I don't really know, he was at a hospital for what I believe were six moths, maybe that idea comes from real life happenings but I have never thought of that happening in Jason's life and I would rather not give it much more thought.

Also, I believe that DC just like fandom would have never been able to handle the subject of Jason having been a sexual assault survivor with the respect and care that it actually needs. We have seen DC treat sexual harassment and abuse as nothing but a side plot or bringing it up in an extremely disturbing way. In Fandom some (very few) people end up glamorising or romanticising these subjects so, I don’t believe the comic world was or is ready to treat a backstory like this with the respect it needs.

Maybe I haven’t even treated the subject with the respect and care that it needs and if that’s the case then I am truly sorry.

I had never answered a question regarding this subject before and I really appreciate all the questions you send my way; they do make my brain happy. I am really sorry it took me this long to write an answer to you but I hope the post is good enough for all the time I made you wait!

I hope you have an amazing week!

[scripttorture]

Hi! A minor antagonist of mine survived the genocide/torture of his species (sci-fi setting) as a child. He's now a young adult and suffers from nightmares, memory problems, anxiety, etc. My worry comes from him being an antagonist who is in a position of power now and who ignores/implicitly encourages the extensive abuse/torture of someone beneath him because their people are the ones that perpetrated the genocide. Is this skirting too close to the 'torture survivors are evil' trope?

Honestly I think the best answer to this one is: how many survivor characters do you have in the story?

 Purely from a writing perspective I think that you need multiple survivors in any story focused on genocide. Because if you only have one survivor then you’ll struggle to really communicate the scale of what happened.

 I had an ask a while back about competing communities (I can’t seem to find it-) where I talked at length about how torture and genocide imply communities of abusers and communities of survivors. Because we’re talking about a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of victims.

 So if the genocide is a big part of the background to this story then it should effect more then two characters. Because we’re not just talking about a single ‘abuser’ and a single victim here.

 Think about where you can have other effected characters and how those characters were effected.

 Are there people who got away just in time, missing the worst of it? Do they have survivors guilt? How many members of their extended families did they lose?

 Are there people with tales similar to this antagonist? How did they survive? Did they do things they regret? Conversely do they feel justified in doing what they had to in order to survive? Perhaps they don’t feel like they took any active role in their own survival. Did their families make it? Their friends? How big are the gaps in their lives?

 Were there ex-patriot or diaspora communities away from the areas the genocide took place? How has the genocide effected their politics? How many friends and relatives did they lose? Has it made their community feel stronger, more involved in each other’s growth and safety? Has it led them to open their doors to refugees and survivors of their own species? Has it led them to do the same for other vulnerable groups?

 I was reading the work of a Holocaust survivor a few weeks ago and I was struck by her observation that for survivors this was not something that ended. Yes she was freed from the death camps, yes she lived and yes she emigrated to the USA. But the experience moved with her and (from what I can remember of her words) ‘continued on the streets of Boston.’

 She spoke about how she was the last person left in her father’s line. That entire side of the family had been murdered.

 And that, that is what genocide is for survivors: the holes in their lives where other people used to be. People they loved and cherished. People they passed on the street. Strangers that they connected to however briefly.

 Holes.

 You communicate that to your readers by showing the people who are left and having them show what they lost in simple every day terms.

 When I was a child there was a section of the souk which was full of jewellers. Most of them were Yemeni. And I liked shiny things as much as the next mammal but I never paid the Yemenis much mind. They tended to sell a lot of big, gold pieces, well out of a child’s price range and I didn’t find the style particularly pretty.

 So I’d say my salaams and walk on past to the stalls that sold antiques or Afghani pieces to look at semi-precious stones I could afford.

 They were young men, the Yemenis. They were probably only a decade older then me, if that. They were probably married. They may have had young children. A lot of immigrants in Saudi come over when young and have families (whether those families are with them or ‘back home’), this holds true of my family as well.

 One day the government decided it didn’t want them any more, they changed the visa laws. It did not quite happen overnight but the Yemenis left.

 There’s been a famine in Yemen since 2016. And I wonder how many of those men who smiled and said salaam as I passed are still alive. I wonder how many of them got typhoid when the infrastructure collapsed completely. I wonder how many of their children died and how many of them will be crippled for the rest of their lived because of hunger.

 I could tell you about their neat clothes and carefully slicked back hair. I could tell you how much effort they put into their winning smiles and how they’d try to persuade my mother to stop and look even though she wore horribly unfashionable abayas. (The rich white women all wore terrible abayas as far as I can remember.)

 And that’s genocide. Seen from a remove.

 Survivors are not saints. The urge to put survivors of global atrocities up on a pedestal as if everything they do and say contains exceptional moral insight is… flawed. Surviving something awful doesn’t make people morally worse and it also doesn’t make people morally better. Acting ethically is something everyone chooses to do or not.

 I don’t think there’s anything necessarily ‘wrong’ with having a survivor be one of the bad guys in your story. They’re people and they can make bad decisions like anyone else. As long as they’re not the only survivor in the story. Because you only get that implication when you’ve got one point of representation.

 So include the community. Think about where you can work in other survivors. Think about the diversity of experience there. Think about how to communicate the scale you need to justify the term ‘genocide’.

 There are a lot of books and survivor accounts of the genocides that have occurred since the 1900s. They’re difficult reading but I think picking up a few could really help you understand the kind of scale and diversity of experience you’re aiming for.

 Mao’s Great Famine is a good one for scale but it doesn’t really focus on survivor accounts. I found that made it slightly easier reading. I still haven’t read all of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families but it does contain interviews with people who were directly effected and people in the diaspora community. That may be helpful.

 I think Amnesty International would also be a good source here. There are currently ongoing genocides in China and Burma which you should be able to find a decent amount of information on. The effected groups are the Uighurs and the Rohingya. There are diaspora communities for both groups and interviews with multiple survivors available online.

 There are other genocides happening at the moment, but I think you’ll find the most free, English information and interviews looking at these two.

 Overall, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this scenario so long as you take steps to make sure this villain isn’t the only survivor we see. The message that abused people go on to abuse others only comes across if you have a single survivor. And I really think that your story will be deeper and richer in a lot of ways by including others.

 Survivors are people. Most of the time I say that to encourage people to remember their positive capacities: their passions and relationships. But it goes both ways.

 Survivors are people; which means we shouldn’t paint them all as saints and we shouldn’t paint them all as devils.

 I hope that helps :)

Edit: Typos, whoops. Thank you for catching that.

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[missingbruises]

[2] --- jamie experiences a devastating condition known as C-PTSD, or complex PTSD. this greatly affects his life, relationships, personality and how he responds to certain situations. this is in response to the years of abuse suffered throughout his childhood and young adult life. 

after running away from his final foster family at 13-14 (he still keeps in touch), he was detained in a juvenile detention centre (a her majesty’s youth offender institution) for seven months for possession (marijuana), attacking a peace officer and “anti-social behaviour”. during this time, he was diagnosed with both MDD, major depressive disorder, and C-PTSD. during the seven months in the centre, he received excellent treatment and managed to obtain several GCSE’s. this was a rather happy period in his life and he speaks almost fondly of his time there. unfortunately, upon release, he relapsed into more violent behaviours and ceased taking his medication. the lack of enforced order or immediate consequence 

at sixteen, he is again briefly jailed for battery against a close friend. the friend elected not to press charges stating that he was partially at fault for the incident. the court agreed but mandated that jamie see a therapist until his anger and C-PTSD became self-manageable. at eighteen, he was considered an adult and released from the mandate. 

COMPLEX-PTSD: What additional symptoms are seen in Complex PTSD? An individual who experienced a prolonged period (months to years) of chronic victimization and total control by another may also experience the following difficulties:

Emotional Regulation. May include persistent sadness, suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or inhibited anger.

Consciousness. Includes forgetting traumatic events, reliving traumatic events, or having episodes in which one feels detached from one’s mental processes or body (dissociation).

Self-Perception. May include helplessness, shame, guilt, stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings.

Distorted Perceptions of the Perpetrator. Examples include attributing total power to the perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, or preoccupied with revenge.

Relations with Others. Examples include isolation, distrust, or a repeated search for a rescuer.

One’s System of Meanings. May include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Survivors may avoid thinking and talking about trauma-related topics because the feelings associated with the trauma are often overwhelming.

Survivors may use alcohol or other substances as a way to avoid and numb feelings and thoughts related to the trauma.

Survivors may engage in self-mutilation and other forms of self-harm.

Survivors who have been abused repeatedly are sometimes mistaken as having a “weak character”  or are unjustly blamed for the symptoms they experience as a result of victimization.  

C-PTSD - What it Feels Like:

People who suffer from C-PTSD may feel un-centered and shaky, as if they are likely to have an embarrassing emotional breakdown or burst into tears at any moment. They may feel unloved - or that nothing they can accomplish is ever going to be “good enough” for others.

People who suffer from C-PTSD may feel compelled to get away from others and be by themselves, so that no-one will witness what may come next. They may feel afraid to form close friendships to prevent possible loss should another catastrophe strike.

People who suffer from C-PTSD may feel that everything is just about to go “out the window” and that they will not be able to handle even the simplest task. They may be too distracted by what is going on at home to focus on being successful at school or in the workplace.

C-PTSD Characteristics:

How it can manifest in the victim(s) over time:

Rage turned inward: Eating disorders. Depression. Substance Abuse / Alcoholism. Truancy. Dropping out. Promiscuity. Co-dependence. Doormat syndrome (choosing poor partners, trying to please someone who can never be pleased, trying to resolve the primal relationship)

Rage turned outward: Theft. Destruction of property. Violence. Becoming a control freak.

Other: Learned hyper vigilance. Clouded perception or blinders about others (especially romantic partners) Seeks positions of power and / or control: choosing occupations or recreational outlets which may put oneself in physical danger. Or choosing to become a “fixer” - Therapist, Mediator, etc.

Avoidance - The practice of withdrawing from relationships with other people as a defensive measure to reduce the risk of rejection, accountability, criticism or exposure.

Blaming - The practice of identifying a person or people responsible for creating a problem, rather than identifying ways of dealing with the problem.

Catastrophizing - The habit of automatically assuming a “worst case scenario” and inappropriately characterizing minor or moderate problems or issues as catastrophic events.

“Control-Me” Syndrome - This describes a tendency which some people have to foster relationships with people who have a controlling narcissistic, antisocial or “acting-out” nature.

Denial - Believing or imagining that some painful or traumatic circumstance, event or memory does not exist or did not happen.

Dependency - An inappropriate and chronic reliance by an adult individual on another individual for their health, subsistence, decision making or personal and emotional well-being.

Depression (Non-PD) -Depression is when you feel sadder than your circumstances dictate, for longer than your circumstances last, but still can’t seem to break out of it.

Escape To Fantasy - Taking an imaginary excursion to a happier, more hopeful place.

Fear of Abandonment - An irrational belief that one is imminent danger of being personally rejected, discarded or replaced.

Relationship Hyper Vigilance - Maintaining an unhealthy level of interest in the behaviors, comments, thoughts and interests of others.

Identity Disturbance - A psychological term used to describe a distorted or inconsistent self-view

Learned Helplessness- Learned helplessness is when a person begins to believe that they have no control over a situation, even when they do.

Low Self-Esteem - A common name for a negatively-distorted self-view which is inconsistent with reality.

Panic Attacks - Short intense episodes of fear or anxiety, often accompanied by physical symptoms, such as hyperventilating, shaking, sweating and chills.

Perfectionism - The maladaptive practice of holding oneself or others to an unrealistic, unattainable or unsustainable standard of organization, order, or accomplishment in one particular area of living, while sometimes neglecting common standards of organization, order or accomplishment in other areas of living.

Selective Memory and Selective Amnesia - The use of memory, or a lack of memory, which is selective to the point of reinforcing a bias, belief or desired outcome.

Self-Loathing - An extreme hatred of one’s own self, actions or one’s ethnic or demographic background.

Tunnel Vision - The habit or tendency to only see or focus on a single priority while neglecting or ignoring other important priorities.

REFERENCE: 1, 2, 3, 4  

[cummunication]

Could it Happen to You?

Someone recently asked me if after the first time I was assaulted I thought it would never happen again. “Of course” I said “I thought if I get it over with it’ll never happen again”. Obviously I was wrong because it happened numerous times after that with multiple people. We never think something will happen to us until it does. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) which is an annual campaign to raise public awareness about sexual assault and educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence. The first time I was assaulted, I was 18 and it was my second month at a community college. I had a boyfriend but decided to let my (male) math partner drive me closer to campus. He did offer so it would be rude to say no. Little did I know, I would cry a little inside each and every time I was on Nichols road. He locked me in his car and although I said no numerous times, he didn’t seem to be getting the hint. “I should’ve yelled, I should’ve screamed I should’ve been more forceful, it’s my fault” I thought for the longest time. And then it happened… again. Just when I thought I put my worst moments behind me someone I deeply loved victimized me in ways I’d never imagine. He put a pillow over my face so his mom wouldn’t hear me screaming; he knew he was hurting me but continued anyway. Afterwards, my stone, cold body was shriveled up in pain as he whispered “I love you” in my ear. We never talked about it but to this day, I remember crying on the shower floor later that night for 48 minutes. “I should’ve just dumped him, I’m over exaggerating, he’s my boyfriend” These thoughts still haunt me to this day. Just when I was starting to heal it happened again with someone who was very well known in my community. I wanted to learn self-defense because I figured learning how to protect myself would stop anyone from taking advantage of me. Or so I thought… He wouldn’t get off of me. I told him no as he pinned my head to the seat. “I’m not allowed to say no” he told me “lighten up, we’re just having fun” I never heard from him again after that night. Why did I just sit there? Why do I always do this? Why do I always shut down in times I should be fighting not freezing?! Was it something about me that made him never call me again? Was I not pretty enough, good enough or skinny enough? Maybe he wouldn’t have done it then? These questions ran through my mind plaguing me for a matter of months. Thing is, it’s really easy to blame the victim when this happens. Why didn’t you just do this or say that? People often assume they must’ve asked for it and should’ve known better. “Boys will be boys” my mom told me. Why did you get in the car with a stranger? my sister asked me. Guilt and shame flooded my veins but it was all my fault. I was stupid, naïve and gullible to think anyone of the opposite sex would ever treat me with respect. I felt like a piece of meat each time I left my house; fearful of being hunted because of the way I was born. I swore off men, telling myself all they want is what they can take between your legs. I trust not all guys are like this and believe for the most part, people are good, albeit misguided at times. I sincerely believe we are all doing the best we can with the knowledge we have at the time and that’s what I have to keep reminding myself. Sure, maybe I could’ve kicked and screamed and pinched and pulled, aiming to get my attacker off me. However, for the most part, I was the prey and they were the predator . They were bigger and stronger and I felt helpless even defenseless, most of the time. For me, the worst part about being assaulted wasn’t the actual assault itself, it was the aftermath. Feeling dirty, disgusting, worthless and used, lasted much longer than the actual assault itself. The way my previous traumas have impacted my current relationships is something I continually work on. To this day, even if I’m not being sexually violated or physically attacked, I still freeze. My brain goes into overdrive and my whole body becomes stoic. My lips feel sewn shut while my head is in 1000 different places. This is often difficult for people to understand when they’re trying to communicate & I’m not responding. It’s not me being “immature” or “spiteful” or purposely ignoring them, it’s literally my body going into panic mode and disassociating as I’d done in the past when my life was threatened. This is the amygdala’s (part in the brain) way of protecting the person against a perceived or actual threat. It is an automatic defense mechanism and for people like me with c-ptsd, often gets in the way of effectively communicating in stressful situations. As far as my perpetrators go, I’ve forgiven most of them. There is one however, I must actively work on forgiving almost every day. I think most people believe the “worst” or most traumatic kind of rape is when a man jumps out of a dark alley, forcing himself on a stranger. Any form of sexual violence is horrendous however, from my personal experience, the most damaging was with someone I deeply loved and trusted. It’s a form of betrayal you may never get over. This leads to further trust issues in a potential relationship that may actually be healthy. Sadly, the majority of sexual assaults occur between people you know; whether that’s a neighbor, family friend, romantic interest or spouse. Unfortunately, it’s not so much the people you don’t know who you have to beware of, but the people who know your deepest secrets. So it is April once more, a year since that last incident happened. I am still in the works of healing and most importantly, forgiving myself. We forget sometimes that it���s not the people who have wronged us we need to forgive most, but rather, ourselves. This April, I hold more compassion for myself than a year ago. I no longer feel like a victim. I am a proud survivor, and so are you.

[crazycoke-addict]

Why Lena Dunham isn’t a feminist icon.

Lena Dunham is many things, but a feminist icon isn’t one of them. She doesn’t deserve to be called a feminist icon and shouldn’t be praised at all. When has Dunham ever done anything for women beside it being about herself? Lena Dunham is a white feminist and being a white feminist isn’t a compliment. The definition of white feminist is someone whom discredits women of colour and don’t seem to care about other women beside their own race. White feminist don’t seem to help out women of colour and they complain when women of colour “don’t speak out” about things like sexual abuse, the mistreatment of women when really they (WOC) have been the ones speaking out about those topic, but you just weren’t listening at all. Dunham has shown us from time to time that she’s the definition of white Feminism but for some people is considered to be a feminist icon. Whenever she’s make a bad choice, her first instinct is to apologise and call it a “mistake”. When you keeping making “mistakes” and your solution is to apologise all the time, it doesn’t become a mistake anymore and the apologies don’t mean anything at all.

Her comments about Abortion

Her first “mistake” was when she said that she was sad about never having had an abortion. Lena Dunham doesn’t have any kids, it isn’t ok say that you are sad about not having an abortion at all. Abortion is a serious thing, but many women get criticised for doing even though you have no idea why the woman decided to in the first place. She was raped, she can’t raise a baby financially, she isn’t ready to be a mum or maybe she was forced to. Dunham sounds delusional for saying that quote. She later apologised for the quote, but those “apologies” don’t seem to end there.

Her supposed anger and lie towards Odell Beckham Jr

The second “mistake” happened at a Met Gala, when she wrote in her feminist newsletter Lenny Letter, that she was upset Odell Beckham Jr. didn’t want have sex with her. I’m sorry you were bummed that a black man didn’t want have sex with her, but shows you a bit more about what your personality really is. She was describing Odell Beckham Jr. as a misogynist because she thought he judging her without even saying anything, “I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards” she said. She apologise to Odell Beckham Jr and said that they never met before so how come you thought he was judging your base on your looks, when you didn’t even interact with him at the Met Gala.

Comparing a website to domestic abuse

In 2015 at a podcast interview, Dunham compared Gawker to an abusive husband. Gawker was a blog that was founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers In 2002 and defuncted in 2016. Dunham said “it’s literally if I read it, it’s like going back to a husband who beat me in the face. It doesn’t make sense”. Comparing a website to a serious situation like abuse isn’t ok all. She apologised by saying domestic violence isn’t a joke, but seem to have deleted the post.

Comparing the Bill Cosby Accusations to the holocaust

In 2014, Comedian and American’s dad Bill Cosby was accused of sexual abuse by many women dating back to the 1960s. Many celebrities were discussing their opinion about the allegations against Cosby including Judd Apatow whom seemed very vocal about it in which people called it an obsession. In January 2015, Dunham said in an interview that Judd Apatow’s obsession with Bill Cosby is like people being obsessed with Holocaust meaning we shouldn’t talk about either of them. Cosby’s sex crime was a traumatic event towards his survivors he hurt and abuse, while the holocaust was the one of most horrifying events that happened in history and neither shouldn’t be not talked about.

Hipster Racism

Lena Dunham’s “feminist” newsletter the Lenny Letter got shut down during 2017. A journalist named Zinzi Clemons used to write for Lenny Letter, but left the company. She wrote an article about she knew Dunham when they were in college and said the group that Dunham hanged out used hipster racism. Hipster racism is basically saying something offensive or racist than defending it by saying it was a joke. You can also say that being hipster racist is when someone used the term “I’m not racist. I have black friends”. Although many people believe that Dunham doesn’t hang out with those people, Zinzi has said that many of those friends have guest starred in the TV show, GIRLS.

Defending an alleged rapist and discrediting a sexual assault survivor

In November 2017, an actress named Aurora Perrineau accused GIRLS writer Murray Miller of sexual assault. When the news broke out, Lena Dunham and GIRLS executive producer Jenni Konner publicly defended Miller by saying that his allegation fit the 3% of the false accusations. This ironic since months before, Dunham tweeted the only thing women don’t lie about is rape. This is very hypocritical because she basically saying that women don’t lie about rape, but won’t believe the woman whom accused her friend of sexual assault. Recently, Lena Dunham made an apology to the sexual assault survivor and that she thought Perrineau was lying due the insider information she was given, but get this Dunham never had any evidence or information to prove Perrineau was lying. This upset a lot of people including myself because 1) Aurora Perrineau is a black biracial woman and women of colour are always silenced or discredited by white feminist like Lena Dunham herself and 2) discrediting a survivor is a very low thing you can do. This is one of the worst things that Lena Dunham has ever done.

Every time, Lena Dunham makes a bad choice, her apologies become more and more excuses and bullshit each day. When apologising to Aurora Perrineau about discrediting her accusations on Murray Miller, Lena Dunham blamed Patriarchy. Patriarchy is something that women have to go through, women in the middle eastern have to face patriarchy every single day due men having control with them from father to husband. However Dunham discrediting Perrineau isn’t patriarchy. Many people think the reason why we don’t like her because she isn’t pretty, we could care less about her looks because we aren’t judging because she’s not pretty, because she makes similar mistakes all over again and expect us to forgive her. There are some people who’ll defend Dunham by saying how we should give her a break because she’s a rape victim or how she can’t have kids due getting her left ovary removed. All of this are sad, but that doesn’t change the fact, she’s a piece of shit. I don’t think Lena Dunham ever worked with the me Too movement of the Times Up Now than led on. Earlier this year, Dunham posted a group photo of the women whom are taking part in the Time’s Up initiative, however actress Tessa Thompson called out Dunham by saying Dunham was never present during the meetings and discussions, Dunham only seem to present when it was photo time. Dunham may considered to a perpetrator, when she wrote that controversial paragraph in her book, Not that kind of girl when she talked about how when she was seven, she examined her little sister’s genitals, bribing her with candy for kisses and casually masturbating while lying in bed next to her. Although child psychologists, sexual abuse experts and researchers in human sexuality researchers reject it as being sexual abuse like many people believe. It’s still creepy and disgusting to many people who don’t see this as normal behaviour.

These are many of the reasons why Lena Dunham isn’t a feminist icon and how she fits the definition of white Feminism. I don’t know why she’s given a platform, when it clear that not many want to hear what she has to say or even care what she does. Even Me Too founder, Tarana Burke isn’t a big fan of Lena Dunham. Like I said before, when has Lena Dunham has ever done anything for women beside it being about herself?

[meandcptsd]

Hey there world,

One of the things I’ve realized at different difficult points in my life is how much of a relief it is to feel like you aren’t completely and totally alone in what you think and feel and experience. And yet, when I outed myself as an incest survivor six months ago, I felt this sense of numbness when people I ran into who had heard gave me not the Look of Horror and Pity, but the Look. The Look of Complete Understanding. In a second, in a squeeze of the hand, was years of hiding in bedrooms and showers and waking up from unconscious nightmares into fully conscious ones, years of staring at ourselves in the mirror and wondering if we look like them, if the children that we would never have out of fear would look like them, if our DNA meant we were just inherently garbage.  But in the 17 years since my father first started sexually abusing me, I never heard anyone talk about anything remotely similar to what I was experiencing. I was 11 or 12 when it started--I didn’t even know what constituted sex, let alone abuse, I didn’t have the vocabulary, nor was there seemingly anyone around me even describing similar things happening to them, so I festered in the silence of confusion and shame, because all my instincts told me that this wasn’t something I was supposed to talk about.  I am immensely, immensely lucky that I have survived up to the point in life I am at now, but I can’t help but think that it wouldn’t have been (and wouldn’t still be) so painful and terrible if there had just been less silence around the unique problems that incest survivors struggle with.  But inherent in the way that incest is perpetuated is the way that it leverages the taboo of even speaking about it aloud is to make sure that it stays trapped within the bodies and minds of the most vulnerable. I have 1000% confidence that, even when it is discovered or found out, a huge percentage of the family members who are not either the abuser or victim help to keep the cycle of abuse going by reinforcing the taboo of speaking about incest aloud. I could write a fucking phD about my theories on that topic, but let’s save that for another day. Today, what I want to say is this: To those who have been sexually abused by a family member or members, you are absolutely NOT ALONE. Everyone’s life is individual, so I can’t pretend that I understand what you’ve gone through, but at this point in my processing (weekly DBT therapy sessions structured around changing my CPTSD-based responses in my interactions with other people and after nightmares), I’ll tell you what I wish my 13-year-old self, drowning in self-doubt and shame and terror and silence, knew. 

There are people out there who will fight for you. Oftentimes they will not be the people you would hope you could rely on, and that sucks. It is one of the worst violations of trust imaginable to think you should be able to count on your family to protect you from harm, only for them to perpetrate it in such a soul-damaging way.  But there WILL be people fighting for you, because I will be one of those people, and sometimes, you will be one of those people for yourself. My unexpected hero was a friend of a friend who told her mother (a teacher at my school), who contacted CPS, who contacted the police. And while that whole experience was traumatizing in its own way, this girl, a classmate I had barely spoken to, helped document that something terrible was happening to me at a time when almost everyone else I reached out to turned away out of discomfort and fear. This girl a year younger than me was so brave for me when I had nothing left to give.  I’ve now lived over half of my life as an incest survivor, but I’ve only really begun to start digging deep into processing my trauma within the last year. This blog is  a way of keeping track of my navigating what I’ve buried for all these years as I try to become a non-codependent, embodied badass with CPTSD causing me only minimal frustration!  Here’s the person beneath.

[togrof]

TW; Sexual Assault; Abuse; Manipulation

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I’ve typed and re-typed, I’ve deleted and hit the undo button so many times. I’m so tired. I’m exhausted. And I can’t live in silence anymore. I have spent the last two years at Lawrence trying to overcome and survive someone I loved who is also my abuser. For the last two years, my friends have watched her gaslight me, emotionally manipulate me and go out of her way to isolate me. She has ostracized me even in my own town, she has pushed me away from my family and she did everything in her power to make sure I would always come back to her.

We, together, have spent the last two years trying to get back to what we were when we were in high school, to find the goodness. We were so volatile to a point that our friends had to step in a peer mediate us until we came to an agreement that we couldn’t be alone together.

When we broke up, I needed space as every one does, but she wouldn’t give it. In public she’d sit down next to me and act as though we were okay when things were anything but. She texted me so much to the point that even after asking for space, I couldn’t be alone until I was off-campus finally. She broke up with me, but then guilted me into hanging around her because I “chose someone else” over her. She called me in the summer on what would have been our 2 year anniversary to let me know I threw it all away. She has maintained a presence in my life that grew to be unsettling and dangerous.

Sophomore year she showed up at my door after relapsing, looking to me to take care of her, putting me in a corner I’ve been trying to get out these last years.

There were so many times that she guilted me into sex with her, saying that I was the reason she wasn’t good enough, after spending so much time telling me how awful I’m doing and how much better she’s doing without me. This has fucked with my head, and she’s done it so many times. I can hear it in my head even now, “you’re miserable and you’re not even trying to hide it, I can see how sad you are and the people around you don’t seem to care…” emotionally manipulating me into believing my friends weren’t there for me and the family I made on campus wasn’t worth shit, and that at the end of the day she was the only person I could rely on. She was the one who knew I was trans before I did, before anyone else did, right? “I was waiting for the day you’d realize, I just always though it was going to be with me” So many times she said, “We know each other best on this campus, I know the real Chandra, you’re not yourself anymore when you’re with these people.” All of it thinly veiled good intent, when what lay behind was just someone scared to be alone, trying to maintain control over me.

When Ashley texted me this summer telling me I was her perpetrator, I didn’t deny her story because she was saying all the things to me that I felt. That she felt she couldn’t say no and that I took a part of her that night - Ashley is my abuser and I believe her, just as I know her as my perpetrator. She has assaulted me verbally, and guilted me into having sex with her over and over.

Once she invited me over on the pretense of us just being friends, and hanging out and watching the office. I had a girlfriend at the time. We kissed and I tried to change the direction of the night by putting on a tv show. She kissed me again, while were laying in bed and that was the first time, I felt a no and even said no, and for the time being is stopped her advancements until she tried again a short time later that night. I felt like a prop. I felt sad, I wanted to to want to have sex with her. I wanted to want her, I wanted to be in love with her all over again, but the pain and hurt she caused in my life has always broken that bridge. With her second attempt, I just let it happen, despite my no earlier in the night. I just laid there and let it happen. I just fucking laid there. Later on, she would complain about how I never reciprocated, never returned her favor and that it furthered her belief that she would never be good enough and that I was using her for sex, but I couldn’t return the favor I could barely be okay through all of that. I couldn’t make myself do anything more than just be a body for her, and I stuck around because I wanted so badly to make things work - to be the person she met in high school. That was the first time I got sucked into this toxic back and forth. I was scared, she was the only true love I knew, she knew me before college, she was the one who go me to apply to college, she was the one that helped me understand my gender. She has managed me and I gave her that power because I needed guidance.

The next morning, it weighed heavily on me all day and I told my girlfriend what had happened. I even said I had said no, I was confused, I was distraught, and I hurt my girlfriend in the worst way possible because this was the first time I had cheated, even if it was coerced. I told my friends I had said no, but because we still had sex, I recanted because I couldn’t face the possibility that a person I loved and spent that last five years knowing could ever assault me.

I feel used up. I feel messed up. I feel like I can’t ever love properly ever again and every day I walk on this campus I wish I had gone through with killing myself this summer. I wish I had taken my father’s gun because I just wanted to stop hurting. I wanted to be done with all this pain. I want to be done with all this pain. This campus has made up their mind about the truth and pushed into a space of silence. A space of isolation, and I just don’t care anymore. I don’t. I just want to graduate and go, but you can’t even let me graduate in peace. I can’t even sleep anymore, all I think about is what she’s done to me and how my trauma surrounds me everywhere I go on this stupid fucking campus.

Despite all of this, I don’t tell this to deny Ashley her voice, I do this to share my voice as a victim. That night that Ashley and I slept together, neither of us wanted it but we didn’t know how to say no because it was erased from our language of us. It was also my final straw, as she had said things about the changes my body had gone through since hormone replacement treatment that rings in my head today, that boils in my gut and reminds me that she’d gotten to experience that virgin part of me before I could trust it with the right person. This is why I cut her off in Winter term and why my life at Lawrence had improved ten fold in just a term. And now im back at square one, clutching my cat for comfort and trying to focus on a capstone when there’s all this shit in my head.

I’ve been in abusive relationships since I was 15. I have body dysmorphia because of exes complaining about my body hair and my vagina with one stating that “I just think it’s ugly, no offense”, I couldn’t let myself enjoy sex after that, It became about pleasing others and my relationship with sex has always centered around me being useful to someone else.

I have to relive these traumas every time I have sex now, I have to mentally talk myself down and let myself be okay in that space.

I have spent the last two years feeling crazy. Feeling like the bad guy, feeling like I deserved all of this abuse. I said the sentence "I survived Ashley, she is my abuser" for the first time out loud in therapy last week.

Here’s what I want you to understand. I’m tired, and I don’t want to fight, I don’t want to dig up everything that’s happened between Ashley and I because I’ve started to in therapy and I’d rather just not remember all the things she’s said to me and done to me, I want to graduate and go away and move on with the tools to be a better person. But I have to, I have to give my truth. I don’t doubt Ashley, I don’t deny her story, and I never did, because it makes sense to me, the reason why we always came back to one another over the past two years despite our horribleness was the desire to get back to what we were. That night brought me my clarity at a cost that we would only continue hurting one another pretending to be the people we weren’t.

I’m so tired. I’m so fucking exhausted and I don’t give a shit what any of you think anymore. I'm a survivor and I'll move forward from this somehow.

[exec--savethem-blog]

return 0; | EXEC_SAVETHEM | Epilogue

EPILOGUE: return 0;

You’re not sure just how long it was you were driven. Most of you fell asleep, finally allowing the tension to fade away and letting your fatigue catch up with you. Others still weren’t quite sure yet if you could trust the people driving you now...

But the fact remained that you were out of that place. Wherever you were heading now, it couldn’t possibly be worse, could it?

Whatever the case... fatigue eventually caught up with you.

...

...

When you came to, you were pulling to a stop in a wooded area, near a river. Your driver looked back at you, gesturing for you to get out.

“Go on, now. He’s waiting for you.”

You hesitantly get out, and walk the direction he’s gesturing. Sitting on a bench, you saw a man in a brown coat, facing the river.

You approach him slowly.

He turns around. An older man, with thinning brown hair and thick-rimmed glasses. A face you’ve seen before...

“I’m glad to finally meet you in person. My name is Suzume Satou.”

Ah, of course. The man who’d been talking to you through that little laptop... He stands up, turning to face you. After a quick headcount, his face falls.

“Though, I do regret not being able to greet all of you.”

He sighs, shaking his head.

“But as for you all, I am grateful to you. All of you. For what you’ve managed to do in there. For ending the twisted ambitions of Arthur Ascott.”

Closing his eyes, he takes a deep breath.

“In life he was a shrewd businessman, with a kind heart. I was proud to call him my friend. But when his daughter was killed, something in him changed. Something within him couldn’t accept the senselessness of her death. My machine - our brainchild, it predicted she would be in danger, but we couldn’t do anything about it. That’s when he left, and started... this project.”

He adjusted his glasses.

“He didn’t think we were doing enough with the information our machine gave us. A machine we designed to see everything, to identify terrorist threats... and only that. But it gave us more than that... names of ordinary people in danger. When we first discovered this, we agreed that we had to keep our creation out of the hands of the Government. We couldn’t let this power be misused.”

Exhaling, he met your gaze.

“That in mind, you’ve no doubt seen for yourself that there are factions in the government with an invested interest in this project of Arthur’s. I hate to say this, but they cannot know the truth of what happened here - what Arthur created, and what happened to it. You’ve seen what Arthur created. Now imagine what it would become if it were raised by a government party, fueled only by greed and the desire to control...”

He lets the word linger on his breath.

“You understand then, why this must not get out. I’ve already taken measures to help you in this... I have contacts in the police who can look after you... And the two currently driving you, they’re employees of mine, well-versed in protection. Whatever happens with these interested parties, we’ll be looking out for you. Us, and, well... them.”

Looking up, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. A small camera, on a telephone pole. Sitting next to it was a pay phone.

As if on cue, the pay phone rang.

“Go on, answer it.” Satou said, smiling slightly.

You approach slowly, and together you pick up the receiver. A familiar voice meets your ears.

“Can you hear me?”

You respond with a simple yes.

“Good. I’ll watch out for you, I promise.”

The line goes dead, and you find Suzume Satou standing by the phone as well, observing you.

“Watching with a thousand eyes, and listening with a million ears...“

After that, you were safely turned over to the police. Some point along the line, your families were informed - as they were there to greet you. The next few days were a whirlwind of questions from policemen and family alike, just spinning around you. You faintly recall a few detectives mentioning ‘your mutual friend’ and avoiding the more difficult questions, just as he said. They even managed to keep the worst of the press away... So they could be trusted, right?

After what felt like forever... You were able to return to your school dorms. With the stress of impending school catch-up on your plate, you opened your dorm to find...

A cardboard box, sitting on your bed.

Inside... was a collection of clothing and other items, from your time inside that building. Good and bad memories alike, all wrapped up in one nice package. One way or another you reached the bottom of the box to find two other items... an envelope of money, and a note.

The note reads:

“You are our future. Stay strong. - SS”

You are being watched.

The government has a secret system - a machine - that spies on you every hour of every day. It was designed to detect random acts of terror, but it sees everything, including violent crimes involving ordinary people - people like you. The government considers these people irrelevant.

We don’t.

We work in secret, outside government control. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find you.

EPILOGUE: return 0; end

exec save_them; success. 12 survivors confirmed.

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!

[thelonesomequeen]

That fear of men is just irrational one. There are a lot of men who respect women and would never do anything against their will. As to Sebastian, there are several statements of people who worked with him saying he's the NICEST person they've met. Not all the people are monsters just because they have a dick. It's about reading characters, those who are nice, are like that all the time, never making fun of someone, making others feeling uncomfortable or acting like bullies or jerks.

I feel like you misunderstand. The fear of men or anyone based on prior bad experiences is not irrational when you've already had very real abuses or mistreatments happen to you. There's no need to defend Seb here. The anon is not placing blame or accusing him of anything whatsoever. They are simply saying that they have a hard time reconciling their fear of men with their liking Sebastian because he is a man. If you got bit by a dog, you might develop a fear of all dogs. Maybe your friend has a very nice dog, but whenever you go to their house, no matter how nice they are, you still feel really wary about this dog. Nothing wrong that this dog did, but you've just had a very very bad experience before that makes you feel really uncomfortable around ANY dogs regardless of their history. That's a very real thing, and not the first time I've heard of this happening with survivors. Please understand that this is not a direct accusation against Seb. Let's take our fangirl hats off for a moment and see what's really being said. It's not about him. It's about the survivor and how they see the world and people now post-assault. I feel you are misunderstanding much of what is being said. Firstly, not all abusers are men, but many of us who are survivors have been attacked by men. A fear of men or an acknowledgment of that fact that most perpetrators of sexual violence are men IS NOT saying that, as you so eloquently put it, they anything with a dick is automatically a monster. That's not what is being said at all. Wouldn't the world be a perfect place if we could always read characters correctly and people presented themselves in very genuine ways? I feel like saying that it's about reading people's characters put the onus on the survivors, and off the shoulders of the perpetrators of sexual violence and abusers. Wouldn't it be great if we could see the jerks and assholes right off the bat when we see them out in public? The very worst people can sometimes present the best public faces. Maybe you don't see them misbehaving. Maybe they seem kind, understanding, and harmless. That is often then case. Remember that a lot of these acts of abuse come from friends, partners, parents, siblings more than anyone else. People we love, people we trust. Speaking from personal experience, abusers can be very cunning, and can hide evil intentions, working diligently to gain trust, and worse, making sure they present a public face that makes people doubt your claims when you do speak out. Yes, sometimes there are instances when people are clearly jerks, and there are things you can see in their personalities that give you pause. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. I wish so much that it were. Then everyone would avoid these people, but these people are very good at hiding a lot of the time. Anyone can fall victim to a cunning abuser if they're good enough at hiding their real selves long enough to gain your trust. I understand the automatic reflex to defend your fave and all of good men out there, but please be aware that this is not about them. There are good men out there. Seb might be really great, but please don't make this about something it clearly isn't. This is about the perspective of a survivor of sexual violence. I knew when they sent in the ask that there was a risk that someone might take it the wrong way, but I'm glad they shared their feelings on the matter, because it's a common and real feeling for many survivors to have. It's not always talked about, but it's important that this feeling they have is acknowledged. Let's keep the focus on that. ☕️

[keptin-indy]

Dresden Files: Salem 5

In which there are demon squirrels and a boss fight!  And another Baz’s-terrible-taste-in-clothing link.

Also, there is no canon term for the plane of existence in which ghosts or spirits in the mortal world but not fully manifested inhabit.  We collectively decided that halfway between reality and the NeverNever should be called the MaybeMaybe.

Also also, shout out to @kassasaurus-rex for Liking all of these write-ups and feeding my need for constant validation.  You are the real MVP.

Adler was so pleased with the form he’d taken to meet the Winter Court that he returned to work as a many-eyed crow and convinced patrons of Count Orlock’s that it had a really great animatronics budget.  Baz’s takeaway from confronting the Winters was that he needed a lawyer familiar with faeries to look over any orders or agreements he gave them.  Unfortunately, he found that the White Court had a local monopoly on people specializing in supernatural law, and he wasn’t willing to owe them a favor.  He consulted the Witches’ Circle, but found that the lawyers they had as members, while supernatural themselves, had more mundane professional focuses.  While there, Mary Harrison reminded him that he should call a meeting of the community to announce that he was unofficially in charge as his mentor had been.  The Warden called Ian Fitzpatrick, who sent out invitations for the following Sunday.  In the intervening days, Baz also asked Adler how he was feeling after his alone-time with Kayla Monroe, saying that he shouldn’t have let him go off alone with her, but that he wasn’t sure where the line was between their mutual protection pact and stepping on his personal choices and life. Adler told him he was glad Baz knew Adler wasn’t really his dog, and that he should offer advice rather than permission; perhaps when they had known each other longer, they would both know when it was acceptable or necessary to step in more decisively.  Adler then told Sam that the two of them should play up being the Warden’s large intimidating dogs at the meeting to counteract Baz’s indecisive niceness.  Sam agreed in theory, but was very much like his owner himself.  Finally, Baz asked Murchah about the touch-talking he’d used in the meeting with the Summer Court.  Murchah was confused at first, then explained that it was his natural form of communication in his true body, so he hadn’t thought much about it and couldn’t say how exactly it worked.  He did say that it functioned differently in the NeverNever, his natural environment, but there weren’t words to explain how.

Out in the Greater Boston Area, people began to notice a slight uptick in deaths and missing persons cases, focused somewhat in the lowest income areas, but broadly not having any common features in the victims.  Upon hearing about this, Baz immediately called the Winters, but they denied having anything to do do with it.  He then told them to find out who was responsible, but not to take any actions against the perpetrator(s) without his say-so.  They hung up before he could specify any more than this, much to his concern.  With no other information to go on, Baz returned to his usual community tasks, but noticed that everyone seemed more on edge or unhappy than usual; the whole city seemed somehow darker.  Sam saw more of the flitting shadow spirits, now gathering around people who seemed to be experiencing negative emotions, but was unable to communicate this because he is a dog.  He came to the conclusion that it hadn’t been the Rowlands’ estate that was haunted, but Baz himself, due to his grief while in the house.  Eager to help, he Barked at anyone afflicted, which both drove the spirits off and startled the crap out of anyone nearby, including Baz, who couldn’t figure out what was setting the dog off.  After visiting the estate again - still under the assumption that it was haunted - Sam Barked at Baz and took off in pursuit of one of the spirits, unfortunately losing it in a crowd of people.  Now alerted to a specific threat, Baz opened the Sight and Saw a shadowy parasite feeding on the darkest parts of a person and growing larger by encouraging those feelings.  This wasn’t a natural spirit for the area and must have been created or warped by someone for this specific purpose.  The Warden called up Adler and Murchah (Evelyn being busy with work and Eunice) and discussed what to do with this information.  Adler cautioned against telling the general (supernatural) public, since telling someone who was already feeling bad that it would only get worse and there was nothing they could do about it wouldn’t help the situation at all.  Sam managed to catch and eat one of the spirits latched onto Baz and felt the cheer it had been sucking away from Baz.  Before delving into the investigation, Baz asked if Adler and Murchah would be willing to act as part of an advisory council in a more formal way, as he was far out of his depth and training.  Murchah agreed until the Formori threat was dealt with, and Adler very tentatively agreed, but only after making it abundantly clear that he would only do so for Baz and that if another White Council wizard thought they had any sway over Adler, they were very much mistaken.  He hadn’t rebuffed the Winter Court only to submit to the wizards.

Out in the field to test a hunch, Sam indicated a person who was being fed upon and Adler turned into a small songbird, fluttering around the person and generally trying to brighten their day.  It worked, and the subsequent lift in the victim’s spirits drove off the shadows, who seemed disgusted, but not harmed by the positive emotions.  Adler also checked in on Orlocks to make sure that the positive, thrilling fear customers felt there wasn’t attracting shadows.  The group went to contact Daniyah as the local spirit expert and found that the area which she had recently claimed as her territory had both fewer of the shadows and many more strange, abstract statues, evidently meant to inspire viewers as part of some kind of arcane ritual.  The group rang the bell as before and were led by the owl familiar into the improbable mist surrounding Daniyah’s otherworldly cottage.  The sorceress greeted them, but her aura was buzzing with a number of magical items on her and her owl stationed itself by a window to keep watch.  When questioned, she was unusually forthright, admitting that she had seen the shadow spirits and knew they weren’t natural, but didn’t know who or what was bringing them into town.  She also told them some some new evils had come into the city within the last week and gave them three locations in the most violent neighborhoods of Boston that her spirits found themselves unexpectedly barred from.  They could possibly be connected to the shadows, but without studying them closely, it was impossible to know for sure.  When asked about the new statues in her territory, she said she was attempting to shape the NeverNever and Ways to her own liking - presumably as a personal holding - so that her friends could be closer to the world.  She promised Baz that it shouldn’t cause any harm to the people living there, just slight surreality, which was par for Salem anyway.  Murchah asked why she wanted her friends so close to the real world and Daniyah said that there were evils in the NeverNever that were preying upon them, who could possibly turn their attention to her if she wasn’t prepared for them.  Concerned, but now with solid steps to take, the group departed.

They went into Boston proper, to old project housing that had been all but abandoned by the city government, but evidently not by its tenants.  Sam let out a low, constant growl as soon as he got near, and even the less perceptive people could feel the deep sense of Wrong rolling off of the building.  Murchah volunteered to go in first, explaining once again that his physical body was both easily repaired and without sentimental meaning to him.  As the group entered, however, it became obvious that the threat there had passed, leaving only corpses in its wake.  Some had killed each other, some themselves, some showed no indication of how they died, but all of them were obviously in the grip of overwhelming negative emotions when it had happened.  The entire building was full of the shadow spirits, thousands of them teeming over the bodies like ants, so gorged on their prey that they could almost be seen in the physical world, a terrible flicker in the corner of your eye.  At the center of this carnage was an old bed, used within the last few days and surrounded by the worst of the violence.  Sam could smell something oily and decaying clinging to it, even over the scent of physical decay surrounding it.  No other information presented itself, so the group headed on to the next location they’d been given, Baz calling in an anonymous tip to the police about the first place.

The second place was much like the first, but more recent, and two of the inhabitants were still alive, though almost incoherent from terror and despair.  From what little Baz could get out of them, it seemed that the area had always been rough, but a man had come not long ago and talked to people and suddenly everything was so much worse.  The man himself seemed unremarkable except that he wore a dark robe and had a strange voice, but he had reduced the lodging to a charnel house within a day of being there.  Adler tried to call Evelyn to figure out where to send the survivors that would believe their story and, as if summoned, Eunice manifested on the scene, berating the corpses for their bad choices in life that had brought them to such an end.  Baz asked if she could see the shadows in the MaybeMaybe and she said they looked like demon squirrels.  Not at all pleased with them infesting her plane of existence, Eunice remembered the oxygen tank she wore toward the end of her life, giving it ectoplasmic form, and rubbed her wool sweater on some trash until she got a spark, making a tiny flamethrower out of the nasal cannula.  The shadows screamed in pain as they shriveled in the flames and Eunice hopped back into the real world, leaving the fire burning in the spirit realm with the living none the wiser.  Baz called in another tip to the police and they headed for the last location Daniyah had given them.

As soon as the reached the rundown apartment building, they could feel that the sense of Wrongness was much stronger there.  The people were still alive, but dazed from the dark feelings the ever-present shadows were drawing out of them.  Sam Barked, scattering the spirits, and a man in a dark robe came out to see what the commotion was.  Eunice, her priorities always in order, demanded to know what he was doing in his bathrobe in the middle of the day, while Baz casually asked what he was doing with his spirit friends.  The man ignored Eunice and said it should be self-explanatory.  Baz shrugged and said he just wanted to see if the guy had any kind of reasoning, then drew his sword.  Adler got there first, changing from a dog to a horrible claw monster and attacking, but the man threw a net of foreboding darkness at him, which he luckily managed to throw off.  Murchah put his unusual speed to work carrying out the comatose bystanders while Baz went sword-to-unexpected-claws with the man, losing most of his shirt in the process, but dealing him a punishing blow he should not have been able to take and still stand.  Eunice tried to phase herself into the man’s body to distract or possess him, but quickly found that touching him burned her, so she switched into the MaybeMaybe and found that the man’s spiritual presence there was a terrible demon bearing a glowing sigil, which didn’t seem like a good sign.  Since it had worked so well last time, she again manifested her oxygen tank and tried to use it as an improvised flamethrower, but it had been improbable that that had worked last time and now it much more sensibly exploded.  Eunice hopped back into the real world quickly, leaving the entire building spiritually on fire in the MaybeMaybe.  Baz’s sword blows, though more than enough to take down a mortal and many supernatural creatures, were merely a match for the man’s claws and both strange man and Warden were suffering under each others’ onslaught until Sam leapt into the fray, his mouth glowing with faint blue light, to savage the man.  The dog’s assault severed the man’s femoral artery, finally injuring him in a way that his supernatural toughness couldn’t handle, and he went down quickly, his mortal form decaying almost before he hit the ground.  A small black coin rolled away from the desiccated corpse and Adler made the connection to some research he’d done for film, cautioning no one to touch it.  He said the coin contained a demon sent straight from Lucifer himself; Adler wasn’t even religious and he was still afraid of what he had heard these coins could do.  Murchah wasn’t convinced, but Baz suggested making tongs out of something and putting in a bag and Eunice volunteered to be the one to do that as she was the least physically dangerous if she got possessed and she was already dead to boot.  Adler vetoed all of this and put a cup over the coin and told the others to guard it until he came back with a priest.  He seemed to have a specific one in mind and brought back Father Macklepenny after explaining what they had found.  The Father had only a vague idea of what to do with a Blackened Denarius, but started with holy water (which boiled upon touching the coin) and very carefully wrapped it in an altar cloth.  Baz introduced himself as a Warden (then explained what Wardens were) and asked what would be done with the coin.  The Father said that he would call specialists who could store it safely.  The struggle between the Chuch and the Denarians had been going on for two thousand years, though the Denarians always made sure to destroy the church’s records every few centuries to hobble them.  Eunice drew the sigil she’d seen on the demon in two parts to avoid giving it any power and the Father said he could pass that along and let them know its name and any other information they had on it once he heard back.  Unwilling to let the coin out of their sight, the group accompanied the priest back to his church.

[missvoltairine-blog]

csa tw/abuse tw

I want to be very clear about what I am observing on tumblr lately:

I am observing a dynamic where a close-knit clique of individuals, with a largely shared audience that is comprised at least to a degree of young people, often gang up on and bully (using deeply personal tactics - often referencing their targets abuse histories and using loaded language that is clearly designed to be as personally upsetting as possible to the individual) anyone who disagrees with them

which would be bad enough except they are also targeting people specifically for trying to talk about consent and communication in relationships, for using terms like “homophobia” and “transphobia” to describe the oppressions that many LGBT people face, and for saying that the consumption of child porn is not okay

specifically I am seeing a great effort being put into undermining established ideas and language etc that have been used for ages, by both victims and victim advocates, to talk about abuse and oppression

to the point where victims are framed as perpetrators explicitly for using the wrong language (even when the language that they used is like, straight out of Why Does He Do That) to talk about their own abuse

I am also seeing a sweeping normalization of emotional manipulation and verbal abuse through widespread misinterpretation of terms like “gaslighting” and “boundary violation” and etc, so that someone can literally post a chat log in which they exhibit textbook manipulative and gaslighting behavior, and then when someone says “you’re being manipulative”, they are attacked for “gaslighting” the manipulator by “saying [their] feelings aren’t valid”

AND, while all this is happening, this clique of individuals circles the wagons around personal friends of theirs who have been exposed as consumers of child pornography, by insisting that fictional child pornography is harmless (it’s not) and that consumption of child pornography is a “valid” “coping mechanism” for csa victims

which, without accusing anyone of lying about being a csa survivor, directly parrots a pervasive meme that is often used to stigmatize and keep survivors of csa from coming forward about their abuse AND is used by abusers to avoid accountability - the idea that being sexually abused as a child directly causes someone to become sexually attracted to children, which is an idea that has been debunked time and time again and largely decried by victims and advocates as deeply harmful

and is especially troubling given the resurgence of ideas like “asexual people are more frequently and more deeply harmed by rape and rape culture than non-asexual people” and “some pre-pubescent children are naturally sexual beings who are interested in and even want sex, and some aren’t, and the ones who aren’t are asexual”

All of this is frankly deeply terrifying to me. I think at BEST people are harming themselves here by engaging in and spreading ideas that seem pro-survivor on the surface but are ultimately deeply damaging, and at worst they are creating a playing field in this discourse where grooming and abuse are normalized and the language that we use to address and call that shit out is seen as unacceptable and problematic, and survivors who don’t embrace this dynamic to their own detriment are treated as disposable (and ironically accused of being anti-survivor!), along with potential victims. 

This is not okay.

[itsfinancethings]

If your aim is to tell a nuanced story about heroism, historical trauma and revenge, it’s probably best to keep Nazis—by which I mean the literal perpetrators of the Holocaust—out of it. From a thematic perspective, it’s very hard to win with these guys. Depict them as brilliant, bloodless killing machines, and you’ll burnish their terrifying mythology; choose instead to paint them as dimwitted, incompetent henchmen, and you’re liable to trivialize the suffering and deaths of millions. A few beloved films that take aim at Nazis have managed to avoid these traps by sacrificing emotional realism in favor of off-the-wall satire (The Producers) or sheer catharsis (Inglourious Basterds). Unfortunately, Amazon’s Hunters tries to juggle all three modes, for the duration of a 10-episode TV series, without anything approaching Mel Brooks’ wit or Quentin Tarantino’s technical flair.

Created by relative newcomer David Weil, Hunters will arrive on Prime Video on Friday, Feb. 21 with the imprimatur of executive producer Jordan Peele. It’s set in 1977—that culturally dense year remembered for Star Wars, punk, disco and the Son of Sam murders—and our hero is a young Jewish Brooklynite, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman of Percy Jackson fame). Though he’d ideally be in college putting his prodigious smarts to use, Jonah is living at home, working in a comic store and moonlighting as the city’s most inept weed dealer in order to support the Holocaust-survivor grandma (Jeannie Berlin) who raised him. But there’s more to this doting matriarch than Jonah knows, until tragedy strikes and he meets her friend Meyer Offerman (the great Al Pacino, overdoing the stock old-Jewish-guy mannerisms a bit) and gets drawn into a squad of vigilantes assassinating members of a vast network of Nazis living under assumed names in the U.S.

Elsewhere in a 90-minute premiere that feels longer, a suburban-Maryland barbecue ends in a cartoonish burst of gunfire. Homegrown Nazi psycho Travis Leich (Greg Austin) calmly delivers wicked white-supremacist monologues in between calmly committing horrific acts of violence. And Millie Malone (Grey’s Anatomy alum Jerrika Hinton), a black woman struggling to earn respect in the overwhelmingly white, male FBI, is sent to Florida to investigate the murder of an elderly, female NASA scientist. The network of undercover Nazis starts to take shape, as does their evil plot to bring about a Fourth Reich on American soil.

Christopher Saunders/Amazon

Inspired in part by real mid-20th-century Nazi hunters and the shameful U.S. government initiative Operation Paperclip, Hunters shares with Peele’s movies an effort to use fun, propulsive genre storytelling as a vehicle for serious social commentary. Horror, for Peele, is a way of heightening our visceral responses to racism, exploitation, inequality. But Weil’s genre is action comedy, and the comedy in Hunters falls pretty flat. Dick jokes and scatological gags—some harrowingly visual—are constant. I’m not scandalized by this kind of humor, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it were confined to Jonah and his teen pals (one of whom is called “Bootyhole”). Instead, we hear it from good guys, bad guys, young, old and everyone in between.

These aren’t the only characterizations that feel shallow or underdeveloped. Millie so closely resembles the righteous, earnest detective characters in network procedurals that her scenes almost seem spliced in from a different show. Opting to portray the Nazis as a hierarchy of cartoon villains, Weil makes them so uniformly crafty and fearsome that you can imagine contemporary neo-Nazis watching Hunters and feeling pretty good about their forebears. More disappointing are the Jewish characters, whose personalities are largely accumulations of benign stereotypes, religious factoids and firsthand or inherited trauma. Gefilte fish comes up so often, you’d think every Jew on the planet devoured those gelatinous gray discs daily. Though I wasn’t alive, much less in New York, in 1977, I did grow up Jewish among Jews of Meyer’s and Jonah’s generations, and for me these depictions (like gefilte fish) didn’t pass the smell test.

It seems obvious that caricatures of Jews, even affectionate ones, don’t make a very effective case against antisemitism. But the show also makes subtler, equally unfortunate choices in the way it represents racism. When it’s convenient to the story, anti-Jewish prejudice appears to eclipse or even erase the violence and discrimination nonwhite characters face—such as when Jonah’s black female love interest is dating a belligerent white guy who calls Jonah a “kike.”

Amazon Studios, Prime Video—Christopher SaundersJerrika Hinton in ‘Hunters’

The show’s biggest problem is the garbled messages it sends about violence and revenge. Like Tarantino, Weil palpably savors the suffering of Nazis and wants viewers to do the same. (There’s one particularly gross torture scene whose pleasures Amazon has cautioned me against “spoiling” with a description here.) And I’m not above admitting that I frequently felt a thrilling sense of poetic justice at the sight of mass murderers dying the same gruesome deaths they inflicted on millions of innocent victims. Yet Hunters also shows us those tragic deaths—both in flashbacks to the concentration camps and through the resurgent Reich’s crimes in its new home. Often they’re rendered glibly enough to be indistinguishable from the righteous kills. In a scene set amid the ironic brightness of a bowling alley, Travis, a near-omniscient villain of Coen Brothers proportions, smashes a guy’s teeth in with a bowling ball.

To his credit, Weil’s intention isn’t really to conflate genocide with vengeance for same. In interviews, he talks about growing up with a grandmother who survived the Holocaust and how as a kid her stories sounded to him like “the stuff of comic books and superheroes,” tales of “great good but grand evil.” He’s said that he hopes Hunters can provide “catharsis” and “wish fulfillment.” But he’s also observed that it “becomes this story that lives not in black and white, but in the gray and that murky morality,” posing the question: “If we hunt these monsters, do we risk becoming them ourselves?” Some of that ambivalence comes through in Jonah’s queasiness about becoming a killer, which inspires an intriguing but all-too-brief consideration of whether it’s possible to be a superhero—to be a good person who can stomach massacring bad people—if you don’t harbor considerable darkness of your own. But mostly, the show’s choice to make all forms of violence entertaining overshadows that nuance. At worst, Hunters can lose its antifascist chutzpah and start to come across as equal-opportunity sadistic.

It’s an unfortunate—perhaps the single most unfortunate—fact of life in 2020 that Nazis have recently goose-stepped their way into mainstream American politics, and thus that stories about killing them have begun to resonate as subversive for the first time in our history. That shouldn’t render them off-limits for the entertainment industry. (Just last year, HBO’s comic-book adaptation Watchmen used the superhero genre to launch a withering critique of white supremacy and its insidious, systemic influence in the U.S.) But it does mean that storytellers across media need to be cognizant of the moral and political undertones of their portrayals to an extent that Weil and co-showrunner Nikki Toscano don’t seem to have been. I trust that they as well as Peele, a busy filmmaker whose level of creative input here is unclear, have their hearts in the right place. It’s just a shame that there seems to be so much distance between what Hunters wants to say and what it actually expresses.

[getesoteric]

The Power of Love and Forgiveness!

The power of Love and Forgiveness!

Published April 11, 2018 | By

John Ashley

Love and Forgiveness

 Reposted from my blog: https://www.getesoteric.com

  What is love exactly? I think all of us have asked that question more than once. Is it a certain level of compassion, is it an energetic field, is it super natural or inexplicable? I would say yes to just about any possible explanation of it, because although there are similarities in people’s experience of love, there are also a variety of way people try to describe the feeling.

 At the core of it, is compassion, forgiveness, a sense of service to others, and a desire to feel cared for. One of the main components of love, is a deep emotional and seemingly spiritual connection. I personally feel there are different kinds of love, and things that we also confuse for love, and things we decide are love, just to fill in a whole in our soul for a period of time.

 Kinds of love

 You can find one kind of love, in the love you express to a family member, or a friend, with another more personally intimate kind of love expressed with a lover. Another kind of love is found in seeking compassionate service, through volunteer work, through sharing of your own personal experiences (such as on this website), so that others can benefit from your own personal experiences, and so that they might not feel alone in the suffering they also had/have to endure. There is great love in sharing our most intimate experiences, but it can be very difficult to do that openly in social media, or other venues. Here folks can share anonymously, or as themselves, or both.

 To refocus though back to the topic at hand; with all of the strife in the world we can experience, and with the news so focused on dividing people, and their ideals, rather than finding ways to come together. I think we can all agree, that sometimes things are not feeling too great when we become regular participants in the consumption of negativity. This can come through the news, social media, music, movies etc. To bring more love into our lives, will definitely take a shift in our current social norms, and our current ways of thinking (as well as the stories we tell ourselves). For those who have spent some time in mediation, and with doing the inner work, it becomes readily apparent, that what is going on, is a spiritual battle more so than any other kind of battle in this world.

 This is a spiritual battle

 This spiritual battle consists of the normal duality that exists on this planet, which was designed for us to learn from, but taken to the extreme. Throughout history, there were ups and downs, with the negative wining out for a period of time (Napoleon, Hitler etc.), and times where great figures such as Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, made such a large impact on society because of their great teachings. The one thing all those great figures had was a love for all beings, and all things in nature, or as Jesus would say, Gods creations. Even the many years old channeled books “The RA Material” (which can be found on this blog for free download), refer to the love and the light of the one infinite creator.

 Love and light are such a common theme, that it begs to question why. What is this light, usually described as white or golden light, with the white light being the purest? If one studies many of the claimed near death experiences, and the claims of remembering being born into this world, they all describe this white light, and an amazing feeling of encompassing love, and oneness with everything. The most unimaginable experiences are described. With that we start to realize, that we must all come from the same place, and all come here for different challenges, and for different purposes. No matter who we are though, and what our purpose, love and forgiveness stand out as the most important lessons of all, that we are all tasked with learning. Now this can take a single or multiple lifetime to achieve, but is best if we are at least aware of the power that love and forgiveness gives us in this life.

 Our energies attract the kind of love that comes our way

 For some people, love comes easily, and for some it seems very difficult. What tends to block the attraction of love energies into our lives, is in many cases things that affects us with negative energy. This could be an environment we are born into, or situations such as abuse we experienced while we were in our most vulnerable years, that we have never dealt with. Some turn to even more damaging behaviors such as addictions, or self-abuse, self-loathing, lack of forgiveness of self and others. It is a choice however to keep this negative energy going, and as we do, we are inadvertently affecting our Karma for every negative reaction. I believe there is a force of negativity in this world that wants to keep people from realizing their own personal power, and strength. And with that the negative side tries to dominate our lives. However, there is a much larger picture at play, and I believe that we are all going to ascend towards enlightenment and love no matter the negative influences we may feel.

 If we choose to turn around our negative thoughts, and seek out the friendships of others, through offering our own friendship and love, we can easily defeat any bad influences. Even the stories of the holocaust survivors said “they can take my life, and the lives of those I love, but they can never take away my faith and my love”. In the worst of situations, it is our faith and our love, and the knowledge that death isn’t something to really fear, since we can know without a doubt… through the work of some great and amazing mediums (such as Maureen Hancock, Anastassia grace, and Candace Dalton), that life goes on, and no one really dies.

 Earth is a school

 Earth is a school, and sometimes it seems like not a very friendly school. I believe however, that everything happens for a reason, and that we do have some control over the outcome of our lives, as far as whether we live a negative, or positive life or not. Much of success in the area of love, self-love etc., has to do with forgiveness. This is with forgiveness of self and others, even when we disagree. For example, to not forgive your enemy, or those who have abused you, your allowing that abuse to continue in many ways. To see that we are all one, and that people that do things like this are damaged or not healthy souls, and souls in need of much healing themselves, and whom must have also been victims of multi-generational abuse themselves, is the level we must go to at some point in time in order to forgive.

 I can’t possibly forgive

 Many people will scoff at the idea of forgiveness in those cases, but it is in all spiritual, philosophical and religious teachings, along with the thou shalt not judge kind of mindset. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t seek punishment for those who choose to continue a pattern of abuse rather than to find ways to heal (that’s what Karama is for), or that we’d in some way have to continue to associate with that individual. The point is more that the forgiveness is for the victim more so than the perpetrator, and that has to come through some kind of determination about the imperfect humanity in all of us, and the subsequent release of the anger and fear associated with it. The first part of it, is with really talking about it, through therapy, a trusted friend, or through introspective meditation and really listening to your heart. Your guides are there for you, if you begin to build a relationship with them, starting with the practice of meditation. Many of those who are victims of abuse will go on to help others free themselves from the stronghold that hate has on them, and the effects that this experience continues to have with the lack of the power of forgiveness. This is the greatest battle for all of us in life.

 Understanding love and forgiveness

 To really understand love and forgiveness, we need to become more mindful of all things in life, and yes that means to love our enemies like Jesus did for example. This includes getting out in nature more, to ground ourselves, to be around the water, the animals, and other people as much as possible. This all helps to remove the fear that our perpetrators put into us, by not allowing them to rob us of our lives, and our ability to enjoy it. Some Empaths say they would rather be alone, than to deal with the energies of others, and to them, I would say we all have free will to choose what energies we are mostly focused on. We have the power to turn around most situations, just with our own thoughts and energies, and with our ability to send out loving energies to those around us, even that person that just cut us off in traffic. We’ve all been guilty of reacting to the selfishness of a dangerous driver, when in fact this will only end up attracting more of the same ultimately, through the law of attraction. Now I don’t believe all of the claims in the law, but there is some very good evidence, that this law is powerful in many ways. You can read about my thoughts on that in the article called “Is there a problem with the Law of Attraction?”.

 This is all I can write this evening on the subject, but I will elaborate more on this topic very soon!

 Namaste!

John Ashley

#getesoteric

#love

#forgiveness

#esoteric

#spiritual

[heatherleeson-blog1]

why do we hate domestic violence survivors so much?

A few weeks ago, while I was staying with my parents, my younger brother was asked by a good friend of his to help her move. For the last couple of months her ex-boyfriend had been verbally harassing, threatening and intimidating her, and trying to trash her reputation around our home town. He spent a lot of time and energy calling her a whore and a slut, both to her face and behind her back, inconsolably furious as he apparently was, that she had the nerve to continue existing after they had broken up. This culminated one night when he threatened to send a group of his mates around to her place to ‘bash’ her. A bunch of guys actually did turn up in the middle of the night, and while they didn’t get physical, they screamed abuse at her from the lawn while she hid inside with her female house mate. She decided to move out shortly after.

A couple of nights later, while my brother, his girlfriend and I sat in his parked car outside the local Indian restaurant waiting for our take away, we talked about what happened. We were disgusted but sadly unsurprised. It wasn’t the first time any of us had witnessed domestic violence or partner abuse. Nor will it be the last. As my brother discussed their plans to move her belongings over to her parents’ house, I sat in silence, still reeling from what I’d just heard. Another friend, another incident. Another shitty, abusive partner. Another woman fearing for her safety, turning her life upside down to keep herself from harm. Because she had the misfortune to date someone who would later turn out to be a piece of shit. She’d done nothing wrong and was suffering 100% of the consequences. It’s a story I’ve been told over and over and over again, from friends, family members, co-worker and strangers on the internet; I’m no longer shocked but it never fails to make me feel sick.

When confronted with an incident of domestic violence, I always assumed most people would have the same reaction as me: disgust, anger and outrage. Being threatened, abused or harassed by a partner or ex-partner (or anyone for that matter), is never ok- right? Yet when my brother told our father he’d have to cancel their plans that day so he could help his friend move, my dad seemed more annoyed than anything else. Why did he, specifically, have to be the one to help her move? (they’re best friends). Why didn’t she just call the police? (she had). Hadn’t something like this happened to her once before? (…so?) The incident was immediately waved aside as something “not to get involved in” as my father picked apart the story while demanding to know whether my brother’s friend, the victim, had “done the right thing”. Not once were the actions of her ex-partner mentioned at all.

After briefly considering screaming at my dad and thinking better of it, I went to curl up in bed and think about what I’d just heard. This woman, who after being harassed, intimidated and abused had done nothing other than try to protect herself, now had a total stranger questioning her like a criminal on trial. Time and time again, I hear people (who, I might add, have no first-hand experience with domestic violence or abuse) talk about what domestic violence victims should do. What they would do, if they were in that situation (if you’ve never experienced domestic violence, I’m happy for you and I can say with 100% certainty that you have no idea what it’s like or what you would do in that situation). This woman actually had done everything “right” - she’d gone to the police and was leaving the house immediately to try and avoid any future incidents – and yet her story still invited scepticism and a total lack of empathy from my father. I thought back to when I first left my own abuser and my dad telling me to come to him for help if I ever felt unsafe or threatened by him again. Would he be saying these things about my brother’s friend if that were his own daughter? Did he lose respect for me when he found out I had been a victim of domestic violence? Did he not realise that all DV victims are, after all, someone’s child?  

It got me thinking, and I wondered why we treat victims of domestic violence so harshly. I’ve never heard someone talk about a victim of say, a car crash or a burglary, with the same disdain as most people do victims of intimate partner abuse. I always hear people insisting that if someone is a true victim of DV, they should come forward immediately, tell their friends and family and go to the police. That’s what I’d do, they say. But who does that actually help? From my personal experience, the most common responses to allegations of domestic violence tend to range somewhere between disbelief and indifference.

When I left my abuser 4 years ago, I specifically tried not to “make a fuss”. I had just left a terrifying situation with no idea where I was going to live or what was going to happen to me. I was scared, confused and ashamed. I didn’t want to call any more attention to myself than I already had. I told only the people closest to me the barest details of what had happened. I certainly never told any of my abuser’s friends or family, and I never even considered going to the police. It would be a long time, after lots of therapy, before I even dared to use words such as “rape” or “domestic violence” or “abuse” to describe what had happened to me. All I wanted was for everything to be over. And yet I still found myself on the receiving end of a constant barrage of unfathomably rude and upsetting comments, from both strangers and people I thought were my friends. Over and over again I heard about how I should have done this, or said that. The tiniest details of my story were pulled apart and inspected, as over and over again I was expected to re-tell, and re-live the worst moments of my life.

Why do we have such little collective empathy for domestic violence survivors? What is it about this particular form of violence that provokes such vicious criticism of its victims? Why don’t people give a damn when they hear about stories like my brother’s friend, like mine? Why do I keep getting shitty comments from people who wouldn’t know me from a bar of soap, telling me why it’s my fault for not leaving? Why is domestic violence considered a ‘personal matter’, while a random assault on the street is considered a crime? Why, after millions of women and non-binary people gave example after example of sexual harassment, assault and abuse during #metoo, do people still not think this is a problem?

We are commanded to tell our stories, only to have them immediately thrown back in our faces and torn apart in the court of public opinion. We are told over and over again, to report domestic violence and partner abuse, to come forward, to tell the people we care about what’s going on, only to be met with disdain and discomfort. Our stories make people uncomfortable, because it forces them to admit that the world might not work the way they thought it did. It’s easy to hear about a random mugging or a drunk driving accident and point the finger at the culprit. It doesn’t upset our world view. It’s harder to witness abuse happening to a friend, or a co-worker, or your sister, or your daughter, and realise that domestic violence can happen to anyone. And it’s a lot harder still to reconcile the fact that the perpetrator isn’t some scary monster, but just a regular person. Someone you might work with. Someone you’re mates with. Someone not so different from you. When we hear about domestic violence it makes us uncomfortable. So, we either turn the other way, or we turn on the victim. Much easier than admitting we’re still living in a rape culture with a serious domestic violence epidemic.

Global estimates published by the WHO indicate that about 1 in 3 women worldwide who have been in a relationship have experienced some form of physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner. Domestic violence is also perpetrated against men and non-binary people in high numbers as well. I guarantee that you know someone who is, or has been, in an abusive relationship. Probably multiple people. People close to you, who you care about. It’s time to stop thinking about domestic violence as ‘someone else’s problem’ and start listening to survivor’s stories, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Whether you’ve been in that situation yourself or not, you don’t know anyone else’s story better than them. So stop judging, and just listen.