#victim perspectives

[shakingparadigm]

[seagreenstardust]

“When toxic behavior is portrayed as romantic, it’s problematic. When problematic behavior is portrayed as a character flaw for a character to work through, it’s good storytelling.”

Katsuki Bakugou, my friends.

His behavior was problematic but never once portrayed as romantic at the same time. Katsuki said and did awful abusive things, and he also chose to be better when he was given the chance. If you’re still hung up on chapter 1 Katsuki now then I don’t think you’ve been reading the same story I have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m not shipping Izuku with an irredeemable abuser. I’m shipping him with his most important person. His narrative foil. His childhood friend who made awful mistakes and then made it right when he saw he was wrong. The person Izuku looks up to and strives to emulate, despite their past struggles.

Bakudeku is so good because of how flawed these boys are, and how hard they’ve worked to get over it, and how much they matter to each other after it all

[susansontag]

I’ve always shied away from discussing ikuhara’s usage of incest in utena because it’s quite a sticky topic in shoujo manga and anime but also because those uninitiated with that are likely to assume his using it is somehow perverted and will have a knee-jerk reaction. but I think he’s honestly very clever with it, using it both on a metaphorical level to elicit sympathy for the characters and their romanticised notions of these relationships but also on a literal level to show the dangers and abuse inherent in these kinds of relationships.

nanami is the most obvious example. even though we as an audience may not understand her almost romantic fixation on attracting the attentions of her older brother touga, we can still sympathise with her behaviour on a metaphorical level; she is thirteen, she is lonely, he is her entire world and the world is taking him, and thus her childhood, away from her and she is helpless to stop this. nanami is not perverse, she is trying to secure control over a situation in which she has none. a more common and relatable example is when one feel as though they, their siblings, their parents, etc, revert back to the dynamics they solidified in childhood when they spend time as a family unit. it’s a phenomenon that can be irritating (‘they’re treating me like a child’) but also comforting, familiar, and certain.

yearning to remain in a permanent state of pre-adolescence is something a lot of different characters in utena contend with, albeit in different ways, but hers is so interesting because ikuhara decides she must at one point be met with the reality of what this would mean if taken to its extreme. nanami understands akio is abusing anthy before utena does, and draws strict lines between what those ‘perverse’ siblings are doing and her pure love for touga. yes, she lacks sympathy for anthy outwardly, but her horror at confronting incestuous abuse in a real, unromanticised context, forces her to understand how her innocent outlook can be taken advantage of by people who would mean to do her harm.

and then touga assaults her, and when she rejects him, bewildered, he accuses her: isn’t this what you wanted? of course he can’t understand it’s the absolute opposite of what she wanted to preserve. one could argue here that ikuhara is blaming nanami for her naivety, even punishing her for being so short-sighted. but on the contrary I think he’s desperately seeking our empathy for her here, in showing us that a child’s romanticisation is not an excuse for her victimisation nor her offering consent. and if all we want to focus on is the fantasies of an alienated child, we fail to appropriately condemn abusers from taking advantage of children like nanami.

[prans-micellar-water]

The way that Olrox’s heritage and romance completely recontextualized his character. We first meet him when he kills Julia, and that’s bad no matter how you look at it, right? Wrong. Julia is a white European who came to the Americas and killed Olrox’s Mohican lover. Olrox retaliated, which is bad, yes, but how else was he going to get justice? No government would ever try a vampire hunter for the murder of a vampire, and no government would prosecute a white woman for harming a Native American. People like her were committing a state-sanctioned genocide. Even the suggestion of legal justice is ridiculous on its face. Julia’s death was wrong in the sense that violence doesn’t solve violence, in the sense that revenge begets revenge, but that’s it IMO. Olrox didn’t go any further—he didn’t torture her, he didn’t kill her son, AFAIK he didn’t kill anyone else that day. The only time we see him kill another human is in France when he kills a European noblewoman, the exact kind of person who profited most from the violence inflicted on him and his people. What I’m saying is that I’m dead serious when I say Olrox did nothing wrong

[lgbtlunaverse]

"Nie Mingjue would still have died young even if Jin Guangyao hadn't killed him" Not as in "So it's fine to kill him because people who won't live for much longer have obviously already forfeit their lives" (what) But as in "If you don't get that Nie Mingjue has had an inevitable young and violent death hanging over him since he was a young teenager and has embraced it you can't fully understand his character"

[wreckedhoney]

MASSIVE SPOILER for one of the endings.

it's been a while since i tried looking, but i did hear that something like this happens last year and over time started to think, "was it a fluke?" bc no one posted footage or caps of it then, and i aimed for a completionist run in my first playthrough. turns out it's real! and definitely shines a new light on a character that, for most other types of playthroughs, will not give this much emotion! EDIT: transcript now included, and some stillshots under the cut

[0:28] Marie: Henry, this is the man who kept you from doing the right thing tonight. Kill him. [0:15] Forrest: Henry, you don’t have to do this. If you’ve not killed anyone yet, there’s still time to make the right decision. [0:05] Out of shot: (Gunshots) Henderson Police! Freeze! Marie: No! Henry, get out of there!

[stupid-sloot-headcanons]

I appreciate Hori trying over and over to emphasize that Endeavor doesn't want or deserve forgiveness but I also hate how Rei says that everyone in the family is at fault for the dysfunction and trauma. Like...no, your children were literal children and you were repeatedly abused and sexually assaulted by Endeavor to the point that you had a psychotic break. There's one person at fault and it's the man with a flame beard and giant tits.

[beekeep]

"oh no a gentile fell for israeli propaganda tying jews to israel and reacted poorly to a pop star's social media post antisemitism is out of control!"

oh wow that's wild hey let's see what the israel defenders are commenting under pro-palestine celebrities' posts

[marchlione]

atla writers who write aang like a bratty child in the northern air temple episode instead of seeing the pain of a genocide survivor watching his people's sanctuaries being disrespected and desecrated<<<<<<<<

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i have never felt this uniquely insane about a character <3 i cant get a read on him

[yuridovewing]

also its insane how ppl go to bat for appledusk so hard when like his only real traits are "-cheats on his wife'' and ''... existing i guess"

[sideprince]

I've seen the same post a hundred times now. Sometimes it's a few days old, sometimes it's from years ago, but it's always the same. Some anti posts about how they don't understand how anyone can like Snape because he was so awful, and then there's a long reply that goes something like, "imagine this happens to you, and then this, and then this" to describe Snape's experience. Sometimes there's some James Potter hate thrown in.

Look. You can go through describing a character's entire experience but you don't really need to. Here's the thing that antis don't understand:

For all her faults (and they're big, bigoted ones) Rowling understood a really integral part of the human experience and conveyed it through Snape. Everyone needs love and to feel accepted. It's that simple. Snape became a Death Eater to seek acceptance (Rowling has confirmed this, though I can't remember the source - whoever wants to add it please do), because it was the only way he could find any.

Snape's understanding of morality, like everyone's, is subjective. Some readers understand this and some don't. When faced against a morality that says there is good and bad in the world, everyone makes choices based on their personal experience. Context is everything. Someone who experiences pain and suffering will not see the person inflicting it on them as moral. That's it. 'How can this person be good when they caused me so much suffering?' = human psychology. Most of the people who think 'I'm a bad person and deserve this' have been gaslit and abused into thinking so, because it's not a natural reaction - it's one that has to often be socialized into someone at a young age, exactly because it's not natural. Everyone is the hero of their own story; no one sees themselves as a villain, because they see the valid aspects of their own perspective.

You can write essays on how vulnerable people needing acceptance is what cults and fascists exploit to recruit vulnerable people, or on how the standard anti's un-nuanced reading of Snape both ignores canon and displays a disturbing lack of empathy or compassion, but at its core it just boils down to context. From Snape's perspective he experienced cruelty, therefore the people inflicting it must be cruel. Again, it's that simple. He was a person, like any other, except he was fictional so he wasn't even real. On the flip side is James Potter, who, for all his faults, didn't get to live long enough to get a chance to change and grow unlike Snape, and I think the Snapedom also needs to acknowledge that.

They're fictional characters representing things an author wants to say, not sports teams, not martyrs, and not all good or all bad emblems that define your identity depending on how you feel about them. It's depressing how much time is wasted arguing with bullies and trolls whether from the Marauders fandom or just random antis. I literally can't find more than three blogs to follow without this argument coming across my feed daily. I know the Snapedom is Not OK™ and that's kind why we're all here, and I know that my take is super unpopular but like Snape, I don't care what others think: this fandom has been having the exact same argument for years and nothing has changed. There's fanart and meta and fic and so much content out there appreciating this character, you're not going to change an anti's mind who's deliberately trolling in the tags, so why are you trying? What are you getting out of it? What does it give you? It's exhausting just scrolling past it.

[mukuberry]

Kotoko can pretend she's detached and strong and uncaring all she wants, but she's the only character who's had another character's POV in both of her songs

[carcasstohounds]

ok so like i’ve seen a few posts blaming mira and ephraim for what happened to ezra and i think that is. a weird take. anyway my personally belief is that tzeebo wasn’t their only plan for ezra if they were taken because they feel like the kind of people to have a network of allies if the goddamn governer of lothal was their friend. i also imagine that they weren’t the only people taken by the empire that night or afterwards, because i feel like it’s implied that they weren’t the only people speaking out against the empire? so like, they probably had a network of people to take care of ezra if something happened but that network dissolved due to arrests, people fleeing, etc etc until there was no way for anyone to find ezra or for ezra to find anyone else and then he was on his own and it was no one’s fault but the empire.

[sourstiless]

i think my biggest gripe with the comparison between zuko and john smith and zutara as a whole to pocahontas is that john smith was an active colonizer. he was a grown man who chose and was proud of what he was doing. he didnt even believe the act of colonization was wrong. yes, he tried to end the violence in the movie, but he still lived with the belief that his people deserved to and were entitled to co exist on that land with the indigenous people.

zuko was an active participant in dismantling a hundred years of colonialism and colonization and genuinely wanted to fix the problems that his ancestors had left for him. it wasn’t easy and he wasn’t a perfect leader, but he was genuinely trying to make decisions that would be for the better of all the people, not just himself or his people. where john smith thought that indigenous ppl needed the white people’s help to become “more civilized” because he viewed them as inferior, zuko sought to give those that the fire nation had hurt their autonomy back.

that’s not to say that it isn’t a valid reason to dislike zutara, and if the idea makes you uncomfortable that’s fine and i respect it. i realize that the ship doesn’t appeal to everyone and that’s okay, but i just hate the comparisons because john smith was genuinely just an awful person who never should’ve been glorified in a disney movie.

[pechebeche]

ok so it turns out the danganronpa mangas are really fucking good