IM STUPID I CAUGHT ONE BUT NOT THE OTHER

mr hand man, hand me a hand

Ive been saying this for over 2 years now, i dont even care if the cost of endeavor’s death is the narrative acting like its a tragedy. Come on stain lets fucking GO

🍓🍓🍓

if you did a brain scan on me rn there would be no brain you'd just see spinneraki rotating in there like little music box ballerinas

ok ummm sorry but why are people talking suddenly like irl domestic violence victims get any sort of widespread sympathy or support??? like, for one, let’s just establish that it’s silly to complain that real, living, breathing people are being treated with more sympathy than a fictional character. but even that alone would also be completely wrong, because… rl victims are not treated well at all??? did we just forget all the victim-blaming, the slander, the cross-examining, the doubt, and the legal institutions that are weaponized against rl victims all the time???

if you somehow see someone condemning rl abuse but dismissing fictional abuse, it’s because they only care about rl abuse in the broadest and most conceptual sense. rl abuse is hated as a contextless idea, or when it’s committed by someone the person doing the condemning doesn’t care about, like some dude they’ve never talked to or some celebrity they have no personal attachment towards. condemnation of, like, weinstein, who most people do not know anything about nor care about, is not the same as popular support for victims as a whole. compare the reactions to weinstein vs reactions to johnny depp or even (god) joe biden. the difference is entirely in how much attachment people have to these abusers.

a character like endeavor makes people trot out an entire circus’ worth of excuses not because these people actually care about irl abuse as opposed to fictional abuse, but because the narrative gives endeavor a way of playing on people’s heartstrings and allowing them to nurture an attachment to him, which they will then vigorously defend even at the expense of his victims. they do this as well with rl abusers who they particularly like or have some sort of connection to. it’s not that ppl’s condemnations of abuse are either existent or non-existent—it’s that they’re frequently circumstantial.

please, let’s be finished with the insinuations that rl victims receive care and support or even, like, lip service that isn’t getting extended to fictional characters.

pssst. while forgiveness is an option that the survivor can make for their own sake, the way it’s written in bnha is not a good handling of a forgiveness narrative. this is because all of the arcs dealing with forgiveness have so far been narrated through an abuser’s thoughts, prioritizing his hopes and unfulfilled desires (desires that are unfulfilled because of his abuse), rather than the emotional journey of his victims. shouto started softening his stance not when the story explored shouto’s thoughts, but when the story began exploring the thoughts of his abuser. as a result, what happens on the page is the abuser stops abusing and starts to feel bad, and therefore shouto begins to have a more positive relationship with him. rather than forgiveness resulting from a survivor coming to terms with his abuse and making the decision to forgive for his own peace of mind, the forgiveness is primarily framed as the abuser doing and feeling things, and therefore forgiveness happens. shouto does not make a decision to start forgiving; his abuser makes a decision and gets forgiveness in return.

forgiveness can be an empowering decision when made by a survivor with their full agency. its portrayal in fiction is not always empowering, especially when the narrative focuses on the feelings and thoughts of the abuser over the survivor. that is propaganda, plain and simple, particularly when we as a society already vastly overestimate the importance of an abuser’s feelings both in general, and in relation to stopping their abuse. in a social climate that already promotes forgiveness—not for the sake of the survivor but for the abuser—it’s difficult to write about forgiveness in a way that won’t be taken as modeling the behavior of “good” victims. we cannot treat characters like independent human beings, who all make “valid” decisions in response to their abuse. how are their decisions framed? who are we being told to sympathize with? who is being prioritized narratively? we can’t engage in discussions about representations in fiction without considering these kinds of questions.

As I’m sure some may have noticed, Endeavor’s got his arc going on, where after finally realizing how horrible he is and tries to become a better person. But a problem I & many others tend to have resulting from this arc is that lots of folks talk about how Endeavor’s ‘different now’, how he’s changing, and how that makes him so much better than Thief Takami or, of course, Dabi (ugh); and as a result I think it’s important we to address is how…Bojack Horseman-y his attempts at changing have really been up until now. Think of it as in honor of Rei calling him out and hopefully forcing real progress out of him in the future, we’re going over his lack of progress so far.

So, let’s look through all his most notable attempts at changing in comparison to what he was doing before that he’s making up for, as well as anything else he’s done that might reflect in some fashion on his redemption:

-We can start with Rei; the woman who he bought, sexually abused for about a decade, psychically abused for 5 more years than that, and then had locked up in a hospital for another 10 years and which she has only just left. He tried to make up for that by having her favorite flowers delivered to her room in the hospital he had her sent to. This is about the average of what we can expect going forward, btw.

-Then there’s Fuyumi & Natsuo, who he deemed failures and neglected so much throughout their childhoods that he appears like a stranger to them, who they know more by the damage he’s done than any actual interactions. To make up for all that, he bought them a house to live away from him and not interact with him anymore, along with their mother when she leaves the hospital. (Not Shoto though, he still interreacts with Endeavor.) This is, unironically, the biggest and most selfless act of atonement he has committed thus far. All down hill from here!

Keep reading

i still think touya and fuyumi should have been twins or the reason fuyumi being born so close to touya was because he was born sickly or something

Élégie

also, the mark of great insight isn’t necessarily “nuance.” great insight imo requires figuring out when “black and white” positions might be appropriate and when they aren’t. there are no two sides when abuses are rooted in power structures, and acting like both sides are equally valid and worthy of consideration, or that neutrality is possible benefits the more powerful party. again, i don’t mean “collapse awful people into the category of ‘monster’ and good/decent people into ‘human,’” but yeah sometimes you have to say someone’s motivations and feelings don’t matter compared to the harm they did.