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bigskydreaming · 7 years

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@nyxelestia

So we had this very same argument more than a year ago, and it looks like neither of our viewpoints has changed so I’m not sure what good this will do, but you have a lot of influence in the TW fandom yourself, esp in corners I won’t go into, so I’m gonna try.

Please, for the love of god, stop mitigating abuse with abuse apologism arguments in defense of characters. That is what you are doing, and I will not let you pretend otherwise because you are putting textbook abuse apologism on paper, time and time again, while calling out abuse in other aspects of canon. And this dichotomy means all those who believe you and accept your POV when you point out abuse in one instance are equally inclined to believe you when you point to where Derek Hale abused various characters and say ‘not abuse, because he was a victim himself, he had good intentions, and other characters did way worse.’

All of those last three things are true. None of them actually alter his actions. None of them are mutually exclusive with abuse.

You can not look at abuse through the POV of the abuser. You can not do it. You have to look at it through the lens of the person being abused, because they are the one that needs defending, they are the one the harm was done to.

So when Derek beat the crap out of Scott in the ice rink in Season 2, does the fact that Derek was abused himself magically change the harm done to Scott? You could write essays about how Derek’s life experiences led to him making the choices that told him it was a good idea to beat up Scott in front of his newly minted pack, and a lot of what you have to write might be true and valid. But will any of that, in terms of Scott, change the reality of what Derek did there and how it would contribute to shaping his own life experiences and perception of reality? NOPE.

If I abuse a teenager, as a grown adult, I don’t get to point to my own childhood abuse and say ‘okay but its not that bad because look what happened to meeeeeeeeeeeeee.’ Yeah that shit may be terrible, but so is abusing a teenager. The one does not give you a pass for the other. The one may inform the other, but it doesn’t give you freedom to keep perpetuating the cycle and constantly passing the buck down the line. It might all be true, but explanation DOES NOT EQUAL EXCUSE.

You can point to Derek’s training with Scott, and with Isaac and with Erica and Boyd and say ‘well he had good intentions. He was trying to toughen them up, teach them to survive, and he was doing it the best way he knew how.’ Again, all of that may be true. Its all still irrelevant to the simple question of: did he use his position of greater power, knowledge and experience to harm them, while telling them it was for their own good?

The only thing that matters in determining if it was abuse is if the answer to that question is yes or no.

Every time Scott reacted to Derek’s hurting him during training in S1 with shock, anger and pain - its because he didn’t know Derek was going to do that. Asking someone more experienced than you for help isn’t giving them permission carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want to. Breaking Isaac’s arm to make a point is still breaking Isaac’s arm, no matter what the point is.

And it doesn’t matter that Derek thought he was doing it to make them stronger, better able to survive. It doesn’t even matter that the beta trio wouldn’t have even needed that ‘training’ if Derek hadn’t recruited them to begin with. It doesn’t even matter that every season post S3 showed us DEREK realizing his own earlier methods had been fucked up and even saying as much to the Alpha twins and to Liam when training and advising them.

All that matters is Scott, Erica, Isaac and Boyd looked to Derek for advice and guidance and help, and Derek delivered that to them in the form of pain and said that’s the best you’re going to get, learn to deal with it, this is your life now.

I can’t even tell you how horrifying this particular line of thought is to me given how much those exact words or a near paraphrasing of them shows up in the trial arguments of every father caught abusing his son and saying ‘it was for his own good, brat needed to be tougher, its a cruel world I’m preparing him for.’

When Derek was ‘merely’ an accessory to what Peter did to Scott in the locker room, when Derek used what he knew (or at least strongly suspected) to be a lie about a werewolf cure to manipulate Scott into helping him, when Derek scared the shit out of Scott in the parking garage and broke his phone - you can point to all of that and say, okay but every other character has done way worse.

And? Your point is?

It is never okay to distract from or explain away harm or culpability in causing harm by pointing wildly around the room and saying ‘well everyone else does it too.’

Again. Might be true. Does not change the fact that harm was still done.

Despite what I just said there, I’m going to indulge that ‘everyone on this show does just as bad’ argument for a second. Let’s bring it back around to Scott. Aka the one character I stan for more than any other.

Let’s bring it back to that scene anti-Scott people love to bring up any time Stiles or Derek or someone else is criticized for hurting other characters.

The scene I hate more than any other, where Scott throws Isaac into the wall of his house in response to learning Isaac wants to date his ex girlfriend. When an alpha reacts violently to his abuse survivor beta saying something he doesn’t want to hear.

I loathe that scene so much, because I full on do not believe that is something Scott would do, I do not believe it made sense for his character, I do not believe it fits any characterization he’s received prior or since, to have him portrayed, even for an instant as ‘an alpha reacting violently to his abuse survivor beta simply saying something he does not want to hear.’

But no matter how much I hate it, or how much I don’t think that fit Scott, you will never ever catch me saying that ‘an abuse survivor beta being thrown into a wall for saying something his alpha doesn’t want to hear’ isn’t a description of an abusive scene, that it isn’t gross and awful and should not be excused.

The reason I can still comfortably stan for Scott and refuse to see him as abusive all while still calling out the actions of characters like Stiles and Derek as abusive is I recognize that the actions of any character on this show must be evaluated on two levels. Through the lens of that character’s characterization, and through the lens of how the writers are choosing to write that character in any given moment. These are fictional characters, yes. Which means they can only say and do what the writers write for them in any particular scene, unlike in real life, where a person throwing another into a wall is solely that person’s responsibility.

But by differentiating my focus, I can do both, I can hold the scene up as something awful and something that I do not need to defend Scott for and WILL NOT, while at the same time putting the blame on the show for being so tone deaf as to write that happening while lighthearted music plays to convince us there’s nothing wrong with this, its just boys being boys.

The reason I do not blame the writing instead of Stiles or Derek when calling them abusive, is because the instances I’m basing their abuse on are frequent, showing up in multiple episodes, in recurring patterns, written by multiple writers. When Stiles lashes out violently at Scott because he holds him personally responsible for what happened to his dad in 5B, that’s not an aberration or a mischaracterization to me, because it pulls straight from the Stiles archives, it is all behavior he has demonstrated before without accountability, without remorse. When Derek trains the beta trio with shock and pain in S2 while saying its for their own good, that’s not an aberration or a mischaracterization because its consistent with what Derek has done and said and believed before, while not having yet been something he’s shown remorse or alternate ways of thinking on yet.

All of that is different from a one-time occasion where Scott behaves in a way that I do not believe fits with his prior or later characterization.

(And yes, Scott has done other harmful things to people, like using his claws on Corey in S5, but literally nobody has ever pretended this wasn’t as harmful or as dangerous as it was. Scott is called out in canon for it. Lydia gives him shit for it. Corey avoids him and mistrusts him because of it. Nobody is saying ‘oh other characters have done worse, when in fact, they actually have, considering Corey’s interactions with Theo and the Dread Doctors. But even the show regards that as irrelevant to the fact that Scott fucked up with Corey and everyone knows it, and thus its tangential to what I’m describing here.)

And let me be perfectly clear. This is not me saying that there is ANY validity to the argument that ‘if it only happens once, its not abuse’. If it happens once in real life, you should still run the hell away, lest it turn out to be a precursor to more. Because the person who hit you ‘just that one time’ is still going to be the same person tomorrow, whereas in fiction, the character who did it ‘just that one time’ is not necessarily going to be the exact same person when penned by a different writer in the next episode. When it happens in fiction, you’re justified in evaluating if it happened because that’s who the character is, or if its because that’s who the person writing him at the moment feels the character is in this moment.

So if you want to defend Derek’s actions via the angle that he is a fictional character written by humans with their own flaws and biases and blindspots, if you want to use that argument to claim that you don’t think he would have acted a certain way here, or that you don’t think it fits with everything else we know about him to have him behaving a certain way there? That’s one thing. But only if you do it while still acknowledging that what he DID do, on screen, was still abusive, and should be described as such.

If you want to defend a character who has committed harm against another, because yes, that describes just about every character on the show - find a way to do it that doesn’t mitigate the harm they actually caused, or unilaterally absolve them of it.

When I say I don’t view Scott as abusive because of that Isaac scene, and because I recognize the writers’ complicity in it, that is not me saying ‘well that’s not really abusive because Scott’s obviously a victim himself.’

You will NEVER catch me saying crap like that, because underneath those actual words is the implicit subtext:

‘Well its different when the person hurting Isaac has also been abused. Its not as bad. I’m okay with characters hurting Isaac as long as they’re characters I like more, and I can point to their own abuse as a factor.’

You will NEVER catch me saying ‘well Scott has done all kinds of good things for Isaac, he loves and protects him, he lets him stay in his house, this was only one time’ - (FROM AN IN STORY PERSPECTIVE).

Because underneath those words is the implicit subtext:

‘Well everyone fucks up and as long as someone loves and supports someone MOST of the time, when someone like that harms Isaac, its not as bad as if it were say, Jackson or one of the twins. I’m okay with characters hurting Isaac as long as those characters make it up to him at other times and Isaac KNOWS that this character didn’t really mean it and really loves him.’

And you will NEVER catch me saying ‘well every other character on the show has done just as bad, and its far from the worst thing that’s ever happened to Isaac’....

because underneath those words is the implicit subtext:

‘As long as whatever happens to Isaac isn’t as bad as the thing that happened to him before this or after this, its not that bad, he can take it, he’s been through worse. And as long as what a character does to Isaac isn’t as bad as what another character did, well, its not really abuse, its not like it was Derek throwing a glass at his head or Allison stabbing him with Chinese ring daggers or whatever, so why are we even talking about this instead of that, we should only ever focus on the WORST things to happen to a character, anything less than that doesn’t matter.’

How we view shows, how we react in fandom, is not divorced from reality and how we behave in the outside world. Its not okay to talk about things like abuse as though they’re academic and abstract and the way we view a character abusing another in fiction has nothing to do with the way we view a person abusing another in real life.

Because even with the awareness that shows operate on two levels, the actions of the characters and the writing behind those characters - when fandom’s priority when viewing a character they like abusing another character they like is to say ‘well its not that bad, other people do way worse, they really love that character and didn’t mean that’.....when they prioritize finding IN STORY excuses for the abuser’s behavior, even when they could just as readily direct their concerns at the writing instead....

How many of those same fans do you think, if confronted with an abuse victim in real life, making allegations against someone that fan likes or trusts -

How many of those same fans do you think will fall back on finding loopholes or ways to mitigate the harm or justify the actions of that person they like and trust and don’t want to believe could really be abusive?

And why do so many people feel comfortable insisting this has nothing to do with the fact that their time in fandom encouraged this behavior by teaching them it was okay and in fact normal and expected to only view abuse through the lens of the abuser, rather than that of their victim, ESPECIALLY if its the abuser they’re more predisposed to liking or have more of a prior connection or attachment to?

#abuse cw #long post #even for me #lol

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