borderlineanders:

flowisk:

me and @el0himapologist were spitballing and they said maybe it was good to post it. i think an interesting thing is, when we get to discussions on abuse they’ve stopped becoming about the actual victim or what it means for the characters. instead it’s about who should be vilified. but for children especially, picking up abusive habits when you have been exposed to trauma yourself is… just expected? it’s the normalization of things, of the ways you interact with people, of what is okay to say to people, of what boundaries you are allowed to have and what boundaries other people are allowed to have.

constantly i’ve seen it talked about as this thing where an abuser is 100% always on, cartoonish. but the truth is, they are complex people. and this is important for… multiple reasons. it’s important for dissecting and recognizing real world abuse, and it’s important for, well, having compassion for children who have picked up abusive behaviour.

One thing I’d like to bring up, which I talked about with Ducks over IM is that fandom accusations of abuse from a character aren’t always in good faith, honest discussion stuff

a lot of minority characters are automatically labeled as abusive bc of bigotry and it;s not playing into anti culture for minority fans to refuse to talk about that

black fans not accomodating people who claim finn is abusive isn;t anti culture

nd fans not accomodating people who claim anders is abusive isn;t anti culture

I know this isn’t your intent but i’m very used to people using “abuse” to shut down every character who isn’t a perfect flawless token and we also  need to acknowledge that

Right, but that’s basically already in my statement. Discussions about abuse have turned into a ‘can this be shipped/can this be enjoyed’. ‘Abuse’ being used as a tool to vilify, rather than address an issue. Which is my issue as well, because as I said, people are more concerned with vilification than the actual characters who have been abused. I feel like this is once again shifting the topic of focus to what this means for vilifying characters or not.

The thing is, on tumblr minority characters are generally the most discussed ones. Realistically, no one has to talk about anything and yes sometimes specific accusations do come from bias and bigotry. But there are characters who are abusive regardless of their status in minority groups. I mean, people shift the focus of discussions about Chara and Asriel’s relationship all the time with statements like that. There is a callout in fandom for most prominent users who have addressed Chara’s actions being abusive. ‘You’re transphobic if you call/believe Chara abusive’ is a statement that has been thrown around.

Part of my point is, it shouldn’t be seen as such a mark on a character to discuss whether an action is abusive in the first place. There shouldn’t be a swinging pendulum of abusive = unforgivable and non-abusive = still capable of redemption. It also does hurt ND fans and people who want to discuss abuse to have their concerns and discussions around trauma shut down like that.

Yes, I’ve seen abuse used in attempts to shut down characters. I also haven’t seen a good discussion on abuse in fiction in years that wasn’t about a 2 dimensional monster parent because if a character is abusive and complex people want to fight for the ‘right to like them’. Because of the very nature of the complexity of children’s relationships, it has been decreed by discourse that peer abuse simply doesn’t exist at all in fiction because children can’t really be abusers, ‘that’s gross’.