fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1851 ]

[ SECRET POST #1851 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1851 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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02.

[Coronation Street]

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05.

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06.

[The Fly]

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07.

[Black Lagoon]

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09.

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

10. [SPOILERS for Catherine]

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11. [SPOILERS for the Vampire Diaries]

[Vampire Diaries and Kyle XY]

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12. [SPOILERS for Huntress Mini]

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13. [SPOILERS for Mawaru Penguindrum]

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14. [SPOILERS for Sherlock]

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15. [SPOILERS for Sherlock]

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16. [SPOILERS for Sherlock]

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17. [SPOILERS for Sherlock]

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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

18. [TRIGGER WARNING for gore/death]
[SPOILERS for Sherlock]

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19. [TRIGGER WARNING for rape]
[SPOILERS for Kannazuki No Miko]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #264.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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First off, I'm not wolfie or anyone else who has commented in this thread; I just want to make that clear. Call me "woodsman" instead.

I've read this whole thread, and I have to say, I think I understand what wolfie was trying to say, and why just about everyone misunderstood it. Wolfie expected people to understand that she was not sharing her personal opinion of the show, but answering the question (rhetorically) asked by the original secret, "Why is this show considered to be THE quintessential yuri anime?"

It goes without saying that if you are going to explain the popularity of a work that has some highly repugnant elements in it, you will have to explain why the people who like that work and make it popular are not turned off by those repugnant elements. Whether it's Little House on the Prairie, Gone With the Wind, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Arsenic and Old Lace, Death Wish, Twilight, KnM or any other work, there must be some reason why the people who like it can forgive the repugnant elements - writing off everyone who does like it as an evil barbarian is a popular strategy that lets the people who do it feel morally superior, but it's hardly realistic.

I've never seen KnM, but from everything I've read about it, I think the problem is that the people who are horrified that something so awful is allowed to exist may be reading it more literally than they are supposed to. Now hold on for a second - do you remember those works I talked about in the last paragraph? What, exactly, makes it acceptable to laugh at Arsenic and Old Lace? Little old ladies who have gone mentally deranged and murdered a dozen innocent people in the pathetic delusion they are showing mercy to them - that's a horrifying prospect! Who could laugh at such a horrible thing?? Well, countless audiences have, because it's considered culturally okay to say "It's just a comedy; I don't have to react with the horror that would be appropriate if I were taking these events literally and seriously." To focus on the horror of the multiple murders of the premise is to misread the work, even though those murders are undeniably there.

What would happen if we had a similar cultural rule that said "What happens in a certain kind of love story should be correctly read as an expression of the intensity of the characters' feelings, not as approval for the form that expression takes"? In other words, just as we don't take the crooner who says "I'll hold you in my arms forever, I'll never let you go" as expressing a frightening literal possessiveness but expressing a tender desire to be always with us, maybe the "correct" way to read Edward is not as the sort of creep who would repeatedly sneak into a girl's bedroom to watch her without her knowledge as she sleeps, but as a boy whose love for that girl is so great that just to see her is something for which he would gladly give up hours and hours of his time. (Think how much that would mean to a Twi-mom whose husband has never given up a Saturday football game for her.)

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that every Twilight fan is actually an empowered Gloria Steinem who consciously thinks "Why, this depiction of a woman having sexual attentions forced upon her is perfectly fine, because it's only symbolic, you see!" I don't think Stephenie Meyer ever thought, "Gee, maybe it'd be actually pretty creepy for Edward to pursue Bella like that." But I think that the way people read texts is far more complicated than "If you read a work where horrifying act X occurs, and you don't angrily reject the work as horrible, you're an X-apologist, and if you even answer a question about why other people might be not angrily rejecting the work as horrible with anything other than 'they're X-apologists,' you're a horrible X-apologist." People cheer for Charles Bronson taking vigilante justice into his own hands in Death Wish and it doesn't mean they approve of vigilante justice in the real world.

-- woodsman

So people who are horrified by the "rape is love" trope are just interrogating the rape from the wrong perspective?

Wolfie or not, you're a fucking douchebag.

No, that's a straw man argument. You seem to be stuck on the idea that there can be only one legitimate reaction to a problematic work, so that if you are horrified by it, all right-thinking people must be horrified by it and all people who are not horrified by it must be wrong-thinking douchebags. Go ahead and be horrified by it; refuse to ever see it; strenuously object to it; and even (if you feel like really doing something productive with your anger on the subject) write your own work of art deconstructing the trope you find offensive. But do you really think you're being constructive and making the world a better place when you say "You must be an awful person!" to someone merely because they enjoy a fictional work you don't? Or even more extreme, "You must be an awful person because you can see why someone might enjoy this work"?

-- woodsman

I think anyone who can justify liking or approving of the Rape Is Love trope as you and Wolfie have both done is mos def a fucking douchebag. It's rape apology, no matter what kind of fancy big words you dress it up in, and that is not okay.

Deal with it.

Well, you have a right to your opinion, but frankly the harder you insist that all right-thinking people must be as rabidly condemning of fictional rape as they are of real-life rape, and the more you insist that anyone who dares acknowledge that fiction is in fact fiction must be a "douchebag", the more I wonder how solid is your grasp of the difference between fiction and reality.

-- woodsman

So I have the right to my opinion, but if I don't agree with your pseudo-intellectual rape apology, I'm delusional.

Yeah, you're a mansplaining dick.

TLDR: "Being a rape apologist is okay if you try and get intellectual about it!"

No shit. What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? Is it something in the water?

In what way is it "rape apologism" to acknowledge simply that people who enjoy a work that includes acts of rape might do so for reasons other than thinking rape in real life is acceptable? Is every person who saw and enjoyed The Talented Mr. Ripley a "murder apologist"? Is every person who doesn't automatically condemn anyone who enjoyed that movie a "murder apologist"? If not, why do you classify murder as less severe than rape, such that fictional murder is okay to enjoy but anyone who fails to revile fictional rape must be branded as evil?

I'd rather "try and get intellectual" about such questions rather than just assume that I must be on the right side of things because I feel so righteously angry -- even as I boast that I Didn't Read the point of view I'm claiming to have refuted. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

-- woodsman

Because ignoring the rape and finding the relationship romantic and perfect and desirable anyway is implying that rape is totally okay (or at the very least "not that bad") as long as it's done with "good" intentions. That's distilled rape apology right there.

Though if you're as male as your sig name implies, it's no fucking wonder you're this much of a dipshit.

Did you really intend all the implications of your last sentence? That the more "male" one is, the more one is automatically a dipshit?

As for your first paragraph, you are never going to be correctly describing the point of view I've been arguing until you start distinguishing between "rape in fiction" and "rape in reality." Until you grasp and deal with that distinction, you're not arguing against me, but against a straw man.

-- woodsman

You bet I was, as to the subject of rape in general. Men are privileged idiots with regard to that topic, and really need to shut the fuck up about it and listen instead of mansplaining.

And no, wrong again. I'm arguing against Wolfie's point about that specific relationship being considered pure and loving and desitable even though it involves rape, and justifying that rape because it was done "out if love." You're the one building the strawman about accepting rape in a work in general. So yes, you're still the douchebag, here.

Because underneath all your pseudo-intellectualism, you're trying to obscure the fact that what wolfie said wasn't at all about the anime being ok despite having rape in it. She was talking about how the main character raping her love interest could still be construed as romantic because she did it out of some sort of overarching love. TLDR also means "Here's a recap for the rest of you because the previous bit was too long and not really worth going into."

Yes, exactly. Wolfie's original comment wasn't directed at the work as a whole, but specifically at Chikane and Himeko's rape-tastic "romance."

Let's not forget the context in which wolfie made her original comment, however: she was answering the question of "why do so many people consider KnM THE quintessential yuri anime?" And immediately people jumped on her as if she had said "This is why I think KnM is the best yuri anime of all time and so hawt, exdee exdee," even after her original comment was reposted again so that everyone could see that she had said no such thing. Even the OP, who clearly hates KnM, acknowledged that a significant number of people do regard it as having that special place in the genre.

Okay, so we have a fact that we may find repugnant, but it remains a fact nonetheless: the fact that many people feel this way about KnM. Assuming we rule out the most primitive and irrational reactions, namely "rabid denial of the unpleasant fact" and "shooting the messenger" (not that everyone in this thread has ruled out those reactions, of course) then how do we meet the OP's challenge? How do we explain why, how people like KnM?

The easiest out, as it always is, is demonizing those who don't think like us. "Anyone who likes KnM must be a douchebag monster! Write them all off as evil and we're done! Case closed!" Simple, easy, and quite clearly there are many people who are quite happy to make that their analysis and be done. But the simplest way out is not always the best or most realistic. Maybe we need to work harder to find an answer.

Less simplistic is the hypothesis "There are many people who like KnM and are not douchebag monsters; however, all of them are deeply repulsed by the rape in it and they simply like everything else in the series enough that it makes up for how much they hate the rape." This is somewhat more realistic than the "every KnM fan is a douchebag monster" hypothesis... but it's still another incarnation of the "everyone who is good thinks like me, and everyone who doesn't think like me is bad" assumption. Maybe we need to keep looking and find a hypothesis that doesn't rest on such an assumption.

That leads to the hypothesis "Not everyone reads KnM in the same way. Even though people are rightfully repulsed by real-life murder, they can be found enjoying stories of fictional murder, even sometimes applauding the fictional murderers, in numbers too large to be explained by the hypothesis 'they're all douchebag monsters who think murder is all right.' People can condemn real-life vigilantes but applaud a fictional character who they know will get revenge on the 'right' people who really deserve all they get. Perhaps in a similar manner, some people can read of an act that they would never condone in a real relationship and interpret it differently in a fictional relationship. They don't believe that 'okay rapes' are real; they're simply capable of suspending their disbelief in such a thing when it's presented to them in a context they know to be fiction."

Obviously, there are people who will hate this hypothesis, and will insist that "everyone who doesn't hate KnM and everyone who doesn't hate everybody that doesn't hate KnM is a monster and we should hate 'em!!" is the truly rational assessment of the situation. *shrug* Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I'm also entitled not to be impressed when someone who hasn't even actually shown an understanding of a presented hypothesis claims to have utterly rebutted it.

The way she phrased it, though, by opening with "you do realize that that Chikane raped her because of a deep-seated neverending love, right?" made it sound as if she thought you'd have to be stupid not to look past the rape and see how wonderful their relationship is otherwise. And that's what people are (rightfully) taking issue with, because it's an age-old 'justification' that gets trotted out with alarming frequency in completely non-fictional rape cases.

I can completely agree with you that that portion of wolfie's phrasing was very bad, and made it sound like everyone should have realized how the rape could be interpreted as a romantic act of love.

I must disagree with you that that's what people are taking issue with, however. They would be quite justified in being offended at wolfie saying "You have to interpret it my way, as an expression of how deeply Chikane cares, or else you're stupid!!" But whether or not that's what wolfie actually intended to say (I doubt that it was) what people have been very clearly saying in her direction is "You have to interpret it my way, as an act of pure evil, or else you're evil!!"

So far you're the only one who has addressed at all one of the key issues I've been trying to point out, which is... it's fiction. Why should it be mandatory to regard a fictional rape in exactly the same light as a rape in real life, when we can very easily think of half a dozen things, some even more serious than rape, which we are willing to accept in fictional contexts very differently from how we'd accept them in real life? You allude to the answer that people might be unwilling to accept this particular interpretation of the fictional KnM rape because it's too close to a twisted train of thought that has been used to try and justify real-world rape, and I can certainly identify with that - earlier I mentioned "vigilante justice" as one of the things people frequently accept in their fiction even if they wouldn't in reality; I didn't mention how personally repulsive I find it even in fiction, because of some of the horrible things I've seen people do and read of others doing, thinking they were actually doing good by being brutal and vindictive and violent to people who "deserved it" ... some of whom turned out not to be guilty of the things they were accused of.

But the thing is, should I dismiss everyone who loves a good "guy gets revenge when the law won't act" movie as a horrible monster? As someone who would themselves go out torturing and killing if they thought they were getting righteous vengeance? I don't think that's very realistic. Perhaps some of them would, but I think more of them simply say "It's fiction. Because it's fiction, we know it really is justified revenge against someone who really can't be dealt with any other way; that's clearly what the screenwriter decided, so I'll just accept that it's so and feel good with no qualms when that righteous vengeance is achieved on the screen." I don't insist that everyone has to think like me on this issue or else be a monster. Why are so many people so insistent that on this issue, everyone really does have to have the same interpretation or be evil?

-- woodsman

Wow. Because obviously you know what I'm taking issue with better than I do. You're psychic and shit, right?

But whether or not that's what wolfie actually intended to say (I doubt that it was) what people have been very clearly saying in her direction is "You have to interpret it my way, as an act of pure evil, or else you're evil!!"

BECAUSE HOW THE FUCK ELSE COULD YOU INTERPRET FUCKING RAPE AND NOT BE A COMPLETE SHITBAG?

Silly me, forgot who I'm talking to...

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 00:56 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 02:53 (UTC) - Expand

So, do you want to get all ~philosophical~ as to why my uncle raped me? And explain how I clearly simply haven't forgiven him because I don't understand it?

After all, it's ~easier~ for me to demonize him as a douchebag monster.

Educate me, oh wise man.

Please see my second paragraph here (http://fandomsecrets.livejournal.com/830593.html?thread=518824833#t518824833).

-- woodsman

Translation: "I don't have an argument that doesn't make me sound like a rape apologist douchebag."

Rape isn't fiction to me. I don't have that particular privilege, thank you very much. Until you acknowledge that it is a REAL HURTFUL THING, then you'll be arguing out your asshole.

I'm not trying to correctly describe your argument.

That's your job. You chose to defend the rape apologist, you get the burden of explaining why that's okay.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-01-31 15:37 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 02:55 (UTC) - Expand

Fuck it all, i have read this thread completely till now and can't believe what i'm reading here. Nobody here said real rape was ok, nobody! This is about a piece of fiction which is apparantly quite unrealistic, as rape is clearly not love. "Wolfie" wrote as an answer why she believes some people like it. Point. Everyone dogpiled her. Now you are accusing people of beeing ok with real rape over a piece of fiction and the understanding why some people like this FICTION! Call me rude all youz want, but you clearly need a lot of therapy if you can't difference between fiction and reality.

Yes, i know,i know, I'm an asshole and after this thread,i don't give a fuck , so stupid are some of you.

Yes, you are an asshole who apparently reads about as well as you type if that's what you thought Wolfie's comment was. Which is to say rather shittily. lrn2english, please.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 02:28 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 02:58 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 03:49 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2012-02-01 06:02 (UTC) - Expand

Congratulations on your brilliant insight. Want a fucking medal? Yeah, I can't believe what I'm reading here, either: a shitton of rape apology, so long as it's done "for true love."

No shit I fucking need therapy. I was fucking RAPED BY MY UNCLE AS A CHILD. And people are playing it off as ~romantic~ and ~I just don't understand it~ if I don't agree.

Go light yourself on fire and jump off a cliff, you fucking shitstain.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-01-31 15:39 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-02-02 11:12 (UTC) - Expand

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