cannot believe that 'yelling at your boss when he repeatedly almost gets you and your crew killed and lies to manipulate you into staying when you try to leave, is not emotional abuse, actually' and 'there is such a thing as a mutually toxic and unhealthy relationship where both parties are incredibly shitty to each other - and this is obviously where Ed and Izzy stand until S2, when it becomes blatantly abusive' is a controversial take. But as this is Abuse Apologism And Ableism, The FandomTM, I really should not be surprised
Just.
I was deep in physically and mentally abusive relationships in my teens/twenties - including relationships that started out with mutual toxicity and bad decisions on all sides, but which became outright physical & mental & other sorts of abuse with myself as the victim. I know my shit.
I suppose I can see where 'Izzy emotionally abused Ed' comes from IF people give literally the most uncharitable interpretation to Every Single Scene, and assume Izzy shouts angrily at Ed and negs him all the time rather than this being how he acts when he's incredibly stressed by circumstance caused directly by Ed and at the end of his fucking rope? Which, as we see in S2... Is not the case.
It's not freaking emotional abuse when you're shouting at your boss who keeps almost getting you and your crew killed. Even if this is NOT a kind or productive way to help Ed deal with his mental health, considering that Ed's actions have consequences that he repeatedly and blithely ignores, it's pretty fucking justified!
It's not freaking emotional abuse if your boss OPENLY LOVES MAIMING PEOPLE AND IS MORE THAN HAPPY TO BURN THEM ALIVE and you encourage that, while upholding his right to not kill with his own hands. Even if he has private breakdowns after the fact because he suffers from black-and-white thinking, dissociates himself from any wrongdoing, and is afraid of his potential to become 'a monster'.
Are these choices helpful? No. Are they kind? No. Is Izzy demonstrating Model Citizen Behaviour? Definitely not.
But it's sure as hell not emotional abuse. And it doesn't justify the physical and emotional abuse Ed puts Izzy through in S2.
Nothing you say can 'make' him hit you. If he chooses to hit you (or... choke you out then repeatedly mutilate you and pressure you to commit suicide and makes you constantly live in fear for your life and the lives of people you care about) he makes that decision himself. Yes, even if you shouted at him first. Yes, even if you were arguing. Yes, even if you were in the wrong in that argument. Yes, even if he has a Tragic BackstoryTM and mental health issues. This shit shouldn't be controversial.
Signed: one of those actual abuse survivors.
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drives me nuts when people treat jin guangyao or wei wuxian like they're socialist revolutionaries like no! they're not!! in fact their respective roles in society and complacency regarding its hierarchies is why ANY of the story even happens to begin with!!!
jin guangyao doesn't hold bitterness just because he was born lower class. he is bitter because others deride him and his prostitute mother in spite of both their intelligence, skills, and efforts to climb the ladder.
why do you think we were shown scenes of other prostitutes in the brothel deriding meng shi for being literate, for "trying" so hard? why do you think we were shown scenes of anxin taunting meng yao and throwing shit at him because he was trying to learn cultivation at his mother's behest?
why do you think jin guangyao arranged for the arson of that brothel, burned to the ground with everyone except sisi inside? that's not the behavior of someone who believes in true equality and the inherent worth of sex workers as human beings!
that's the behavior of someone who thinks he's better than them. the behavior of a man who already came up on top through political games and war crimes, backstabbing and spying for the sake of the "greater good".
i won't rehash his argument to nie mingjue that he didn't have a choice-- he had some choice, but no matter what he does his class will come up and people will always assume the worst and try to hurt him for it, which forces his hand to do whatever will protect him best (hence 'no choice').
jin guangyao did everything he could to secure his own safety and a place among those already higher up. and by that point, he'd won it.
the fact that the temple rebuilt on the brothel site is to guanyin, the goddess of mercy, is even more ironic! the fact that jin guangyao has the goddess's statue carved to look like his own mother is proof that he viewed both her and himself as higher than them. more worthy than them.
of course he cared about the general welfare of others (read: the watchtowers). but consider also that there is no watchtower near yi city, which ended up being one of xue yang's playgrounds. jin guangyao can and will turn a blind eye to certain sufferings if it is convenient to him.
sure, jin guangyao made undeniable contributions to cultivation society and accessibility, but he is not at any point trying to topple existing class structures. his adherence to them is in fact integral to his own downfall in the end.
it brings with it the inevitability of society conveniently ignoring his triumphs and genuine moments of humanity to deride him once more as an evil, disgusting son of a whore once his crimes come to light.
now for wei wuxian. he's the righteous protagonist of the story and he doesn't give a fuck what society thinks, yes, but he wasn't out there trying to cause an uprising so that all the poor servant classes and lower could become cultivators. he wasn't trying to redistribute wealth or insinuate that those who are lower deserve to be viewed as equal to the gentry.
the most critical and non-explicitly stated fact of mo dao zu shi is that wei wuxian has always been resigned to his position in the social hierarchy.
his unreliable narration, especially regarding his own past and thoughts, is so damn important. he doesn't EVER tell the reader directly that people treated him any which way at their leisure because of his parents' differing social classes.
no. instead we are shown how much prestige he is afforded as cangse-sanren's son-- reputation as a talented and charming young cultivator, made head disciple of Yunmeng Jiang-- and how little respect he is given in the same breath, as the son of servant wei changze.
the way he is treated by others is as fickle as the wind. if he obeys and does as told, there is no reward. of course he did that, that was the expectation to start with! if he does anything even slightly inconvenient, there is a punishment. of course he has no manners, what else would you expect from an ungrateful son of a servant?
wei wuxian's righteousness is not a matter of adhering to principles he was explicitly taught, the way nie mingjue values honor or the way jiang cheng always tries to prove himself. wei wuxian does the right thing regardless of what the consequences are to him because his good deeds are always downplayed and his bad deeds are always singled out, no matter who or how many people were doing it with him.
he has faced this double standard since childhood. there are points in the novel where it's clear that this sticks out to wei wuxian, but does he ever fight back against that view of himself? does he EVER, at any point in the story, explain his actions and choices to jianghu society and try to debate or appeal to their sense of reason?
no. because he knows, at his very core, that any explicit deviation from their interests whatsoever will be punished.
slaughtering thousands of people is fine when they want him to do it, and when the alternative is unjust torture, re-education camps, and encroachment upon other sects' lands.
slaughtering thousands of people who are trying to paint him as evil for not going along with their genocidal plans, however, is punished.
wei wuxian knows his acceptance among the higher classes is superficial and unsteady. from the age of 10, when jiang fengmian took him in, he knew subconsciously that he could be kicked out at any time.
he knows that cultivation society doesn't care about war crimes and concentration camps and mistreatment of the remaining wen survivors of the sunshot campaign. but the right thing to do now that they aren't at wartime is to help them, plus they'd punish him either way for it, so he will.
in this regard wei wuxian is more self-aware of his position than jin guangyao. he does care about common people and he does try his best to help them as an individual. even if that ends up with him disabled, arrested, targeted in sieges, or dead.
but is he revolutionary? in the full equality, fight the establishment, rewrite laws, change social structures and people's perceptions of class sense?
no. no. he isn't.
now my knowledge of chinese society and history is fairly limited to my hindu diaspora upbringing and our shared cultural similarities ... but speaking to what i absolutely know us true, adherence to one's social class is expected.
this is rigid. efforts and merits might bring you some level of mobility, but in the end, the circumstances of your birth will always be scrutinized first, and your behavior compared to the stereotypes of where and how you originate.
mdzs is not about revolution, and none of its characters are able to truly change its society. there is no grand "maybe cutsleeves aren't inherently bad" or "i'm sorry for persecuting you and believing hearsay, you were truly a good person all along!" at the finale.
people ignore history and repeat it again with the next batch of ugly gossip and rumors.
wei wuxian, lan wangji, and luo qingyang find peace only by distancing themselves from cultivation society and its opinions.
jin guangyao and wei wuxian both cannot ever escape from others' perception of their origins and actions. regardless of their personal beliefs, they are not revolutionaries.
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of ten’s companions, if the doctor couldn’t handle losing them and crossed his own timeline to trick them into traveling with future!him instead of past!him so that he’d have a little more time with them:
rose would do it. first because bless her but she has the situational awareness of a rock, and legitimately would not realize this isn’t her doctor until his facade starts to break down and he starts bleeding grief-laced love for her at every turn. but once she does realize it, she’s both deeply sympathetic and a little scared that she could make him into this. it’s a lot to be confronted with having that much power over someone, to break them so thoroughly. rose would try to get back to her doctor, but while she’s with the future version, she tries to do what she can to ease his pain. (she also tries to figure out a way to subvert her fate. she fails.)
i think martha would be harder to trick. she can smell desperation on the doctor like a bloodhound. she is so tapped into the fact that this man wants to off himself so bad and that she’s 90% of his self-restraint, so present her with a doctor who is lacking that and she’s onto him immediately. however, assuming he gets her to come with him, explains why he’s doing this, there’s like. a minute where she’s kind of. not flattered exactly, but surprised, giddy with the realization that he’d come back for a little more time with her, especially if this is early season 3 martha. which would all come crashing down around the time that he reveals that he wasn’t pushed to this by losing her to some tragedy or her death or anything- but that she chose to leave. that is the point at which martha goes ‘oh i need to get the fuck off of this tardis right now’ and ghosts the past!doctor that she was also traveling with because holy shit, man.
donna, like rose, is easily bamboozled into following the wrong doctor home, provided that he shuffles her along into his tardis too fast for her to argue. but she catches on far quicker than rose does. like, three minutes tops of watching the doctor move through the tardis in a way that’s definitely not enthusiastic piloting and looks more like guilty panic. and then she yells at him for lying to her. and she yells at him for kidnapping her. and then she stops yelling because he’s gone sort of still and quiet and his eyes are just broken. and he doesn’t explain himself, he confesses. donna is going to try to stay with him after this btw. because how do you go back to looking your best friend in the eyes when you know he’d take everything you’ve become away from you, even to save your life? and this is still the doctor, he still did that to her, but he regrets it. regrets it so much that he can’t live with it, he’s breaking time and space just to hear her say his name again. and donna doesn’t want to lose him anymore than he wanted to lose her.
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does thomas kazansky believe hes an honarable man? what does honor mean to him?
i love this question because this is my version of tom kazansky’s whole thing, and i think my version of tom kazansky is a man very conflicted about what honor means—the purpose of everything he does, the way he acts, what he acknowledges and refuses to acknowledge, is to achieve some higher level of honor… one more medal, one more rank, one more star. but of course in his personal life (womanizing, his relationship with mav, all the secret-keeping), he is not an honorable man, no.
and the funny thing is, i don’t think he could answer this question—the fatal flaw of my fanfic, as I’ve written about (and made diagrams etc) here, is that… for plot reasons, no one can really ask him that question! It’s actually very visible in the slider one-shot: every time slider or someone else gets close to asking, “Look, can you just be honest with me about this for a sec,” they literally get interrupted in the middle of their sentence, because for plot reasons Ice can’t actually be pressured to answer a question like that until maverick dies! So I think, if you asked him what honor is, he would say “I’d like to think I’m an honorable man. I have four stars that prove it.” But if you pressured him about some of his actions… what about pulling Bradley’s papers, or your secret illegal relationship… he wouldn’t know what to say. Honor, for him, is whatever the NAVY tells him it is. The navy says honor = four stars, he has four stars to prove how much honor he has earned. Anything in his personal life comes secondary to the honor he’s starving for in the navy. And, he feels like he has no control over his personal life, because he just lets that happen to him.
So—in summary, I’ve been writing him as someone who values professional honor over personal honor, and then ends up paying for that in the end.
But here’s also the thing… I’ve been trying to write him as someone who still TRIES. He’s been given this life…all these secrets… some of it is his fault, yes, but some of it also isn’t. It’s just life. He’s trying to do the best he can within its (admittedly artificial) constraints.
He’s just trying his best. hopefully ive left it up to you to decide if he succeeds.
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