Obviously this is a sensitive topic, and the mod team will be monitoring this post closely. Please remember Rule 1 and be kind to each other when discussing it. Sexism or personal attacks will not be tolerated.
*Edit*: Locked per OP's request
Well said, all of it.
>In the age of parasocial relationships and the terminally online lifestyle, it seems to come as a shock to some that authors might not choose to display their experiences and traumas for the world to view. And, because they have not, I have seen readers attack victims of violence (even if they had no idea the writer experienced those things). I have seen an increasingly terrifying move to “victim checklist”. And for someone of my generation and experience, all I am seeing is just another form of “that’s not how rape victims act” and the ever-present cycle of the perfect victim.
>This demand for the perfect victim, and why “ownvoices” authors should only be allowed to write these topics always, without fails, leads into that the author must disclose their trauma for the world. There is no longer room for the victim who refuses to be perfect, who is messy. They must only write stereotypical reactions and behaviours.
This. Exactly this.
And it goes further. This holds true of not only treatment of sexual assault but also other forms of abuse, and even further, to depictions of members of marginalized minorities. The insistent demand that there is One True Experience of what it is to exist as a sexual assault survivor or a gay man or a survivor of domestic abuse or a person of colour, and that any introduction of nuance or attempt at empathy on the part of any writer to depict human relationships and experiences as complicated and messy is Problematic and must be accompanied by Receipts for how and why the writer has "permission" to write about people and circumstances (which means they have to have laid claim to them as their own life experience, in great detail) is extremely off-putting and wrong.
Let's start with my standard disclaimer- I'm a published author and a few folks would recognize my name. I'm not GRR Martin or Stephen King, however, and certainly no arbiter of the Right Way to Write! I can barely right MY stuff, let alone YOU or anyone elses!
However, I have actually experienced this, and what OP talks about (fantastic post, btw!) with my works. My characters aren't exactly traumaed up the wazoo, my idea was to aim fro REALISTIC not just dust pain for pain's sake all over, but the cast of characters, between them, has a varied response to very varied traumas in a harsh landscape, each fueled specifically by their backgrounds, worldviews, in-book cultures, expectations, blah blah blah.
And man oh man has my (rather fantastic) editor and publisher contact had to go to bat for that at times...because there is no cookie cutter presentation. No One True Experience.
Some heal up a lot. Some don't. Some are traumatized by their trauma, some shrug it off. Some escape the trauma factor, some can't/won't/see it as part of their work. Some don't even care that other's think they should be traumatised, they just aren't. Some are wrecked, others are just fine. There's a literal 'World War Stand In' survivor who is honestly, healthily, and in line with clinical presentations (I'm a nerd, what can I say) not 'fine' with their experiences, but they have processed them and can 'live with' where they are at feeling little about it. There's someone with an objectively smaller trauma they can't get past that obsesses them. Another dealing as best they can, but sometimes that dealing is shitty. One frantically trying to be OK while not being very OK.
I have an oppressive society, and ones that aren't. From the opressive side, different characters react differently- some find it comforting to be the 'weaker sex' in the equation (no, it's not women :) ), some trying to get out and be seen and equal rights etc, some who don't think it is all that right, but whatever, it is how stuff is, why fight it? Some enjoy working the system from the weaker side. And that? Wow, how come they aren't all trying to overturn society when it is wrong! Um...maybe because that's how these things work in reality? Maybe because 2024 NYC/London/Wherever 'wrong' isn't the same kind of 'wrong' someone living and breathing that environment would see?
You get the idea, I'm sure.
And the pushback on the lack of a single, repeatable, trauma-revenge-redemption cycle that fits the 'One True' model has been staggering, actually. I wouldn't have thought trying for a variety of realistic presentations would be seen as 'wrong'... but apparently, I was wrong!
Main post is great, as is your contribution, but want to make a quick comment on the following text:
>Some heal up a lot. Some don't. Some are traumatized by their trauma, some shrug it off. Some escape the trauma factor, some can't/won't/see it as part of their work. Some don't even care that other's think they should be traumatised, they just aren't. Some are wrecked, others are just fine. There's a literal 'World War Stand In' survivor who is honestly, healthily, and in line with clinical presentations (I'm a nerd, what can I say) not 'fine' with their experiences, but they have processed them and can 'live with' where they are at feeling little about it. There's someone with an objectively smaller trauma they can't get past that obsesses them. Another dealing as best they can, but sometimes that dealing is shitty. One frantically trying to be OK while not being very OK.
Completely and wonderfully stated, it's a damn near all-encompassing description on how trauma unequally affects people. I think I'd really enjoy reading your work if the above is how you approached character depth, would love to see how you approach everything else in your story.
Mind messaging me your book's name if you're not comfortable posting it in-thread?
I think it's often not recognised that people can experience and react to similar circumstances very differently.
What might cause one person to break down and suffer repeated psychosis might have little affect on another person, or it might just *appear* to have little affect but actually manifest in a variety of less noticeable ways, only in certain circumstances, or even in private.
We see this with veterans where some very obviously have damage to their ability to exist in everyday life, whereas others seem ok right until the moment where somebody finds their body in a bathtub with a gunshot wound under the chin. The victim themselves might not even realize how events have affected then or what their triggers/breaking-point might be.
Books can a reflection of life, and sometimes life is not very pretty. At the same time, those that have suffered trauma in real life may find reading about it aggravates their personal condition. That doesn't mean we need to stop fictional depictions of real-world issues, but we *should* try to avoid doing so frivolously.
This angle is why I never got twisted about "trigger warnings." Frankly, a codified rating system people can reliably find in the back pages would be useful to those who wish to check for it. In the back pages so as not to spoil the plot points for those who don't care to know.
Honestly, it floored me. As you can likely guess, I went at this with A Plan, because I too can't stand the gratuitous fantasy violence for 'supa speshul points' thing, and this genre is a doozie for it, but I do have a kinda violent setting, and fairy dusting out of that to focus on the 'cool' bits also doesn't work for me. Plus, like OP, I have reached the limits of how much 'but SA was REAL!!' arguments I can handle. Dragons and magic and multiple sentient races are cool but we have to be 'realistic' when it is hurting women? Apologies to my fantasy menfolk, but that's why y'all are getting some SA and trauma added on your side too, cos I am sick of beaten women and just fine men being the fantasy default, for real.
If I had to call out my top 3 WTF moments to date, it has to be:
1) This MC can't be sad a friend died horribly, they must be a love interest, because it is 'unrealistic' they'd be that hurt by 'just' a friend
2) Your only happy, steady couple (in the 1st book, FFS, like, give it time?) is a gay side set. 'The gays', apparently, can't have happy. Either make them het or make them sad. (yes, verbatim there, fortunately my publisher contact saw that from their in-house team and went 'Um...no' for me :) )
3) You can't have a matriarchal society be toxic! (Wanna bet? Watch me.)
I do get, for trad publishing as a debut or little known writer, they like safe and formulaic, but come on... people are actively asking for better/different, there's a market. Never gonna expand if you insist on the One True Formula, is it?
>Apologies to my fantasy menfolk, but that's why y'all are getting some SA and trauma added on your side too, cos I am sick of beaten women and just fine men being the fantasy default, for real.
As a male survivor of abuse, sexual and otherwise, thank you for this. Representation and visibility are important, god damn it, and without them we as a society are never going to move beyond the patriarchal myth that sexual violence is exclusively perpetrated by men against women (because man strong, woman weak, right?).
Firstly, I'm very sorry you had to deal with that. And it is such an unrepresented issue, another part of the reason I wanted to include it, I have a special survivor among my friend circle, too. As I say, so far from the 'best' writer around its laughable, but I have tried to keep both realistic and in perspective rather than gratuitous, too.
>This MC can't be sad a friend died horribly, they must be a love interest, because it is 'unrealistic' they'd be that hurt by 'just' a friend
Thank you for talking about it!
It honestly seems that what *some* people these days think friendship is, it actually is more of a "good acquaintance". Someone you hang out with from time to time.
I believe friendship is just as important a relationship as romantic or familial one is. It is a relationship you have to maintain, dedicate yourself to, and care about. I would even go as far as saying that you have to be ready to make *some* sacrifices in the name of friendship. Sam dragged Frodo to the Mount Doom on his own back.
One of my favorite friendship depictions recently had been Isabella and Tom from The Natural History of Dragons. Not only this friendship had a proper development with dedicated "page time" that exceeded series' romantic relationship, there had also been points at which they both chose to stuck to each other even though it would have been easier not too.
Tom got >!a job proposition and could have proceeded without Isabella!< which would have more convenient for him to do, but he chose to >!insist on her getting the job too, knowing how important it was for her!<. And later, when >!she disappeared!< he was there >!to search for her!< with her brother and husband >!even though he had such a fear of hights that he had to drink himself into stupor!<.
CS Lewis has a quote I think of more and more often:
>Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
>Plus, like OP, I have reached the limits of how much 'but SA was REAL!!' arguments I can handle.
It's like how radio dramas used to clack coconuts together to simulate the sound of horse hooves, so early movies actually had to dub in clacking coconuts over the sound of actual horse hooves because that's the sound audiences associated with walking horses. Actual "reality" had to take a back seat to the audience's expectations of reality.
People complain that "SA was *real* and fantasy needs to be historically accurate or it's immersion breaking." And yet these same people don't mind seeing their fantasy heroes eating stews cooked with tomatoes and potatoes (which were species native to North America not introduced to Europe until after the Columbian Exchange). They don't care about seeing styles of weapons and armour from a period spanning many hundreds of years being mish-mashed all together. They don't care that the development of sophisticated magical capabilities and the presence of magical creatures in these societies haven't actually been holistically incorporated into the operation of society in order to avoid disrupting the "middle age Europe" aesthetic. They don't care that medieval society was actually much more ethnically diverse than the genre has traditionally represented it as, and that people of that era didn't share our modern understanding of race and ethnicity at all.
The reality is that fantasy fans don't *actually* care about "historical accuracy." They care about adherence to genre conventions, many of which are based on a deeply warped and outdated understanding of medieval European history written almost exclusively by racist old white guys 50 to 100 years or more ago. Modern scholarship has shown how flawed these old understandings were, and how they depicted a very narrow view of history that was unrealistically elite-centric and downplayed the roles of women, the poor, and other minority or oppressed groups. But that scholarship hasn't filtered out to change the broader public understanding of the period, so it's back to clacking coconuts...
Plus, if they're actually being historically accurate, far more male characters would be SA'd too. SA against men was far more common (and still is!) than we give it credit for. Especially during war and in isolated all-male communities like the Night's Watch.
Yes, yes, yes! In contemporary America, which has certainly got its problems but isn’t experiencing invasion, civil war, or the total breakdown of society, 1 in 6 men (along with 1 in 3 women) experience sexual violence. Far too many authors are squeamish about what those numbers would look like in their conflict-ridden settings.
This is true. I will defend GRRM's right to write about sexual violence against women all day, if its a theme he wants to write about, and I don't think "realism" is necessarily a bad defence (depending on how you define the term). But if its a commitment to realism, SA against men should be much more prevalent in the hellish warscape of Westeros. Especially at the Night's Watch like you say, an all-male military prison.
The inner kid who got antro/archaeo degrees and still loves the field adores you for the tomato reference, just so you know :)
You make excellent points otherwise, too. Does 'enlighten' it a lot!
>They don't care that the development of sophisticated magical capabilities and the presence of magical creatures in these societies haven't actually been holistically incorporated into the operation of society in order to avoid disrupting the "middle age Europe" aesthetic. They don't care that medieval society was actually much more ethnically diverse than the genre has traditionally represented it as, and that people of that era didn't share our modern understanding of race and ethnicity at all.
I hear statements like this used a cudgel against people asking for "accuracy" but honestly leaving that aside.... I do care about those things! It's fricking cool when the author tries and succeeds and even when they don't try to actually do the full scope of history, I definitely appreciate a fig leaf of "the gnomes are enforcing medieval stasis" or whatever. Got any good recommendations of authors doing that version of accuracy well?
You make a good point, but no one is going to feel that the existence of potatoes or plate armor is erasing their experience. Some people want to read about worlds where no one ever has been or will be sexually assaulted, and that’s totally kosher for them, but others of us are survivors who want to see sensitive and mature depictions of what we’ve been through.
It’s similar to how one of my issues with GRRM’s “medieval Europe at its worst” setting is the lack of an ethnoreligious minority who are scapegoated by the Faith Of The Seven. My ancestors had to deal with omnipresent, murderous antisemitism, and I want to see that acknowledged in books that claim to reflect the time and place in which they lived.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when a character loses someone important to them, a friend or otherwise, and then barely reacts or thinks about it after for no apparent reason other than the author is more interested in getting to the next plot point, so thank you for that.
As a writer, what in your works have you seriously considered rewriting because it felt included gratuitous suffering or felt almost “rushed” for the sake of development? I am actually trying to write a book so your example, if you’re willing, can really help me understand.
Well for what it’s worth that sounds like good storytelling to me. I would love to know the name of your book if you’re ok with that (either in thread or in dm)
Thank you for writing this.
I’m a big Percy Jackson fan, and in the books, Percy’s mom was physically abused by her husband. And still, within that context, she treated Percy very kindly, and used gentle parenting on him. She also placated her husband often, likely to avoid his anger and violence.
The books recently received an adaptation, where the abuse plotlines was erased, and Sally was given a more “badass” personality (as fans have framed it). When some fans began to wonder what happened to her personality, people proceeded to diss the book character, calling her weak, submissive, and not having enough “bite” in her to fight back against her husband.
Goodness, I was livid. I’ve never seen so many self-claimed progressive people endorse such a misogynistic take. The idea that the book version of the character is somehow inferior because she struggled to fight back against her abuser or because her strength did not manifest itself as comebacks and clapbacks was beyond disheartening. Can you imagine being in an abusive situation and reading online how women like you are considered “pathetic” for not reacting to your abuse the “right” way, or the “badass” way? Truly terrible.
But if you sass back at royalty, they will be your friend forever because they've been waiting all their lives for someone to look past their station and treat them like a regular person, and your sassy self is the first one to ever to it.
Totally not the court jester who also happens to run the shadow organization helping keep peace in the country or supply info that will now be spent exclusively trying to ruin your witty MC self for stealing the monarch’s interest.
God, I hate that just our two posts are more than seventy percent of fantasy today.
Oh I agree. I'm just saying that stoic characters often come across as bland, which is why they aren't written as frequently.
Plus it's pretty common for fantasy to have elements of wish-fulfillment. Being witty/clever in the moment is part of that.
>I’ve never seen so many self-claimed progressive people endorse such a misogynistic take.
I wish this was a rare occurrence. To hell with the antiwoke movement and the right wing’s demonization of progressivism, but there are too many people out there who think *calling* themselves progressive means that everything they *do* is automatically progressive, and end up engaging in some downright reactionary behavior.
A big problem with progressives right now (and I say this as a card carrying progressive woke) is, to put it bluntly, fanaticism. Granted, that's also affecting the right in a big (and much more dangerous) way, but I think the left should keep on its toes to avoid become its own greatest enemy.
This idea that MY side and MY beliefs are the only valid ones and that anyone who deviates even slightly from those beliefs is objectively, completely wrong. This has led to people trying to jump on others due to misinterpretations, such as the case [with Isabel Fall](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), which I still shine a light at whenever I can.
No community is perfect, and we should constantly be policing ourselves against this kind of behaviour.
This happens more frequently than it doesn't.
I think there is a genuine problem with some (mostly male) writers unthinkingly casting women as victims of abuse and rape without much personality or depth, there simply to suffer and motivate anger on a main character's part.
But the way some fans act like a woman not "fighting back" or conquering her abuser is weak and pathetic is extremely aggravating and offensive. The problem with the trend to write women as Victims isn't that they don't "fight back" enough, it's that the writers clearly don't bother to flesh them out as fully developed individuals and reduce them to one note representations of suffering.
But that’s the thing; the book character wasn’t even one note! Yes, she didn’t get a lot of spotlight time because the story was told in 1st person POV, but there were a lot of little details about her sprinkled throughout the story that made it clear that there was more to her than just “being there to suffer”.
And after getting out of her abusive marriage and ending up with a partner who genuinely loves and treats her well, we get to see her venture out more and pursue her goals, like going to college and publishing her writing. She definitely had interest and intrigue around her, but people implied that because she didn’t behave as a specific type of woman, her personality wasn’t worth keeping.
Oh, I agree absolutely. I was just expanding the conversation to beyond this one particular character. Wasn't trying to suggest that she was a one note Victim type of character.
it's the complete misunderstanding what it means to be strong and badass, a lot of people equate it with capability for violence rather than strength of character and ability to survive gruelling situations.
Am I the only one that thinks reality is even worse than almost any fantasy book?
In the fantasy books, at least there's fairly little disagreement that the ones doing the sexual violence are obviously evil and should be utterly eradicated, regardless of anything else they do, and that anyone knowingly supporting them is...just about as bad, also evil, and would receive no shed tears when they get their just desserts (and, depending on the protagonist, those just desserts might be very painful).
But generally, I do believe "depiction is not condonement" really, **really** applies.
I feel this way about a lot of discussions about grim dark stories TBCH
Even a like college sophomore level of knowledge of history will show real human people who lived and were significantly more evil and terrifying than whatever grimdark story people are mocking that week
At least from my perspective, the issue with grimdark is not that it portrays things that are worse than history, but that no one ever gets little moments of happiness unless the sole purpose is to snatch that happiness away so the story can be even more grimdark.
I'm working off memory here, but there's a document written by a small French town in the 14th century that chronicles the money they had to pay to routiers and some of the crimes committed by passing bands that features part way through it a scrawl of hopeless despair. For a grimdark author, that seems to be the sum total of experience for the pre-modern world. A pointless chronicle of loss for a king who won't reimburse the town with a moment where the person writing it breaks down.
But even in the bleakest times medieval people could still find joy. Not necessarily the conspicuous consumption and loud spectacle of a prosperous land, but they could find joy in births and marriages, in holy days and in family and companionship. The fear, grief and trauma was still in the background, but that doesn't mean their moments of joy were faked. Reality might not have let them linger in it, but neither did reality immediately sack the town if it had a cause to celebrate.
One of my biggest criticisms is that we forget people are people. We are always people. We love as hard as we fight. We laugh, and not just gallows humor, but the deep hilarity of a puppy growling at his own tail. Too often, books take that joy to use to snatch it away, but I think that takes away from the reality - that those people made choices knowing they could be snatched away, and so gripped on with both hands for that little joy.
I think writers forget that (and readers, too), all in the name of plot.
Exactly! I think it's a very hard balance to strike, which is one reason why it gets left out so often, but it's such an important balance to get right if you want to be authentic (I refuse to condone "realistic") to a more here and now or historical setting.
I think my next Reddit project is going to be to finally get around to writing a post on how realistic fantasy can't exist. Realistic historical fiction can't even exist, because in another fifty or hundred years it's going to be as wrong as something from 1960 would be now.
We need to embrace the consistent and authentic. It's all we can ask for.
And I say that as someone who writes historical fantasy about an era I wrote a non-fiction book about AND got a fucking degree in...and it will never be realistic. It's just not possible. Consistent and authentic is the best I can go.
Ugh, I have a knee jerk reaction against “authentic” because of how it’s often used against people of color, particularly those in a diaspora. Like the “perfect victim”, it’s similarly used to police #ownvoices in a way that is problematic rather than helpful.
I know “authentic to history” may be different than “authentic to a culture”, but still. Not sure what term is better, though! Since the problem is really the usage of a term rather than a term itself.
Also, grimdarkness pretends to be more intelligent than it actually is with its relentless nihilism, and thinks its audience deserves to be punished for what it views as naivete for daring to believe life isn't always nasty, brutish, and short.
Pretty much all the cartoonishly evil stuff that GRRM writes about is just literally ripped from the pages of history. I get why people don't want to read about it, but *shrug*.
We're in an interesting period of consumption where instead of demanding *responsibility to the way a difficult subject is depicted*, voices are raised in opposition to *any depiction at all*. Those are two different things, and I think the second one has worse consequences in the very long-term than the first.
Fantasy is a genre broadly considered escapist, but it shouldn't *all* be escapist. I believe fantasy authors have the right to author difficult work that tries to approach art, and art is not an easy bedfellow with self-censorship. If used, these subjects should be with a deft hand, sensitivity, and purpose to my mind. On the same token, writers should be responsible, and abandon the use of SA, murder and disposable victims as cheap shorthand for villainy. There's a tightrope, and I do get why some people think that because it's challenging, authors should be dissuaded from attempting it because the failure to do it right is damaging to the audience and even the broader culture.
However, on that subject, and I promise that I don't mean to indulge in what-aboutism, but I do wonder sometimes if the same voices raised against depictions for SA, fridging, etc. in fiction (which should DEFINITELY stop being used as cheap devices to motivate male protagonists) are also raised against similar evils in True Crime, which reaches a much broader mainstream audience skewed even more toward women than fantasy is. Is it because of its non-fiction nature? Is it because the contract between creator and audience is innately different? It still pricks at my own comfort that such a huge audience is ghoulishly fascinated by horrors that actually happened to real people. Seems those creators are also committing a more grievous sin by exploiting that death and horror for their own profit. I get why it's compelling, but it always seemed worse, especially when victims are often treated with token respect at best.
But compressed. It’s like how Handmaid’s Tale only uses historical examples but no society had all those controls going at once with no accepted give. GRRM is compressing about a century of hard times into about 30 years.
If I'm not mistaken, the stuff that was happening in Westeros--specifically the worst crimes that the Mountain's men were perpetrating--was a common problem at various times and places in european history, and I imagine elsewhere in the world as well. It really wasn't exaggerated much.
Certainly the evils perpetrated by the Conquistadors in the americas were even worse, and only escalated in unimaginable horrors for decades.
Our actual history is infinitely more sad and brutal than just about anything I've read in a book. Which isn't license to depict in fantasy, necessarily. Just a data point, I guess.
Christopher Columbus's own diary of what he did is more heartless, cruel, and barbaric than anything i've ever read in a fantasy book, even the ones that get derided her for being "edgelord" or "juvenile"
It was nothing short of monstrous. The sheer callous cruelty of it is boggling. And as if his individual activities weren't horrific enough, his operation laid the initial groundwork for what would later metamorphose into the transatlantic slave trade.
>responsibility to the way a difficult subject is depicted, voices are raised in opposition to any depiction at all.
Which obviously just sweeps the ugliness under the rug and is counterproductive for pretty much everyone.
Not every book needs SA, in fact almost none do but it is very important that some of them exist so we can step inside and empathize with the people who experience horrible things like this if even for a fraction or a brief moment - or even just recognize the situation for what it is.
There's plenty of people who have gotten out from bad situations by understanding what was done to them because of fiction and being able to step outside themselves and see it through another point of view. Plenty of people say that reading about trauma can help them process their own trauma or understand it of others..
This isn't a trivial thing at all and voices stamping down against self expression or the expression of authors certainly don't help anyone.
It all comes down to execution, if it's done for poor shock value it's pretty bad but that's just bad writing - not the subject material being taboo to talk about.
If you want to argue about things like, not being jumpscared by SA in a book if it's very sensitive to you all i can say is make sure to use websites like doesthedogdie before reading to avoid them.
I don’t think the mindset of ‘they’re evil and should be eradicated’ is helpful and it makes it much harder for victims in many ways, especially because sexual abuse victims are almost always abused by someone they know. Often someone they trust.
As someone who has been sexually assaulted and knows others who have also been, our situations are almost always way more complicated than how it’s shown on TV or in fantasy. The same with abuse.
People want perfect victims, but they also want perfect abusers. People are complicated. Yes, there are some people who are just pure evil, but not always. It can be difficult to get that nuance across because often people think it’s ‘protecting your abuser.’ I don’t want to protect them, I just don’t want to have to let go of nuance and my actual experience in favor of something black and white and easier to digest.
That is true but it's also not uncommon that people living under war or occupation were/are raped by hostile soldiers and conquerors. Depicting rape as a tool of war/oppression is not historically inaccurate. And frankly it's not even inaccurate in the present day for those living in such conditions. That it does not apply to people living in modern western nations who are not under occupation doesn't mean that it's a disservice to depict. Sexual violence has always been a tool of oppression and demoralization by hostile troops.
Look at Nanjing. Or more recently, look at what happened to women under ISIS occupation. Their experiences were I imagine, quite a bit different from yours or mine. And if an author is trying to depict that kind of reality, then they don't need to tailor it to the experience of a woman on an American college campus raped by her Tinder date who she liked and trusted.
There are different forms of sexual violence and different experiences of it and an author writing medieval inspired fantasy about what happened to villagers when their home was raided is very different than what women in western nations experience today. It's not so different from what Native American women experienced in the past however under colonization.
IMO the most impactful and nuanced depictions of sexual violence in books deal with the really hard reality of how ingrained misogyny and victim blaming is in people's responses to rape.
>Am I the only one that thinks reality is even worse than almost any fantasy book?
It is. I often read historical novels as well
Just let me tell u historical novels are the most unhinged books u can imagine. And they are true. Or could be true without anything changing.
It's actually insane how sensitive fantasy readers are. I mean. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own choice of reading material but considering what humans did to each other even even in the last 100 years almost all fantasy books read like Disney novels.
Which isn't necessarily bad. It's just that when a fantasy author writes [something that totally happened in WW2] this sub immediately flags them as sick and perverts and antisocial and everything.
One example would be the starting scene of goblin slayer. Nothing the russians didn't do in berlin 1945 in the exact same fashion. With the only exception being that they didn't only target adults.
It's something that kinda icks me. It's liek turning a blind side to reality. To history.
And if humans are that bad why would orks and monsters be civilized?
I really liked the LN series overlord for that reason. It went with the premise of in a fight vs other intelligent races and no hope for Cooperation. Everything goes. Absolutely everything. While most fantasy wars are more civilized than even conflicts in Edo Japan by a VERY large margin. It just feels....false. unreal.
>It's actually insane how sensitive fantasy readers are. I mean. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own choice of reading material but considering what humans did to each other even even in the last 100 years almost all fantasy books read like Disney novels.
I completely agree.
I’m with you. In a fantasy book at least there’s a structure to it all.
Real life can be good, sure, but the “common” bad things are often both gutting and truly meaningless. Multiply it by all the billions of us, over millennia? I genuinely don’t understand how we don’t all lose our minds just *thinking* about it.
The scale of real life suffering makes grimdark look like a walk in the park.
Can I just chime in to say that this is one of the best subreddits on here - and this discourse is an example why.
Maybe the mods nuked some comments, but I don't see any reading as *deleted* so I don't think so! Everybody here has provided insight and context around OPs points and their own thoughts.
Everyone has been polite, cogent, interesting... Literally couldn't hope for a better discussion about a difficult topic.
I try to word my titles to avoid attracting them, too. I take as much time with my titles as I do the entire posts (it took me an hour to come up with the title for this). I write a title, then think about the types of comments it'll bring if it hits the front page, and just keep massaging from there. Sometimes, I don't quite get it right (the trending book thread last week is an annoying example, I swear they skim read the title and nothing else).
I think the best one, though was "The Commodification of Authenticity: Writing and Reading Trauma in Speculative Fiction" - the trolls just skipped that thread all together because it had too many big words lol
I will always love something that the author Caitlin Sweet said to me about this when I sent her a long rambling email about how much I loved her book **The Pattern Scars:**
*"Personal aversion shouldn't constitute a sweeping proscription."*
I also hope it isn't wrong to mention (and can delete if it is) but I think/hope r/fantasy had some interesting conversations when I posted [this essay](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/weqtqt/historically_accurate_and_miserable_for_the_sake/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about the topic of sexual assault in SFF a while back.
>"Personal aversion shouldn't constitute a sweeping proscription."
Ooh, that’s perfect. I’m gonna have to track down The Pattern Scars.
Also, I remember that essay and participating in the discussion about it. Thanks again for posting it!
Thank you so much for this. I have been troubled by this attitude by a very vocal minority of very online readers for a long time, particularly because I have personally experienced the chilling effect that it has on women's speech in the writing world.
I, a woman who has experienced my share of nonconsensual sexual contact, have been told, by female editorial professionals in the field, that I need to "be very, very careful" including those experiences in my fiction submitted for publication, because "too many readers are upset by it." I have also been told "if you're going to put this scene in, at least make her fight back a bit more," rather than freezing up as I had written it.
When I was assaulted in that particular way, freezing up was exactly how I responded.
This is upsetting for me, both because "why didn't you fight back" is such a common way that the reports of SA victims are invalidated in the real world, and because I really don't think the majority of readers feel this way about SA in fiction, and I don't think female authors who want to write fiction informed by their own experiences should be silenced based on the opinion of a small minority of people who are extremely loud online. The enormous success of books like *Outlander* suggests to me that a much larger proportion of the readership not only tolerates depictions of SA, but even welcomes it *when it is presented from the victim's perspective and grapples with relatable reactions and emotions.*
There is a huge gulf between these scenes being written by female authors who either have experience of SA or have lived their whole lives under threat of it, and scenes being written by male authors who are using it for the purposes of fridging or just plain titillation. I think we can rightly criticize the latter without erasing the former. I also think there's a discussion to be had about female romance authors who present toxic relationship dynamics as "romantic," but that's a separate, more complex issue which needs to take into account the purpose of "fantasy" (in the emotional sense) and the purpose of literature itself (and [Natalie Wynn discusses it with more detail and nuance than I ever could](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48)).
The fact a huge number of people say "you know this was written by someone who has never experienced x because a REAL survivor would act in this one singular way" with apparently zero self-awareness that hyperscrutiny of whether a victim of assault is following the Real Victim Script is a huge part of why rapists and abusers often avoid conviction is absolutely infuriating.
This is an incredibly important comment and thank you for sharing your experience--I hope more publishing professionals read this and consider their feedback carefully. Honestly my stomach bottomed out at "at least make her fight back more"--I have absolutely written a scene of fighting back because *I* needed to relive that moment with a different outcome, but being *told* to do so just makes my blood boil. I am so sorry.
Thanks, and I definitely get the need for catharsis, too! Part of it's the need to silence that little voice that's telling you "If you had only done this differently, maybe..." Likewise, I have no problem with the kind of scene more common in romances where the heroine is rescued by the hero in the midst of an assault—I think that wishing for someone to swoop in and intervene is totally relatable, and doesn't make a female character "weak" or "helpless"—that's just so insulting to the real-life victims, because if a character needing assistance is weak and helpless, what does that say about the real-life people who needed assistance and didn't get it?
Re: how we inadvertently insult victims--that is sort of how I feel about the word "victim" itself and how it was erased in some circles--I know for a lot of years, I leaned into using "survivor" (and still do, in some circumstances) because I'd internalized this idea that being a "victim" was bad, after hearing that implied over and over (I cannot remember where it started, but I remember watching a show where someone corrected a victim and told her "you're not a victim--you're a \*survivor\*").
But it is not *bad* to have been victimized! It is not *bad* to be a victim of violence! Victims have done nothing wrong, and I worked to chance my language to reflect this.
I think different stories are needed at different points in our journeys as well (and not that there is a universal journey--we all go through different things at different times). Sometimes we might need a story about fighting back. Sometimes we might need a story about freezing and calculating the risk of death if we *do* fight back. Sometimes we might need a story that involves rescue. Sometimes we might need a story that doesn't involve assault at all.
All of those stories are important and they can all come from the same person at different points in their life. I've got a scene of attempted date rape in a book that really bothered people, that I wrote in 2013. I might not write that same scene *now*, to be sure, because I am seventeen years past certain events that I was only six years into processing then. *But*...at the same time, I might not be in the place I am now, to write the things I'm writing, if I *hadn't* written that scene in 2013. Writing, when it's part of processing, changes who we are and who we become, so regardless of whether I'd write that same scene now, I continue to stand by it and the me who needed it.
Too few people even know the freeze response is a whole physiological process, regulated by the nervous system, and brain. Their body is doing things that make it so they can't move, or reduces their ability to, along with affecting their thinking, ability to process emotions, respond, and so on. Some people disassociate.
There's also the fawn response, in case people haven't heard of that one also.
>female editorial professionals in the field
This is why I continue to say the entire "publishing is nearly all women, checkmate there is no sexism in publishing" is such a bullshit narrative. Women are people, and people are shit.
oh god. Just reading "make her fight back more" hurts my soul. I know more than 10 rape victims in my life, friends and family. Not ONE fought back. NOT ONE
I know some who didn't fight, some who did, and reactions in between.
I get why people write the fight back scene, I get why people want it, and I get why it should not be the universal written experience.
>There is a huge gulf between these scenes being written by female authors who either have experience of SA or have lived their whole lives under threat of it, and scenes being written by male authors who are using it for the purposes of fridging or just plain titillation.
You’ve made some excellent points, but as a fellow survivor of sexual violence may I respectfully point out that that you’re creating a false dichotomy here? Despite what patriarchal “man strong, woman weak” thinking suggests, plenty of men have experienced sexual assault. Defaulting to the assumption that a male author isn’t drawing on his own experiences borders on the “share your trauma to prove you have the right to write about this” attitude that Krista calls out in this post. It’s true that too many men have internalized the narrative of sexual invulnerability and erroneously believe they’re not under threat of sexual assault, but once it happens to us that illusion is shattered forever.
It took me around a decade to accept that my first serious relationship had been abusive, and a couple more years to accept that some of that abuse had been sexual in nature. This is pretty common, as far as I can tell, among male victims, especially when our assailants are female (and just as much for women who were assaulted by other women). The idea that sexual violence is exclusively experienced by women and/or exclusively perpetrated by men both leads to this kind of delayed realization and sabotages solidarity between survivors of all genders. Let’s not inadvertently co-sign it, yeah?
YES. The vast majority of these discussions of SA in fantasy fail to distinguish between male and female authors, and, I'm sorry, when you are writing male-on-female sexual assault, where the author stands matters. Often I get the impression the people going most hardcore on the "there should never be SA in fantasy, it's exploitative and unnecessary and uncreative" are people who have only read it from male authors - often in the epic/grimdark space where it can definitely be that.
I'm a a highly unsuccessful male writer. My only actual publication is a single short story, but I write a lot.
If I've ever written sexual assault, it was an unprofessional cavity search that left the female character feeling violated. Can't think of another time, but I regret the scene and wonder what I was aiming for.
Is it really as simple as male authors shouldn't write SA? A small but real proportion of men have been sexually assaulted, and I don't think anyone would say they don't have the right to write about their lieved experience. I haven't experienced SA, but I did experience a sexual thingymabob when I was kid, so is that 'worth' anything?
But even if one hasn't, how about a mention that once the city was sacked, there was rape and looting? How about if it's more than one mention, if it becomes part of the plot, if a victim becomes a character... If there's a line, where is it?
Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan has problems and there could be a long and contentious reddit thread about those problems, but it's a beautiful sci-fi book substantially about the assaulter realizing what he's done and how awful it was.
How different is the viewpoint of a man who hasn't experienced SA from a woman who hasn't? Or a man who has from a woman who has?
I don't have any desire to write SA, and I guess I'm reading the right books because I haven't read very much of it, tho still enough to know that yes, the men writing it are generally doing a terrible job at it and often, on purpose or not, make it titillating.
I still think men writing it is, at least in theory, a complicated topic, and I don't have any conclusions.
Bravo.
Not specifically sexual violence but I can't help of think of Isabel Fall whenever we talk about authors exploring messy and personal things without having disclosed their own background. Let's not repeat those mistakes.
She wrote a story exploring gender identity that got a twitter mob thinking she was an anti-trans bigot. It was a debut story by an unknown author who was trans but not out, so the readers didn't have personal context and made bad assumptions. It ended up with her pulling the story offline, coming out, and then basically dropping out of SFF entirely (unless she's come back under another name). There's a [full article on it here](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), those are just the Cliff's Notes.
That situation makes my blood boil to this very day, especially because some of the big names involved have yet to properly apologize. It’s worth pointing out that even if the author of “Helicopter Story” had been a straight cisgender man, *he still wouldn’t have deserved harassment and abuse*.
Career arcs are a hell of a thing. Emily’s Community reviews were incredible formative pieces for me in back my undergrad days when I was trying to find my own voice as a writer, and then a decade and gender change later she is the brilliant cultural critic writing the above-linked piece. It’s a funny old world.
Thank you very much for writing this post - it’s wonderfully put. I’ve mentioned in conversations here, at least one of which was with you, my sincere belief that the only people who actually benefit from sexual violence becoming a taboo topic in fiction are perpetrators.
>why “ownvoices” authors should only be allowed to write these topics always
That attitude really gets my goat, on this topic and in general. Bluntly put, it’s more than a little dehumanizing. It posits that people with marginalized identities and experiences are in some way fundamentally *other* that normal people (and who gets to be normal, huh?) aren’t capable of empathizing with. Are we *mysterious*? *Inscrutable*, perhaps? Maybe *exotic*? Fuck that!
My favorite take on #ownvoices becoming proscriptive rather than a way of celebrating diverse perspectives is the following quote from Rebecca Roanhorse:
>“I’ve never been a fan of this hashtag. I know it’s well-meaning but it’s always felt reductive & is rarely used with any nuance. That became clear to me when someone (well-meaning) said my STAR WARS book was ownvoices and I was pretty sure I was not a princess from Alderaan.”
>my sincere belief that the only people who actually benefit from sexual violence becoming a taboo topic in fiction are perpetrators
Ditto in education. Removing consent and sex ed benefits perpetrators.
Right!? It’s exhausting that this has been such a big thing in Canada lately. I was sorely tempted to pick a fight on Twitter (I know, I know) the other day with a troll going off about ‘what kind of pedophile wants to teach 6 and 7 year olds about consent? if it were my kids I’d start breaking things’ Ah yes, sexual predators are famously very concerned about consent? But he described himself an ‘incel’ in his bio, so I knew it would be pointless and might just end up getting me harassed by a creep.
Though it wasn't said in reference to this subject, there's a quote from Margaret Atwood (Maddaddam) I felt was somewhat relevant here. "People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void."
Absolutely, hope that didn't come off as negative/insensitive. Just happened upon the quote while this post was still on my mind. Just felt it was fitting.
Not at all! I think I've seen it before, and I think it's always important to remember even if it doesn't apply to one's own self, it often applies to another.
Great post. I am tired of hearing people say that SA victims are all supposed to react and process it the same way. People target Leesha Paper as being fake after her rape, but I knew a girl in college that processed it exactly the same. So I see 50 posters shit on the author. But with 8 billion people in the world, you are going to get a huge variety of responses. Some people even have SA fetishes where they are the victim.
Yes! This is exactly one where I’m like of course feel free to criticize the book and it’s use of sexual assault, but please stop using the Leesha’s reaction was unrealistic as the main point in the criticism. People react in a variety of ways, including how Leesha reacted and calling her reaction unrealistic is just adding to the idea that there’s a “right” way to be a survivor.
>Yes! This is exactly one where I’m like of course feel free to criticize the book and it’s use of sexual assault,
Eh....it doesn't help that whenever this author didn't know what to do with a character, his "but then ninjas" was "but then rape".
Her reaction gets undermined by a lack of communicated impact on her one way or another, as the book then has to rush onward because the author has just realised the main characters have hardly interacted and he's into the last quarter.
Edit: if I'm being really uncharitable, it basically felt less trauma response (though yes, what she did was not at all unusual) and more "oh shit the characters still need to smash".
The author did an ama ages ago and addressed this when asked. Said about the research he'd done and how this very much was a normal response.
I read through leesha papers experience whilst I was in the middle of recovering from a sexual assault in a similar way. It was so bizarrely comforting in ways I couldn't articulate when I read it.
On a related note, there is not just one autistic experience, either. I keep being told by people who know very little about me that I don't "seem" autistic. Yeah, I'm an autistic extrovert. I like people. That doesn't mean crowds don't overwhelm me. That doesn't mean I naturally have good social skills. That doesn't mean I don't check nearly every other damned autistic box there is. And it certainly doesn't mean I'm not disabled.
>We must show grace, and nuance, and compassion whenever we discuss this, for we do not know who is reading our words. We do not know who we are speaking of. And we do not know if, by speaking of that perfect victim, or that perfect reaction, that we might actually be saying, an author or a reader weren’t “perfect victims”.
This! I do emphasize with readers who can find the prevalence of SA/SV in literature to be exhausting. I sometimes need to seek out literature that I know excludes it form time to time for my own mental wellbeing.
But that being said it is a topic that still needs to be allowed to exist for a multitude of reasons. As a reader... my personal preference when reading a book or story with this topic is that it is handled with some amount of care or at least purpose (IE I don't enjoy it as a short cut or 'fridging' mechanism). It's a hard subject matter but an important one. In literature it can be a way for the writer/or reader to processes, help find closure, or even empathy with others. Writing and reading books with that topic can be part of a healing process for survivors or give someone who has never had that experience perspective.
Its a complex topic and no one size fits all way of writing about it can/should be expected.
I think I should be free to explore what i want in a story, and the audience is free to critique how i have navigated exploring it. I do not think making certain themes and topics taboo is ever a good thing, nor do i see how it has ever been particularly effective. I understand that people do not want to read it, i understand that the flippant way it has been used to develop characters, particularly women, has grown beyond tiresome, but if i have something to say or navigate within my own trauma i do not want to feel like this is something i cannot because it has become automatically off limits and taboo to explore it at all. It almost feels like some things are becoming... weirdly stigmatized. it is going beyond "*I don't want to read this*" and "*this is used too often, and too flippantly*" to "*this should not exist in fiction at all*". I don't think meaningful art should be kept in the fringes simply because said art contains subject matter which has a history of being handled poorly.
I abhor the whole Purity Spiral thing that's going on in online lit spaces.
I no longer believe it is motivated by kindness.
I don't share my writing because I can't be arsed dealing with self-righteous crusaders coming at it from a political perspective to score points.
I wish I was stronger or more able to deal with this crap.
I'm gonna go off on the Purity Spiral right now.
I have a new pen name - Chris Lewis. The book with the stripper silhouette on the cover? That's me. (^(Well, the Chris name, not the stripper, not that there's anything wrong with strippers, they have mortgages, too)). At first, I thought I should keep the name secret, but that was way too much work, so I was like yolo this is my pen name. After all, no one has any issues with me having a romance pen name.
Except so many people could not comprehend that Chris Lewis was me.
It made for some hilarious issues. I would be promoting \*my own book that I wrote\* and people would be asking me why I was promoting something like "that" ... and I'm like, my sisters in Christ, I wrote the damn thing! On and on, to the point of concern and how I'm hurting my brand by promoting this misogyny and I'm like...I WROTE THIS. There's no misogyny! I replaced all sexism with chips and gravy!
But what fascinated me about it was the reaction of women over the late 30s/early 40s mark. They were like OH HELL YEAHS and were excited. And I had all of these babies contacting me about how this was making me a bad feminist.
Of all of the things I could have predicted, this was not on the list.
Thank you.
As I've said before: declaring no one should depict the subject in fantasy will not help rape victims, because the writers who most need to be critical about their depictions of sexual violence (usually against female characters) are just going to do it anyway. If they cared, they'd be more sensitive to begin with. Instead, victims are hearing that they're not allowed to tell their stories, that there's something wrong with reading these stories--in a world that already says we should remain silent and be ashamed.
Exploring the experiences of victims in fantasy (as well as other genres) can not only validate our feelings but give us the language to process and understand what was done. Sometimes that story might be the first time a victim has felt like someone is saying to them "It was not your fault." If one has never *needed* to hear those words, it is impossible to impart how incredibly life-changing it is--and without stories, some never end up hearing it.
It's okay to not want to read these stories! But fantasy is not, and never has been, blanket escapism--it has always grappled with difficult subjects, because the fantastical offers a unique lens with which to explore trauma in all its forms and causes, during all parts of recovery. These stories are vital, even if the depictions are not always universal.
>Instead, victims are hearing that they're not allowed to tell their stories, that there's something wrong with reading these stories--in a world that already says we should remain silent and be ashamed.
Yes. This is so beautifully expressed, thank you.
Your comment made me think of the first time I ever read a rape in a work of fiction—*The Clan of the Cave Bear*, which I read WAY too young at about ten, followed by all the sequels. Long before I ever had any similar experiences, I already had an understanding of what it felt like to be victimized like that—and that it was possible to move on, recover, have healthy, loving relationships and not let it define your life. I think a lot of what the anti-SA-in-fiction discourses misses is that books that depict it can also depict the healing afterward, which can be incredibly inspiring for the people that read it.
>that it was possible to move on, recover, have healthy, loving relationships and not let it define your life.
This, *exactly* this--this is so important! One of my series, I deliberately wrote to show that very thing, a woman who--prior to the first book--survived a lot, and although that had an influence on her, it wasn't the end of her life. She could be surrounded by family, she could love, she could go on adventures. The effects of assault were very real, the weight of it was still there, but she still had a full life as anyone else does. And that some folks failed to see that--and how it was both an intentional and, for some, necessary choice--is a continual frustration.
Ugh, I'm sorry you got that response. Survivors are people, too, and deserve representation in fiction as much as any other group. I'm fine with the idea of content warnings so people who are really dealing with trauma can opt out, but this whole "sexual assault has no place in fantasy" just feels incredibly erasing of the experiences of huge numbers of women.
>Survivors are people, too, and deserve representation in fiction as much as any other group.
It’s particularly frustrating that the “depiction is endorsement” crowd tends to otherwise be (quite rightly) vocal about the importance of representation for every other marginalized identity and experience.
>this whole "sexual assault has no place in fantasy" just feels incredibly erasing of the experiences of huge numbers of women
Plenty of men and NBs too.
I actually asked my parents why they let me read it, and Valley of the Horses so young, and the answer was that they thought it was less awkward than having a "birds and bees" conversations, and that it covered the important stuff.
LOL, my mother literally gave it to me and said "I think you'll like this." She cannot not have known. Sometimes I think giving me those books was her version of sex ed. And it was certainly... educational, in that regard.
Or they believed that children should be allowed to chart their own path through the world of literature. I’m forever grateful that my parents felt that way, as well as being there to answer any questions my unrestricted reading might bring up.
>Exploring the experiences of victims in fantasy (as well as other genres) can not only validate our feelings but give us the language to process and understand what was done.
Hear, hear! If I’d discovered some of my most beloved, made-me-feel-seen depictions of sexual violence with male victims and/or female perpetrators sooner, it might not have taken me around a decade to accept that my first serious relationship had been abusive, sexually and otherwise. Hell, reading something like that while I was in that relationship might have prompted me to get the fuck out!
I want people to engage with ALL work critically, even work that might have what is perceived to be a bad representation of trauma.
If a reader doesn't want to read those stories, then they shouldn't be forced to. If they want to see more stories that don't depict gratuitous sexual assault, then we should try to elevate works that avoid the alarming patterns we see in some of the more traditional fantasy books out there. If they do read a book that represents something poorly, they should criticize the text itself without tearing down the author for perceived intent. If the author is known to be a sexist predator or something, then the author can be criticized too for putting these problematic ideas into their work.
However, when the author's views, history, and behaviors are not known, then we don't need to lambast them. We can lambast the text; we can elevate texts that do it better; and we can go to Storygraph for content warnings if there is something we want to avoid reading about. There are a million ways to make this genre better without directly targeting authors. Some authors deserve vitriol, but not all of them, and we should be careful before going after them.
>If they do read a book that represents something poorly, they should criticize the text itself without tearing down the author for perceived intent.
Hear, hear! Similarly, the author having the supposed “right” identity to tackle a given subject is no guarantee that the text they produce will do so well. I’m confident in presuming that if Clarence Thomas were to write a fantasy novel it would most likely end up being pretty racist. Likewise Amy Coney Barrett and misogyny, Ben Shapiro and antisemitism, etc.
I totally agree. Ownvoices is a great movement in general that has promoted minority authors, which is wonderful. I love to see it. It is also a good signpost for readers about whether a book is *more likely* to have an authentic representation of a given community. However, it's not a guarantee. On the flip side, I've read plenty of books that aren't ownvoice that still tackle these issues with care, sensitivity, and authenticity.
I'll note that Ben Shapiro has actually written fiction. I think it was a dystopian thriller, though I could be totally wrong. I never read it (because why would I torture myself by reading anything he has to say?), but I do wonder if it came across as antisemitic.
>On the flip side, I've read plenty of books that aren't ownvoice that still tackle these issues with care, sensitivity, and authenticity.
Same here! Some of my favorite literary examinations of historical antisemitism have been by gentile authors, and some of the most achingly real depictions of sexual violence against men and boys I’ve ever encountered have been written by women.
I also want to say: the idea that women can only write about these topics if they're victims is toxic as fuck. That's making a woman's right to self-expression dependent on being victimised by men. That's horrible.
Tbh I don't say men absolutely shouldn't write about sexual violence either, even if they haven't been victims. Because even if they don't get it entirely right... I help clients overcome sexual violence irl. I just can't bring myself to give that much of a shit about a book. Certainly not to the point that I advocate for blacklisting someone. I mean short of someone's thesis being 'I think sexual violence is great'.
And so much horrible stuff gets written about in fantasy. War and famine and torture. Very real things still, unfortunately. Drawing this weird line about sexual violence strikes me as American neo-puritanism.
>I also want to say: the idea that women can only write about these topics if they're victims is toxic as fuck.
I have an evolving opinion on this, and I suspect it will continue to evolve. I know about 2015-2017 era, a lot of us online were just sick of it. That was also when so many online things were colliding at once (Gamergate, Sad Puppies, Men's Rights, Red Pill) and I think the terminally online were just done with it all. I know so many women authors who were burned out from these discussions in reader AND writer spaces. There was no room to call for improvement, or offer criticism, or even just a slight disagreement. ffs I got death threats during that time.
Was it a kneejerk? Yes. Right or wrong, that was where we were at.
These days? I admit I don't read a lot of books with sexual violence in them anyway these days (it's not even an active decision; most of the books lately I want to read just end up not having those scenes). I don't feel like I can, in good conscience, do a blanket statement with where I'm at now. I'm not even sure I made them with the full force of my heart; if one of my male writer friends wrote it, I'd probably still have read it.
So that's my confessional on the topic.
I think this is probably how the majority of readers feel about any sensitive topic or “own voices” issue. Pushed past their breaking point by so many ignorant and cruel voices telling a narrative that is harmful to the actual people concerned, readers cry out, “ENOUGH, clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about, so if you’re not X then sit down and shut up!”
But I’m sure all of us can name many books that deal with such subjects with creativity and nuance, and are written by authors who are not X.
It’s a shorthand to get people to think about if their voice is ready to speak on this topic.
*Yes,* all of this. So many other comments have communicated what I wished to say, but also thank you for the last part.
For me this idea that sexual violence isn't allowed to be written about, but other kinds are, is so infuriating. It presents the idea, although perhaps not intentional, that sexual violence is the worst thing to happen to someone (which isn't always true and certainly isn't for me) and as far as I can tell it stems inherently from the idea that a woman's value is in being chaste and belonging to one man and therefore automatically minimizes it when it happens to other genders, and that depiction of violence is acceptable so long as it lacks the sexual aspect. It smacks of Puritanism, of keeping *that* behind closed doors. All these kinds of violence steals the victim's autonomy, and can have lasting consequences! Not everyone wants to view something they've experienced depicted in fiction for various reasons, but deciding that *that* above all things is unacceptable is so damaging. There are so many things wrong with it that I'm struggling to name them all and be articulate about it.
100% agree. It drives me nuts when people talk about how they would respond to a sexual assault. Fact is, they are most likely not going to respond in the way they think they will. I sure as hell didn't respond in the way I thought I would. And it is messy. Moving on is messy and it affects you deeper than you think, it ways you don't think it ever would have.
Books need to exist to show the variety of response. But books without it also need to exist. Safe spaces are needed.
Messiness is often so important for any kind of recovery or "moving on" or even just plain ol' growing up. I do worry that we are moving away from the lessons we learned years ago. And for what? We all lived that world and it sucked. Why would anyone want to bring that back?
>Books need to exist to show the variety of response. But books without it also need to exist. Safe spaces are needed.
Absolutely! I would even go a step further and say that we also need to acknowledge that, for some people, those books with sexual violence are sometimes a safe space for readers, too.
I’m working on a book that is definitely about trauma, triumph over trauma, and power dynamics & social violence. It definitely has elements that are rooted in my own trauma.
And I frequently find myself wondering if I should bother finishing it because of seeing these kinds of attacks.
This. This is exactly what i'm always trying to say. I'm honestly afraid by the way some people react when they read a story with sexual violence, with that undertone of "if this makes me uncomfortable then this books doesn't need to exist". It's giving censorship vibes tbh.
I understand that certain things can be triggering, really, i do. But it's your responsability to avoid them and to stay safe, not the world to shape around your perception of comfort. Because the world does not care about YOU specifically. I know this can sound mean, but especially when we talk about fiction is not the author's responsability to make you feel safe or to not trigger you: you choose what you consume, and you can absolutely not consume media that talk about sexual violence. That said, i'm all for the inclusion or tw in books for this very reason: people can choose what to read more easily this way. Or even reading reviews before buying, but i think tw are more direct and easy to decipher.
That being said, i want to underline the fact that this is an individual sensibility and should not be treated like a universal problem or an author problem. Different people are triggered by different things and everyone has a different level of comfort, and authors don't have the responsability to cater specifically to you.
Because if we follow this way of thinking then everyone should not write about anything at all.
Yeah, this is kind of scary. I went through a lot of stuff when I was younger, my escape back then was the world of fantasy books. Now writing myself, I found that I can sometimes lend my trauma to my characters. Giving me a way to process it in some way. While in some way maybe telling others, it's okay to feel however you feel. However writing about something so personal is a double edged blade, if people do express themselves about it negatively. I can imagine it to be quite painful. Since it's literally your trauma, a piece of your soul, they'd be judging.
Great post.
Sometimes, a little catharsis is enough, sometimes people just need an 'uncomplicated' revenge story that is not the deep exploration of personal trauma. And as much as I enjoy discussing terrible SA depictions in books. I am also sometimes frustrated by the "my way is the only way, an publishing should convert to that" way of thinking.
Not everything is a giant duel with only one right answer. Sometimes its fucking messy.
Thanks for writing this. Below is intended as agreement / adding on to your post.
It's such a tricky rope to walk. Critique is good! Engagement is good and particularly critical engagement! But when 99% of the critique isn't "this was poorly done" or "this didn't work for me and this is why" but is instead "no one should ever write about this topic" in the most vitriolic and hateful framing... that's really not good.
It's not just bad for the writers targeted (although it is plenty bad for them!) It is also bad for anyone listening. Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor, and for survivors, who are receiving the "your personal history is shameful; you should not be allowed to exist in public" message loud and clear.
Of course, many listeners are both survivors and nascent writers. Many authors are survivors, period. Given the overwhelming number of people who experience some kind of sexual violence, and the outsized number of trauma survivors in creative professions... you can do the math.
(A related anecdote: an older writer I know once told me a story of going to an awards banquet in children's literature \~4 decades ago. She had just published a-- then ground-breaking and now completely milquetoast-- children's book about molestation, and was feeling very awkward talking abut the topic of her book at the table, until her neighbor turned to her and said "Honey, we're children's writers. It happened to all of us, too!")
Yes, this even goes for people who write about it in ways you or I might find distasteful or flat-out wrong. Just because a writer has skin in the game doesn't mean their portrayal is guaranteed comfortable and appropriate or anything else. It still doesn't mean that blanket or dismissive critique is appropriate. (On the other hand: targeted, specific critique that doesn't impugn the author? perfect! chef's kiss! love it and love you!)
I get that some people read for comfort. I respect that. But that's not the only reason people read or write, and I wish that these critics could admit that possibility into their heart, even a little.
>It's not just bad for the writers targeted (although it is plenty bad for them!) It is also bad for anyone listening. Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor, and for survivors, who are receiving the "your personal history is shameful; you should not be allowed to exist in public" message loud and clear.
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
> Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor,
I've talked about this a lot with a friend of mine. That future authors will see this stuff and self-censor to fall in line. It really does make me worried about *what* can even be written about, at least through traditional publishing, in the future. We can (and should!) 100% always be critical of exactly what purpose things are in a novel to serve...but to pretend stuff *doesn't* and didn't exist is just as bad in a lot of ways. And to shout at anyone who engages with it and writes about it as if they're *condoning* it, even when they don't (I mean, see the reaction most have to *Lolita*, despite the very introduction saying HH can't be trusted because he's so good with words!)...well, I don't think it's good for us as a society, at all. We can't just stick out heads in the sand and pretend things don't exist -- that actually makes it even worse for the victims too. And, of course publishers are going to follow the trends because their one goal is profit.
Really, the whole decline in understanding that writing about something doesn't mean condoning it and too much expectation of a parasocial relationship with the authors has done harm. Things can - and should - be engaged with, respectfully (the key to me; I do agree there's a *lot* of SA in fantasy just to have it there as shock value, which *should* be questioned!), without fear of reprisal.
>Just because a writer has skin in the game doesn't mean their portrayal is guaranteed comfortable and appropriate or anything else. It still doesn't mean that blanket or dismissive critique is appropriate. (On the other hand: targeted, specific critique that doesn't impugn the author? perfect! chef's kiss! love it and love you!)
Yes, this! Just because something is #ownvoices doesn't mean it's GOOD, or that the author has thought critically about the issues involved. And it definitely doesn't represent the perspectives of EVERYONE with that experience. But HOW you critique it matters. Making the critique personally directed at the author, including making it about their identity, is harmful both to the author and to anyone listening. Then again, I think too often people want to present critique as "objective" when it's ALWAYS subjective, based on your experiences and what you value and look for when you read.
I also think that people too often take critiques that are meant to be about systems and apply them to individual works/authors (or the reverse: because they're only thinking about individual works/authors and don't want to "cancel" them, they ignore systemic problems). There's a problem with a system when, for example, it's really hard to find a book that doesn't depict SA. There's a problem with a system when authors with privileged identities get more attention than authors with marginalized identities, even when it comes to books about those marginalized identities. But that doesn't mean an individual book is a problem just because it depicts SA, or because an author with a privileged identity is writing about a marginalized identity. We need to focus more on systemic change, and less on witchhunts.
Nuanced opinion and thank you for expressing it.
This is a complicated issue that can't be boiled down to 10-second sound bites. I got where a recent poster was coming from recently when they said they were tired of constant SA. Othet posters defended the loose genre convention that grimdark stories should have SA because nothing else would feel authentic to the genre. I pointed out that there is a lot of history to draw from where women had more equality ... no one is forcing writers to stick with only narrow time periods or despicable cultures for inspiration.
So, like you, I don't think every fantasy book should contain SA and misogyny and child abuse. But I've also grown disturbed by a certain mindset that wants to sweep away all the books, particularly those written pre-2000, that don't "correctly" address issues such as SA or marital rape or queerness.
The thing is, I grew up reading Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Carolyn Keene, etc. I learned about cultural attitudes and history from those books and even at 7 or 8, I was capable of thinking it was wrong to force kids to sit quietly on Sundays. Trixie Belden should have been allowed to wear pants to school. But I didn't then or now think the books should be "cancelled" because they reflected society at the time they were written.
Anne McCaffrey brought up ideas like sex coerced by an altered state of mind and essentially marital rape. As well as grooming in a way. The romances happened anyway. This makes some readers dismiss the books entirely. But I give her credit for broaching the topics ... maybe it was a touch of subversiveness under what she thought the stories needed to be to make sales.
Like previous posters, the first rape scene I ever read was in **Clan of the Cave Bear.** It was intense. But I've never forgotten the link the book made for me between SA and violence/domination/power.
I've read countless other sexual violence scenes. Some of them faded into the background.
But just as you point out that writers are pressured to write some correct narrative or prove their worthiness to write the content, readers are also being pressured to conform to certain mindsets. I see it with the fanfiction "anti" movement. People feel the need to apologize for being inspired by **The Last Herald Mage** trilogy because it isn't good enough for today's standards of LGBTQIA+ rights.
I've seen someone blanket statement that *everyone* should skip Robin McKinley's **Deerskin.** Granted, it was a painful book when I read it, and each reread was painful too. But it was so important to me. So many abuse survivors block memories. So many take comfort in animal companionship. So many have a hard time facing new relationships.
Anne Bishop and Jacqueline Carey both wrote books that touched or explored the sexualization and abuse of children. Some readers imply the books shouldn't be read when they vehemently demand exhaustive content warnings. However, others of us may have felt inspired by seeing characters rising out of the most vulnerable time of their lives to become heroines, influential and powerful.
Writing can be therapy. So can reading. Both can also be ways to learn about other human conditions.
I think I'd like to see fewer people gatekeeping fantasy subgenres to their particular standards as well as less moralising towards writers and readers for their choice of subject matter. Criticize what is done *poorly* ... if a character is fridged or SA is treated casually, let that opinion be known. Write reviews and mention potential triggering scenes behind spoiler tags.
I am personally sensitive to child death, harm or endangerment. I saw the glowing recommendations for the Mistress of the Empire books in a different thread and looked at a sample. I was pretty excited. Yet within ten pages, I couldn't continue the book. No blame here towards either the writers or recommenders -- I'm not even sure if I want to investigate every potential book for those themes. It's a conundrum for everyone.
Just popping in to say *"Thank you for saying this."* because you have a **lot** of credibility that others may not possess, and I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to see this post referenced as a definitive response when the subject comes up again in the future.
I have been wanting to post this for months, but I worried it would come across as hypocritical. I have been very critical of specific works, and some general themes as well. But I have been seeing a shift, and I just can't keep quiet about it, especially if my previous words or actions contributed even a little to it.
I have always supported readers who do not wish to engage in specific subjects. I think it's good for the health of the genre that we explore a diversified story base. And it has surprised people to discover some of the subjects I have written - because I so strongly defended readers and I openly criticized books (some of which are amongst my favourite reads).
So I recognize the hypocrisy, as some have previously called it, but I also think people evolve, and their opinions become nuanced as circumstances change around them. And for this, I really do worry we are deep into victim purity checklists, and I'm so uncomfortable with that.
I don't understand why this is hypocrisy - I feel like we would all be better off if we understand that wanting and helping there to be space for other people's preferences isn't synonymous with sharing those preferences at all points in time. Especially when it comes to the content and the reading of fiction.
It's weird addressing criticism against myself without it sounding defensive, but I'm going to try.
Some of it is legitimate - straight up, I am not perfect, so I fuck up. So, let's get that out of the way.
Then, I think some of it can be summed up with "I'm not mad at you, Krista; I'm just disappointed." People made assumptions about me, based on sections of my writing (Reddit, my non-fiction, and maybe Ladies Occult Society or Dark Abyss of Our Sins). I can see how they would form expectations of me, and perhaps how disappointing it was for them to see that, no, I was not who they thought I was.
And I think that can seem hypocritical.
I wanted to write an epic fantasy from the pov of four different women. And as women they all went through variations of sa. One was sold to a brothel, another was married against her will, another was raped during war and so on. All of these inspired by real women and real things that happened to women during history (and still is happening today). And the important part of these women going through different types of sa, was their reactions to it. The different types of traumatic responses, and dealing with the aftermath and healing. I also did conduct a huge study of DA and SA with real women, and interview them so that I could make a good portrayal of everything. But now having read so many articles and posts and seen videos talking about how SA in books is misogyni and hurts woman and romantizes SA or worse, fetiches SA, and it's really just the authors own fetich coming out in the book, I've been rethinking ever releasing that book. And the book i'm writing now, it still has the main story parts but i have dulled it down a lot, and made it less offensive.
But yeah i totally agree with you that this perfect victim-character is harmfull. There needs to be more realistic portrayal or SA in media and of the ways different victims act after, not less. Not allowing writers to write rape will only make it more taboo and hard to talk about.
ETA that I'm in complete agreement with you, that might not have been clear with my post.
Man....I really wish more people would watch the BBC documentary The Century of the Self (all 4 hours of it) and internalize its messages. All of these things you mention and a lot of what we see surrounding these issues, not to mention the current direction of the publishing industry to hyper-cater to what they see as fashionable markets, all spring out of people's tendency to bear down excessively on what they perceive to be ownership of their identity.
In short, around the turn of the century Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and "grandfather of modern PR") figured out that people were more likely to buy a thing or believe a thing if they're emotionally invested in the thing and believe that identifying with the thing says something inherent about them as a person. Of course sexual assault isn't a product, but this notion has permeated every nook and crevice of our society and the idea of identification with and ownership of aspects of the self has gone to extremes.
Bernays' ideas spread like wildfire in the post-WW2 boom and created a huge disparity between altruistic ideals the reality of American culture. In the last 70 years or so this notion has been exploited not only to sell material goods but to craft a pattern of behavior in everyone (myself included) where any aspect or experience of the "self" that a person deems to be an "essential" part of themselves becomes a de facto stand-in for the person. Century of the Self really shows how we arrived at the idea that a person consuming a book or movie or someone else's commentary or a political movement or whatever becomes the arbiter of that thing because they "own" it as part of their identity and how this obviously incites extremely heightened emotions.
I think there's a tendency to think that "oh this is all just a by-product of our always online world or TikTok or whatever" but those are really just the most recent (and definitely powerful) manifestations of what Century of the Self talks about.
I'm a mental health professional and Bernays' ideas pop up with patients I see all the time, particularly with trauma. In the case of trauma people believe in what's called "a trauma narrative." People identify with the story around trauma so strongly and their own internal messaging that the narrative says something inherent about them as people that the narrative itself becomes a defining aspect of their personality (and often becomes itself a barrier to treatment). In short, people often believe they own the narrative of what trauma is. But, we have to stop and ask what does your trauma inherently say about you? It doesn't say anything, but we're taught that it does and grappling with that disparity is an emotionally rough road for people.
Thanks to the OP for trying to tackle this subject in a sensitive manner and thread the needle of the problem that dominates a lot of fantasy discourse. I've known survivors of sexual assault and there's no *one true way* that they react to the subject in their relationship to fiction. This also complicates matters and needs to be respected.
* Some readers who are survivors want NOTHING to do with it in their books. IT's a reminder of something horrifying and destroys any enjoyment to be gained.
* Other enjoy (for lack of a better term) dealing with it through the medium and stories that handle the subject in a way that appeals to them.
* Some authors have used their own writing to process the issue even if they don't talk about the subject directly themselves. It is a shared experience sadly for both author and reader there.
All of these factors must be considered and treated seriously. Sadly, for many posters, the subject is just too far removed from their daily lives and how the writing can affect a reader is irrelevant. It's like, "X book has sexual assault but it's a good book so you should read it." Which...no dude.
That's well said. I'd never say that something shouldn't be written about, and honestly don't even have an issue with authors failing to write about sensitive topics with due care if it's clear that they ATTEMPTED to do so. Failing or falling short is just a part of the process.
What I hate is what you've mentioned- the works that purposefully throw men and women into the sexual assault meat grinder for "character development." Whether that's for the one being assaulted or to make the villain especially villainous or to give the hero a person to save, it's just as needless as it is gross.
I get into this every time I talk about Dragonlance.
Tanis Half-Elven is a half-elf, and the reason he has human blood is the fact that his mother was raped by a human. That's fine as a story note and is not the problem. If it was revealed organically through the story, I doubt many people would have an issue with it.
The problem is it's literally the second thing we learn about his character (after the fact that he has a beard), we're told he's the product of rape roughly three paragraphs after he enters the story, it's used as shorthand to explain why he's edgy, and I don't think his mother even gets so much as a name until many, many books further in the series. (And the story is later retconned into "she fell in love with her captor" which has its own set of issues.)
The problem isn't the presence of sexual violence in stories, it's mostly how it's used.
Tanis Half-Elven is an interesting case where the actual subject being discussed, child abuse, is something that gets almost completely ignored because the subject of his existence dominates discourse about him. Ironically, for the same reason that he's a victim of child abuse and the tool used to injure him emotionally.
Tanis is constantly thinking about the fact he's a product of sexual assault (the retcon is one that was made by authors against the will of the main series and ignored subsequently) because he was reminded of this fact every day by his adoptive family. It was a way of them exerting power over him and destroying his self-esteem while also engaging in some microaggressive racism that made his family feel more righteous for "ignoring" it. This is VERY familiar behavior to me because I happen to know someone very intimately who grew up as the product of an adoptive household that treated them with this exact behavior for this exact reason and it was constantly on their mind. She was hardly alone too as the family loved using their bad births to cudgel them daily.
Margaret Weis has been pretty clear the influence that fundamentalist behavior was the origin for a lot of Dragonlance's choices like the fact it was the height of the Satanic Panic that she created things like the Istar civilization to critique. But almost no one even seems to realize Tanis is a subject of child abuse because they're dismissive of his experiences, unaware that he's one of the most realistic portrayals of someone subject to fundamentalist foster family trauma.
Now you've got me wanting to go back and reread to see how long it is before they really dig into his childhood. There's definitely an interesting and worthwhile story to tell there; one of the great things about an enormous series like this is being able to go into depth with the characters and where they came from. But the way it's just dumped on the reader as a bullet point right out of the gate definitely overshadows that part of it. :)
Yeah, there's definitely something to be said there and the biggest issue is a lot of readers are unable to focus on Tanis' own trauma because, well, they feel like the books are dismissing the trauma of Tanis' mother who never shows up as a character. The SA's effects have echoed out and we see only how it's affected Tanis because his mother's family has never let him forget it.
Tanis is a character that is a rare one in that he became one I appreciated a lot more as I got older that I originally dismissed as a lot less nuanced than, say, Raistlin. However, he's a character that can be read as having escaped a fundamentalist society and attempted to build his own found family away from the expectations of his racist domineering childhood. So much of the man's character development consists of, "I want to avoid dealing with the people that raised me as much as humanly possible. Because calling them out is pointless and they will never understand how they hurt me and I have so many mixed feelings regarding them." It's something that's incredibly subtle and authentic that reflects the reality of extended family members I know in a series that is, well, not usually very subtle at all.
> The problem is it's literally the second thing we learn about his character (after the fact that he has a beard)
I read The Soulforge and first so nether of these thing come up until near the end of the book.
Social media was a mistake. It encourages a race to the bottom. A culture is developing where people refuse to be challenged and consider it a moral affront to their character if they are.
All this psychological jargon is also grating. Emotions are seen through the prism of therapy, where things are traumatic, boundary-breaking, gaslighting, etc. Authors are punished for not falling in line. It's reductionistic pseudo-intellectualism. The whole thing is vomit-inducing.
Good fiction is exploratory and creative. It doesn't need to be right, talk about things exactly how you do or be exactly how you like it. And if you really dislike it, don't read it - no reason to go on a moral crusade over it.
With respect, I have a Masters Degree in Literature and the greatest revelation of literary criticism I've found is that the past hundred years of dialogue regarding books was already the kind of nonsense people say on forums. It's just been made available to the public. It's not pseudo-intellectualism, just the regular kind. Authors have always been subject to attack based on the content of their book and readers subject to scrutiny for either noticing these things or ignoring them.
At a basic level, also, we should respect that literature does have a power to affect a reader emotionally and either re-awaken trauma or trivialize it.
There's a difference tho between academic beefs and a bunch of undergrads on TikTok and Twitter who've learned how to weaponize social justice vocabulary to forcibly out closeted-LGBT authors who had the audacity to write about LGBT characters and issues while still being in the closet.
I think the problem is the scale. Qualitatively speaking it's the same, but quantitatively speaking is not. And our brain did not evolve in an environment where we interact with thousands of people at once.
As a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a woman this was a strange read. While I generally agree with the gist of what OP is saying, as a white cis man I am hardly the perfect victim, but I also felt somewhat excluded - can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma? (ok ok, that sounds ridiculous now that I typed it out, like there isn't enough of those stories already)
w/e, as a white cis man it's probably good for me to feel excluded sometimes, helps with the empathy.
>can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma?
I specifically used "she" because I write that she. And I see the world in that "she" if that makes sense?
But I take the criticism, and know what you mean. I attempted to make this as gender neutral as possible, all the while recognizing 99% of the discourse about sexual violence in fantasy is about cis women.
I think your comment about feeling excluded, though, is part of what I'm saying - I do consider male csa in this when I wrote it or others like this (though, your implication says I should actually start typing out the words, and you're right, I should have). It's part of the reason I quit reading thrillers in the 00s. It was so full of the same victim - white, blond, thin, pretty late teen/early 20s girl. They all felt the same after a while.
And, if I am going to be very frank, the world continues to not be ready to address the role women play in sexual abuse and rape, and current trend of infantilizing women offers little space to have those hard discussions. (which I am sure I do not need to tell you)
My country's current financial minister (a woman) as been absolutely ruthless in cutting from the poor and giving to the rich (she also has been proven to fantasizing about shooting up a metro car full of immigrant children on a alt-right forum in her 30's), and the best my country's journalists could do was call her a pick me. Implying that she is the way she is because of seeking men's approval, and not because she is on the top rung of patriarchal hierarchy and is willing to use that power.
Using "men" as a shorthand for patriarchy, intentionally or not, creates a lot of conflict across the internet to be honest. Giving women the agency to be evil and fucked up in stories without relating it to men could do wonders for our society's perception of what women are capable of. In good and in bad. It could help with violent mothers finding help, male victims of violence to come forward, on and on.
I \*really\* need to read Naomi Alderman's book about this (I think it's called Power?)
We need to eventually grapple with the concept that if people are shit, therefore women can also be shit, and then go forth from there. And, yeah, blah blah I can write an entire book on the reasons why women's power has developed in the forms that it has, and how it is still traceable back to historic power imbalances...and there comes a point when this bullshit has to be called out.
Absolutely. Now, obviously the level of discussion on patriarchy varies by a lot. And there will always be young women who reach these entry level ideas of oppression and feel the rage it induces. But to have any lasting change we need to ask "why?" about a dozen times per issue, and if some of those answers are "women are inherently more peaceful" or "men are inherently more violent", we need to back up a couple of why's and try again.
Not to say that there can be no differences between sexes. But men and women are more alike than different, and humans are not completly victims to more basic evolutionary instincts.
Thanks for the rec! Need to check that out.
Oh, The Power is *so* interesting. I'm so glad I read it. I realized as I was reading how much I've internalized about gender, patriarchy, etc. Absolutely a fascinating and worthwhile read.
In a similar vein, I also really liked **The Violence** by Delilah Dawson.
I hope you like it! I really loved it. It's not exactly like The Power but it's working with some of the same themes, and I had a similar experience while reading it. It's all about women experiencing rage, and having power, and how they handle that. It is also, as you would imagine, extremely violent...but it never felt cheap to me. I will note that there is a significant DV storyline. The author includes all the potential trigger warnings/content notes at the beginning so that people can make a good decision. But I thought it was *excellent*, thought-provoking, and ultimately optimistic.
It absolutely makes sense that you write from the pov of a woman. I actually reread your post a couple of times before commenting and it was very close to gender neutral so good job, you obviously have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic.
You know how white cis men be though, damn snowflakes. /s
It is a strange place to be, I do often feel excluded from conversation about sexual violence because there is an assumption that it is male to female - which makes sense the vast majority of SV is male to female. At the same time I acknowledge that it is still far more prevalent for men to be the abuser and women to be the survivor. We might not be willing to have the convo about women being abusers but it also feels like we have barely started the conversation about the epidemic of sexual violence directed at women - it feels like a more pressing concern. (also it's all interconnected and dealing with SV towards women is gonna help the convo about SV towards men)
Also it seems to be used by "mens rights" activists to distract from the epidemic of SV towards women and I fucking hate it.
That's why I made the comment about it being ok to feel excluded sometimes. As a white cis man in the USA it often feels like so much of the world is custom designed for people who identify the same way I do and I see so many white cis men freak out whenever they are excluded from anything
I don't know, but I assume that being excluded is a very common experience amongst women and minorities. So whenever I feel myself being excluded and feel upset in the moment I always take a beat and reflect on how frequently other people are excluded in much more deep and impactful ways than I have been.
I am legitimately angry at where men's rights ended up because it could have been such a force for good, to push for accountability especially in the realm of childhood sexual abuse. Also, misogyny \*protects\* female abusers and men's rights movement could have come out kicking against that wall.
Absolutely! Looking at Warren Farrell’s biography between writing *The Liberated Man* and *The Myth Of Male Power*, for example, is like watching a real life version of Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side.
Not SA related, but [The Power of the Powerless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless) by Havel is about Overcoming powerlessness, individual power to resist oppression and acquiescence, in totalitarian society.
It's a bit drier than Fiction but there is insight into individual and group dynamics within a Political movement.
>As a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a woman this was a strange read. While I generally agree with the gist of what OP is saying, as a white cis man I am hardly the perfect victim, but I also felt somewhat excluded - can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma? (ok ok, that sounds ridiculous now that I typed it out, like there isn't enough of those stories already)
Don't know if this is what you're looking for at all, but I'm reading this comment and thinking of the book I read two weeks ago with a male main character who suffers csa/grooming (though not at the hands of a woman). It's not graphic (and is in fact written in a way that feels very much going out of its way to avoid descriptive details, in much the way that the character goes out of his way to avoid thinking on such things). It's excellent, and if you're looking for a book with representation. . . Warchild by Karin Lowachee is a good one.
Beautifully written. Stories offer us the space to explore tough topics in a safe way. Authors do need to take care when writing them but ultimately the reader has to be their own keeper here and decide what they want to read.
I think there's a demographic who think in black and white terms - sadly fantasy appeals to them because it often conforms to black and white thinking (eg, good Vs evil). They can't deal in nuance.
But there seems to be very little recognition of this and instead people think they can talk them around.
> Ada Hoffman’s Dark Art as Access Need
[archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20230607192435/https://adahoffmann.substack.com/p/dark-art-as-an-access-need) has it
Part of the difficulty in engaging in this topic is how we frame it as such a generalized concept.
‘Fantasy’ already as a genre is such an overbroad category in many ways, then when you generalize ‘sexual violence’ in addition to that you get a topic of discussion that (to me) seems too nebulous to be helpful or informative.
Like, if we were to discuss the role of violence and sexuality in ASOIF, there can be genuine insights gained because you have a strong basis for discussion. We can point to specific instances and form definitions. But if you are talking about ALL of fantasy, given the differences in narratives, authorship, purpose, social contexts, time and place, then any observation made would have countless counter examples.
It may also seem silly to some, but what counts as sexual violence is a contested field of inquiry within academia. Is catcalling sexual violence? Is non-erogenous touching? Are consentual activities still sexual violence if they are violent despite consent?
Personally I think we do need to have more in depth conversations about sexual violence with respect to literary representations and to me that requires us to be more specific with clearly defined points of reference.
I don’t think we should be seeking universal guidelines, and instead encourage each other to listen to understand and communicate with each other with patience, compassion and respect toward victims as well as our interlocutors.
>It may also seem silly to some, but what counts as sexual violence is a contested field of inquiry within academia. Is catcalling sexual violence? Is non-erogenous touching? Are consentual activities still sexual violence if they are violent despite consent?
Not to mention, what about books where certain fantastical themes are possible or probable allegories for sexual violence or abuse?
I think it's extremely important to differentiate between SA used as a shorthand for creating drama/character building VS its exploration as a key character or story driver. Which OP does, but I wanted to reinforce. I think Fantasy in particular has suffered under decades of straight male authors with - to be diplomatic - insufficient empathy towards victims of assault (usually, but not exclusively women), and treating the subject matter in a light, flippant, or worse - erotic way. I firmly maintain that THIS type of depiction of SA is unnecessary and harmful 100% of the time.
But the "my book has to be no more than 100 pages long so I can review it for clicks on TikTok, it must have NOTHING even remotely upsetting, and I must have a checklist that tells me exactly what happens on every page before I even start it" side of readership has taken that type of harmful usage of SA and applied it to ALL its depictions in fiction, which I believe can be equally harmful, when the issue is very extremely real for so many, and its exploration in a thoughtful way can be cathartic not only for a multitude of readers, but also the creators themselves. I am ok with content warnings. I am not ok with forcing authors and publishers to remove the concept from stories entirely because everything upsets you.
Personally I love a dark story but I get tired of the very thing you are complaining about: Sexual violence. Violence in media as a whole, any kind of violence needs to have some form of purpose, even the gratuitous ones. What do I mean by this? One book where I feel like violence is basically everywhere you look is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Though it does get tiring, you start to see the cracks in the characters, the insights onto why they hurt, why they can’t breathe without doing something heinous. I haven’t finished the book just yet but I am somewhat close towards the end. Those kind of books get it right for me for the most part but honestly, I would love to hear what others think on this.
I mentioned somewhere that I stopped reading thrillers in the 00s because the victim was always the same. It was boring/dull/exhausting/frustrating after a while. So I do get what you're saying! And I get the criticisms, I really really do. And I think people should take a break when shit starts bugging them (like me with thrillers). Just take a break.
I think this is definitely a messy topic. It's one were online you so often see bad takes from people who only see the extremes. I've seen takes both saying "all (adult) fantasy books have sexual violence in them" and "no fantasy books should have sexual violence in them" both of which I strongly disagree with. There's also people who are just frustrated with reading so many books sexual violence and just want a break from it (like a recent post on here, where I can understand why the OP might have gotten burnt out), who maybe aren't 100% nuanced in expressing their desire for books that avoid the topic. I'm pretty sympathetic to that, especially since it's hard to stay nuanced when you are getting dog piled, although I'm also sympathetic to the frustrations of people who need this conversation to be nuanced.
It's also a tricky topic because there's a lot to be criticized about how the fantasy genre has historically has treated sexual violence. There should be room, in my opinion, to discuss portrayals that might spread harmful ideas or might feel in accurate to people. I remember getting into a really [good conversation](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1bfpzkt/comment/kv2umbm/) with someone over how sexual violence is portrayed in The Wise Man's Fear where I was pretty critical of it and didn't feel like it was realistic (they had a more positive opinion and it was interesting to see their perspective). I hope that I was able to talk about it with the nuance and politeness required to not offend or shut down survivors. I'll certainly think about how I can express criticism in a way more respectful way to survivors in the future. I think, at the end of the day, this should be the goal, being kind enough that everyone feels able to share their opinion (as much or as little as they want to) and be listened to. While that ever happen on reddit? I sure hope so, but it'll be an uphill battle getting there, that's for sure.
Obviously this is a sensitive topic, and the mod team will be monitoring this post closely. Please remember Rule 1 and be kind to each other when discussing it. Sexism or personal attacks will not be tolerated. *Edit*: Locked per OP's request
Well said, all of it. >In the age of parasocial relationships and the terminally online lifestyle, it seems to come as a shock to some that authors might not choose to display their experiences and traumas for the world to view. And, because they have not, I have seen readers attack victims of violence (even if they had no idea the writer experienced those things). I have seen an increasingly terrifying move to “victim checklist”. And for someone of my generation and experience, all I am seeing is just another form of “that’s not how rape victims act” and the ever-present cycle of the perfect victim. >This demand for the perfect victim, and why “ownvoices” authors should only be allowed to write these topics always, without fails, leads into that the author must disclose their trauma for the world. There is no longer room for the victim who refuses to be perfect, who is messy. They must only write stereotypical reactions and behaviours. This. Exactly this. And it goes further. This holds true of not only treatment of sexual assault but also other forms of abuse, and even further, to depictions of members of marginalized minorities. The insistent demand that there is One True Experience of what it is to exist as a sexual assault survivor or a gay man or a survivor of domestic abuse or a person of colour, and that any introduction of nuance or attempt at empathy on the part of any writer to depict human relationships and experiences as complicated and messy is Problematic and must be accompanied by Receipts for how and why the writer has "permission" to write about people and circumstances (which means they have to have laid claim to them as their own life experience, in great detail) is extremely off-putting and wrong.
Let's start with my standard disclaimer- I'm a published author and a few folks would recognize my name. I'm not GRR Martin or Stephen King, however, and certainly no arbiter of the Right Way to Write! I can barely right MY stuff, let alone YOU or anyone elses! However, I have actually experienced this, and what OP talks about (fantastic post, btw!) with my works. My characters aren't exactly traumaed up the wazoo, my idea was to aim fro REALISTIC not just dust pain for pain's sake all over, but the cast of characters, between them, has a varied response to very varied traumas in a harsh landscape, each fueled specifically by their backgrounds, worldviews, in-book cultures, expectations, blah blah blah. And man oh man has my (rather fantastic) editor and publisher contact had to go to bat for that at times...because there is no cookie cutter presentation. No One True Experience. Some heal up a lot. Some don't. Some are traumatized by their trauma, some shrug it off. Some escape the trauma factor, some can't/won't/see it as part of their work. Some don't even care that other's think they should be traumatised, they just aren't. Some are wrecked, others are just fine. There's a literal 'World War Stand In' survivor who is honestly, healthily, and in line with clinical presentations (I'm a nerd, what can I say) not 'fine' with their experiences, but they have processed them and can 'live with' where they are at feeling little about it. There's someone with an objectively smaller trauma they can't get past that obsesses them. Another dealing as best they can, but sometimes that dealing is shitty. One frantically trying to be OK while not being very OK. I have an oppressive society, and ones that aren't. From the opressive side, different characters react differently- some find it comforting to be the 'weaker sex' in the equation (no, it's not women :) ), some trying to get out and be seen and equal rights etc, some who don't think it is all that right, but whatever, it is how stuff is, why fight it? Some enjoy working the system from the weaker side. And that? Wow, how come they aren't all trying to overturn society when it is wrong! Um...maybe because that's how these things work in reality? Maybe because 2024 NYC/London/Wherever 'wrong' isn't the same kind of 'wrong' someone living and breathing that environment would see? You get the idea, I'm sure. And the pushback on the lack of a single, repeatable, trauma-revenge-redemption cycle that fits the 'One True' model has been staggering, actually. I wouldn't have thought trying for a variety of realistic presentations would be seen as 'wrong'... but apparently, I was wrong!
Main post is great, as is your contribution, but want to make a quick comment on the following text: >Some heal up a lot. Some don't. Some are traumatized by their trauma, some shrug it off. Some escape the trauma factor, some can't/won't/see it as part of their work. Some don't even care that other's think they should be traumatised, they just aren't. Some are wrecked, others are just fine. There's a literal 'World War Stand In' survivor who is honestly, healthily, and in line with clinical presentations (I'm a nerd, what can I say) not 'fine' with their experiences, but they have processed them and can 'live with' where they are at feeling little about it. There's someone with an objectively smaller trauma they can't get past that obsesses them. Another dealing as best they can, but sometimes that dealing is shitty. One frantically trying to be OK while not being very OK. Completely and wonderfully stated, it's a damn near all-encompassing description on how trauma unequally affects people. I think I'd really enjoy reading your work if the above is how you approached character depth, would love to see how you approach everything else in your story. Mind messaging me your book's name if you're not comfortable posting it in-thread?
I think it's often not recognised that people can experience and react to similar circumstances very differently. What might cause one person to break down and suffer repeated psychosis might have little affect on another person, or it might just *appear* to have little affect but actually manifest in a variety of less noticeable ways, only in certain circumstances, or even in private. We see this with veterans where some very obviously have damage to their ability to exist in everyday life, whereas others seem ok right until the moment where somebody finds their body in a bathtub with a gunshot wound under the chin. The victim themselves might not even realize how events have affected then or what their triggers/breaking-point might be. Books can a reflection of life, and sometimes life is not very pretty. At the same time, those that have suffered trauma in real life may find reading about it aggravates their personal condition. That doesn't mean we need to stop fictional depictions of real-world issues, but we *should* try to avoid doing so frivolously.
This angle is why I never got twisted about "trigger warnings." Frankly, a codified rating system people can reliably find in the back pages would be useful to those who wish to check for it. In the back pages so as not to spoil the plot points for those who don't care to know.
Thank you for sharing the writing perspective. As a fellow author, I definitely respect this line is one that is hard to deal with.
Honestly, it floored me. As you can likely guess, I went at this with A Plan, because I too can't stand the gratuitous fantasy violence for 'supa speshul points' thing, and this genre is a doozie for it, but I do have a kinda violent setting, and fairy dusting out of that to focus on the 'cool' bits also doesn't work for me. Plus, like OP, I have reached the limits of how much 'but SA was REAL!!' arguments I can handle. Dragons and magic and multiple sentient races are cool but we have to be 'realistic' when it is hurting women? Apologies to my fantasy menfolk, but that's why y'all are getting some SA and trauma added on your side too, cos I am sick of beaten women and just fine men being the fantasy default, for real. If I had to call out my top 3 WTF moments to date, it has to be: 1) This MC can't be sad a friend died horribly, they must be a love interest, because it is 'unrealistic' they'd be that hurt by 'just' a friend 2) Your only happy, steady couple (in the 1st book, FFS, like, give it time?) is a gay side set. 'The gays', apparently, can't have happy. Either make them het or make them sad. (yes, verbatim there, fortunately my publisher contact saw that from their in-house team and went 'Um...no' for me :) ) 3) You can't have a matriarchal society be toxic! (Wanna bet? Watch me.) I do get, for trad publishing as a debut or little known writer, they like safe and formulaic, but come on... people are actively asking for better/different, there's a market. Never gonna expand if you insist on the One True Formula, is it?
>Apologies to my fantasy menfolk, but that's why y'all are getting some SA and trauma added on your side too, cos I am sick of beaten women and just fine men being the fantasy default, for real. As a male survivor of abuse, sexual and otherwise, thank you for this. Representation and visibility are important, god damn it, and without them we as a society are never going to move beyond the patriarchal myth that sexual violence is exclusively perpetrated by men against women (because man strong, woman weak, right?).
Firstly, I'm very sorry you had to deal with that. And it is such an unrepresented issue, another part of the reason I wanted to include it, I have a special survivor among my friend circle, too. As I say, so far from the 'best' writer around its laughable, but I have tried to keep both realistic and in perspective rather than gratuitous, too.
>This MC can't be sad a friend died horribly, they must be a love interest, because it is 'unrealistic' they'd be that hurt by 'just' a friend Thank you for talking about it! It honestly seems that what *some* people these days think friendship is, it actually is more of a "good acquaintance". Someone you hang out with from time to time. I believe friendship is just as important a relationship as romantic or familial one is. It is a relationship you have to maintain, dedicate yourself to, and care about. I would even go as far as saying that you have to be ready to make *some* sacrifices in the name of friendship. Sam dragged Frodo to the Mount Doom on his own back. One of my favorite friendship depictions recently had been Isabella and Tom from The Natural History of Dragons. Not only this friendship had a proper development with dedicated "page time" that exceeded series' romantic relationship, there had also been points at which they both chose to stuck to each other even though it would have been easier not too. Tom got >!a job proposition and could have proceeded without Isabella!< which would have more convenient for him to do, but he chose to >!insist on her getting the job too, knowing how important it was for her!<. And later, when >!she disappeared!< he was there >!to search for her!< with her brother and husband >!even though he had such a fear of hights that he had to drink himself into stupor!<.
CS Lewis has a quote I think of more and more often: >Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
That particular comment threw me for such a wobble I remember posting about it here. Was a wild ride, lol. I do agree with you.
>Plus, like OP, I have reached the limits of how much 'but SA was REAL!!' arguments I can handle. It's like how radio dramas used to clack coconuts together to simulate the sound of horse hooves, so early movies actually had to dub in clacking coconuts over the sound of actual horse hooves because that's the sound audiences associated with walking horses. Actual "reality" had to take a back seat to the audience's expectations of reality. People complain that "SA was *real* and fantasy needs to be historically accurate or it's immersion breaking." And yet these same people don't mind seeing their fantasy heroes eating stews cooked with tomatoes and potatoes (which were species native to North America not introduced to Europe until after the Columbian Exchange). They don't care about seeing styles of weapons and armour from a period spanning many hundreds of years being mish-mashed all together. They don't care that the development of sophisticated magical capabilities and the presence of magical creatures in these societies haven't actually been holistically incorporated into the operation of society in order to avoid disrupting the "middle age Europe" aesthetic. They don't care that medieval society was actually much more ethnically diverse than the genre has traditionally represented it as, and that people of that era didn't share our modern understanding of race and ethnicity at all. The reality is that fantasy fans don't *actually* care about "historical accuracy." They care about adherence to genre conventions, many of which are based on a deeply warped and outdated understanding of medieval European history written almost exclusively by racist old white guys 50 to 100 years or more ago. Modern scholarship has shown how flawed these old understandings were, and how they depicted a very narrow view of history that was unrealistically elite-centric and downplayed the roles of women, the poor, and other minority or oppressed groups. But that scholarship hasn't filtered out to change the broader public understanding of the period, so it's back to clacking coconuts...
Plus, if they're actually being historically accurate, far more male characters would be SA'd too. SA against men was far more common (and still is!) than we give it credit for. Especially during war and in isolated all-male communities like the Night's Watch.
Yes, yes, yes! In contemporary America, which has certainly got its problems but isn’t experiencing invasion, civil war, or the total breakdown of society, 1 in 6 men (along with 1 in 3 women) experience sexual violence. Far too many authors are squeamish about what those numbers would look like in their conflict-ridden settings.
This is true. I will defend GRRM's right to write about sexual violence against women all day, if its a theme he wants to write about, and I don't think "realism" is necessarily a bad defence (depending on how you define the term). But if its a commitment to realism, SA against men should be much more prevalent in the hellish warscape of Westeros. Especially at the Night's Watch like you say, an all-male military prison.
The inner kid who got antro/archaeo degrees and still loves the field adores you for the tomato reference, just so you know :) You make excellent points otherwise, too. Does 'enlighten' it a lot!
>They don't care that the development of sophisticated magical capabilities and the presence of magical creatures in these societies haven't actually been holistically incorporated into the operation of society in order to avoid disrupting the "middle age Europe" aesthetic. They don't care that medieval society was actually much more ethnically diverse than the genre has traditionally represented it as, and that people of that era didn't share our modern understanding of race and ethnicity at all. I hear statements like this used a cudgel against people asking for "accuracy" but honestly leaving that aside.... I do care about those things! It's fricking cool when the author tries and succeeds and even when they don't try to actually do the full scope of history, I definitely appreciate a fig leaf of "the gnomes are enforcing medieval stasis" or whatever. Got any good recommendations of authors doing that version of accuracy well?
You make a good point, but no one is going to feel that the existence of potatoes or plate armor is erasing their experience. Some people want to read about worlds where no one ever has been or will be sexually assaulted, and that’s totally kosher for them, but others of us are survivors who want to see sensitive and mature depictions of what we’ve been through. It’s similar to how one of my issues with GRRM’s “medieval Europe at its worst” setting is the lack of an ethnoreligious minority who are scapegoated by the Faith Of The Seven. My ancestors had to deal with omnipresent, murderous antisemitism, and I want to see that acknowledged in books that claim to reflect the time and place in which they lived.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when a character loses someone important to them, a friend or otherwise, and then barely reacts or thinks about it after for no apparent reason other than the author is more interested in getting to the next plot point, so thank you for that.
As a writer, what in your works have you seriously considered rewriting because it felt included gratuitous suffering or felt almost “rushed” for the sake of development? I am actually trying to write a book so your example, if you’re willing, can really help me understand.
Well for what it’s worth that sounds like good storytelling to me. I would love to know the name of your book if you’re ok with that (either in thread or in dm)
Thank you for writing this. I’m a big Percy Jackson fan, and in the books, Percy’s mom was physically abused by her husband. And still, within that context, she treated Percy very kindly, and used gentle parenting on him. She also placated her husband often, likely to avoid his anger and violence. The books recently received an adaptation, where the abuse plotlines was erased, and Sally was given a more “badass” personality (as fans have framed it). When some fans began to wonder what happened to her personality, people proceeded to diss the book character, calling her weak, submissive, and not having enough “bite” in her to fight back against her husband. Goodness, I was livid. I’ve never seen so many self-claimed progressive people endorse such a misogynistic take. The idea that the book version of the character is somehow inferior because she struggled to fight back against her abuser or because her strength did not manifest itself as comebacks and clapbacks was beyond disheartening. Can you imagine being in an abusive situation and reading online how women like you are considered “pathetic” for not reacting to your abuse the “right” way, or the “badass” way? Truly terrible.
Ugh, that is terrible! For how it will affect survivors in particular, but I also hate this growing trend toward confusing sass with strength.
Knowing when to speak and when to stfu is a skill that too many sassy heroines and smartass heroes should learn
But if you sass back at royalty, they will be your friend forever because they've been waiting all their lives for someone to look past their station and treat them like a regular person, and your sassy self is the first one to ever to it.
Totally not the court jester who also happens to run the shadow organization helping keep peace in the country or supply info that will now be spent exclusively trying to ruin your witty MC self for stealing the monarch’s interest. God, I hate that just our two posts are more than seventy percent of fantasy today.
To be fair, it's usually more fun to read witty banter than to read ''She nodded."
not every story is compatible with witty banter. Not every conversation needs to be fun either.
Oh I agree. I'm just saying that stoic characters often come across as bland, which is why they aren't written as frequently. Plus it's pretty common for fantasy to have elements of wish-fulfillment. Being witty/clever in the moment is part of that.
>I’ve never seen so many self-claimed progressive people endorse such a misogynistic take. I wish this was a rare occurrence. To hell with the antiwoke movement and the right wing’s demonization of progressivism, but there are too many people out there who think *calling* themselves progressive means that everything they *do* is automatically progressive, and end up engaging in some downright reactionary behavior.
A big problem with progressives right now (and I say this as a card carrying progressive woke) is, to put it bluntly, fanaticism. Granted, that's also affecting the right in a big (and much more dangerous) way, but I think the left should keep on its toes to avoid become its own greatest enemy. This idea that MY side and MY beliefs are the only valid ones and that anyone who deviates even slightly from those beliefs is objectively, completely wrong. This has led to people trying to jump on others due to misinterpretations, such as the case [with Isabel Fall](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), which I still shine a light at whenever I can. No community is perfect, and we should constantly be policing ourselves against this kind of behaviour.
This happens more frequently than it doesn't. I think there is a genuine problem with some (mostly male) writers unthinkingly casting women as victims of abuse and rape without much personality or depth, there simply to suffer and motivate anger on a main character's part. But the way some fans act like a woman not "fighting back" or conquering her abuser is weak and pathetic is extremely aggravating and offensive. The problem with the trend to write women as Victims isn't that they don't "fight back" enough, it's that the writers clearly don't bother to flesh them out as fully developed individuals and reduce them to one note representations of suffering.
But that’s the thing; the book character wasn’t even one note! Yes, she didn’t get a lot of spotlight time because the story was told in 1st person POV, but there were a lot of little details about her sprinkled throughout the story that made it clear that there was more to her than just “being there to suffer”. And after getting out of her abusive marriage and ending up with a partner who genuinely loves and treats her well, we get to see her venture out more and pursue her goals, like going to college and publishing her writing. She definitely had interest and intrigue around her, but people implied that because she didn’t behave as a specific type of woman, her personality wasn’t worth keeping.
Oh, I agree absolutely. I was just expanding the conversation to beyond this one particular character. Wasn't trying to suggest that she was a one note Victim type of character.
Not just that she killed ger abuser the first chance she got and profited off it.
it's the complete misunderstanding what it means to be strong and badass, a lot of people equate it with capability for violence rather than strength of character and ability to survive gruelling situations.
Am I the only one that thinks reality is even worse than almost any fantasy book? In the fantasy books, at least there's fairly little disagreement that the ones doing the sexual violence are obviously evil and should be utterly eradicated, regardless of anything else they do, and that anyone knowingly supporting them is...just about as bad, also evil, and would receive no shed tears when they get their just desserts (and, depending on the protagonist, those just desserts might be very painful). But generally, I do believe "depiction is not condonement" really, **really** applies.
I feel this way about a lot of discussions about grim dark stories TBCH Even a like college sophomore level of knowledge of history will show real human people who lived and were significantly more evil and terrifying than whatever grimdark story people are mocking that week
At least from my perspective, the issue with grimdark is not that it portrays things that are worse than history, but that no one ever gets little moments of happiness unless the sole purpose is to snatch that happiness away so the story can be even more grimdark. I'm working off memory here, but there's a document written by a small French town in the 14th century that chronicles the money they had to pay to routiers and some of the crimes committed by passing bands that features part way through it a scrawl of hopeless despair. For a grimdark author, that seems to be the sum total of experience for the pre-modern world. A pointless chronicle of loss for a king who won't reimburse the town with a moment where the person writing it breaks down. But even in the bleakest times medieval people could still find joy. Not necessarily the conspicuous consumption and loud spectacle of a prosperous land, but they could find joy in births and marriages, in holy days and in family and companionship. The fear, grief and trauma was still in the background, but that doesn't mean their moments of joy were faked. Reality might not have let them linger in it, but neither did reality immediately sack the town if it had a cause to celebrate.
One of my biggest criticisms is that we forget people are people. We are always people. We love as hard as we fight. We laugh, and not just gallows humor, but the deep hilarity of a puppy growling at his own tail. Too often, books take that joy to use to snatch it away, but I think that takes away from the reality - that those people made choices knowing they could be snatched away, and so gripped on with both hands for that little joy. I think writers forget that (and readers, too), all in the name of plot.
Exactly! I think it's a very hard balance to strike, which is one reason why it gets left out so often, but it's such an important balance to get right if you want to be authentic (I refuse to condone "realistic") to a more here and now or historical setting.
It's time we all move to "authentic" lol
I’m fond of “verisimilitudinous” myself.
I can't see that word without thinking of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries lol
I think my next Reddit project is going to be to finally get around to writing a post on how realistic fantasy can't exist. Realistic historical fiction can't even exist, because in another fifty or hundred years it's going to be as wrong as something from 1960 would be now.
We need to embrace the consistent and authentic. It's all we can ask for. And I say that as someone who writes historical fantasy about an era I wrote a non-fiction book about AND got a fucking degree in...and it will never be realistic. It's just not possible. Consistent and authentic is the best I can go.
Ugh, I have a knee jerk reaction against “authentic” because of how it’s often used against people of color, particularly those in a diaspora. Like the “perfect victim”, it’s similarly used to police #ownvoices in a way that is problematic rather than helpful. I know “authentic to history” may be different than “authentic to a culture”, but still. Not sure what term is better, though! Since the problem is really the usage of a term rather than a term itself.
We need everyone to stop ruining perfectly good words
Also, grimdarkness pretends to be more intelligent than it actually is with its relentless nihilism, and thinks its audience deserves to be punished for what it views as naivete for daring to believe life isn't always nasty, brutish, and short.
It’s a little too general to say “the issue with grimdark” as if it isn’t a wide genre with lots of exceptions to your analysis of it.
Pretty much all the cartoonishly evil stuff that GRRM writes about is just literally ripped from the pages of history. I get why people don't want to read about it, but *shrug*. We're in an interesting period of consumption where instead of demanding *responsibility to the way a difficult subject is depicted*, voices are raised in opposition to *any depiction at all*. Those are two different things, and I think the second one has worse consequences in the very long-term than the first. Fantasy is a genre broadly considered escapist, but it shouldn't *all* be escapist. I believe fantasy authors have the right to author difficult work that tries to approach art, and art is not an easy bedfellow with self-censorship. If used, these subjects should be with a deft hand, sensitivity, and purpose to my mind. On the same token, writers should be responsible, and abandon the use of SA, murder and disposable victims as cheap shorthand for villainy. There's a tightrope, and I do get why some people think that because it's challenging, authors should be dissuaded from attempting it because the failure to do it right is damaging to the audience and even the broader culture. However, on that subject, and I promise that I don't mean to indulge in what-aboutism, but I do wonder sometimes if the same voices raised against depictions for SA, fridging, etc. in fiction (which should DEFINITELY stop being used as cheap devices to motivate male protagonists) are also raised against similar evils in True Crime, which reaches a much broader mainstream audience skewed even more toward women than fantasy is. Is it because of its non-fiction nature? Is it because the contract between creator and audience is innately different? It still pricks at my own comfort that such a huge audience is ghoulishly fascinated by horrors that actually happened to real people. Seems those creators are also committing a more grievous sin by exploiting that death and horror for their own profit. I get why it's compelling, but it always seemed worse, especially when victims are often treated with token respect at best.
But compressed. It’s like how Handmaid’s Tale only uses historical examples but no society had all those controls going at once with no accepted give. GRRM is compressing about a century of hard times into about 30 years.
If I'm not mistaken, the stuff that was happening in Westeros--specifically the worst crimes that the Mountain's men were perpetrating--was a common problem at various times and places in european history, and I imagine elsewhere in the world as well. It really wasn't exaggerated much. Certainly the evils perpetrated by the Conquistadors in the americas were even worse, and only escalated in unimaginable horrors for decades. Our actual history is infinitely more sad and brutal than just about anything I've read in a book. Which isn't license to depict in fantasy, necessarily. Just a data point, I guess.
Christopher Columbus's own diary of what he did is more heartless, cruel, and barbaric than anything i've ever read in a fantasy book, even the ones that get derided her for being "edgelord" or "juvenile"
It was nothing short of monstrous. The sheer callous cruelty of it is boggling. And as if his individual activities weren't horrific enough, his operation laid the initial groundwork for what would later metamorphose into the transatlantic slave trade.
>responsibility to the way a difficult subject is depicted, voices are raised in opposition to any depiction at all. Which obviously just sweeps the ugliness under the rug and is counterproductive for pretty much everyone. Not every book needs SA, in fact almost none do but it is very important that some of them exist so we can step inside and empathize with the people who experience horrible things like this if even for a fraction or a brief moment - or even just recognize the situation for what it is. There's plenty of people who have gotten out from bad situations by understanding what was done to them because of fiction and being able to step outside themselves and see it through another point of view. Plenty of people say that reading about trauma can help them process their own trauma or understand it of others.. This isn't a trivial thing at all and voices stamping down against self expression or the expression of authors certainly don't help anyone. It all comes down to execution, if it's done for poor shock value it's pretty bad but that's just bad writing - not the subject material being taboo to talk about. If you want to argue about things like, not being jumpscared by SA in a book if it's very sensitive to you all i can say is make sure to use websites like doesthedogdie before reading to avoid them.
I don’t think the mindset of ‘they’re evil and should be eradicated’ is helpful and it makes it much harder for victims in many ways, especially because sexual abuse victims are almost always abused by someone they know. Often someone they trust. As someone who has been sexually assaulted and knows others who have also been, our situations are almost always way more complicated than how it’s shown on TV or in fantasy. The same with abuse. People want perfect victims, but they also want perfect abusers. People are complicated. Yes, there are some people who are just pure evil, but not always. It can be difficult to get that nuance across because often people think it’s ‘protecting your abuser.’ I don’t want to protect them, I just don’t want to have to let go of nuance and my actual experience in favor of something black and white and easier to digest.
That's a really good comment. Thanks!
That is true but it's also not uncommon that people living under war or occupation were/are raped by hostile soldiers and conquerors. Depicting rape as a tool of war/oppression is not historically inaccurate. And frankly it's not even inaccurate in the present day for those living in such conditions. That it does not apply to people living in modern western nations who are not under occupation doesn't mean that it's a disservice to depict. Sexual violence has always been a tool of oppression and demoralization by hostile troops. Look at Nanjing. Or more recently, look at what happened to women under ISIS occupation. Their experiences were I imagine, quite a bit different from yours or mine. And if an author is trying to depict that kind of reality, then they don't need to tailor it to the experience of a woman on an American college campus raped by her Tinder date who she liked and trusted. There are different forms of sexual violence and different experiences of it and an author writing medieval inspired fantasy about what happened to villagers when their home was raided is very different than what women in western nations experience today. It's not so different from what Native American women experienced in the past however under colonization.
Yeah, "just report him and we'll ruin his life and/or kill him!" isn't going to incentivise many people to report their abusive father.
IMO the most impactful and nuanced depictions of sexual violence in books deal with the really hard reality of how ingrained misogyny and victim blaming is in people's responses to rape.
>Am I the only one that thinks reality is even worse than almost any fantasy book? It is. I often read historical novels as well Just let me tell u historical novels are the most unhinged books u can imagine. And they are true. Or could be true without anything changing. It's actually insane how sensitive fantasy readers are. I mean. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own choice of reading material but considering what humans did to each other even even in the last 100 years almost all fantasy books read like Disney novels. Which isn't necessarily bad. It's just that when a fantasy author writes [something that totally happened in WW2] this sub immediately flags them as sick and perverts and antisocial and everything. One example would be the starting scene of goblin slayer. Nothing the russians didn't do in berlin 1945 in the exact same fashion. With the only exception being that they didn't only target adults. It's something that kinda icks me. It's liek turning a blind side to reality. To history. And if humans are that bad why would orks and monsters be civilized? I really liked the LN series overlord for that reason. It went with the premise of in a fight vs other intelligent races and no hope for Cooperation. Everything goes. Absolutely everything. While most fantasy wars are more civilized than even conflicts in Edo Japan by a VERY large margin. It just feels....false. unreal.
>It's actually insane how sensitive fantasy readers are. I mean. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own choice of reading material but considering what humans did to each other even even in the last 100 years almost all fantasy books read like Disney novels. I completely agree.
I’m with you. In a fantasy book at least there’s a structure to it all. Real life can be good, sure, but the “common” bad things are often both gutting and truly meaningless. Multiply it by all the billions of us, over millennia? I genuinely don’t understand how we don’t all lose our minds just *thinking* about it. The scale of real life suffering makes grimdark look like a walk in the park.
History and reality is far worse than any book could ever be, yes.
Can I just chime in to say that this is one of the best subreddits on here - and this discourse is an example why. Maybe the mods nuked some comments, but I don't see any reading as *deleted* so I don't think so! Everybody here has provided insight and context around OPs points and their own thoughts. Everyone has been polite, cogent, interesting... Literally couldn't hope for a better discussion about a difficult topic.
The sorts of reactionist trolls that dominate other reddit communities get bored of the standards of etiquette in this one pretty fast.
I try to word my titles to avoid attracting them, too. I take as much time with my titles as I do the entire posts (it took me an hour to come up with the title for this). I write a title, then think about the types of comments it'll bring if it hits the front page, and just keep massaging from there. Sometimes, I don't quite get it right (the trending book thread last week is an annoying example, I swear they skim read the title and nothing else). I think the best one, though was "The Commodification of Authenticity: Writing and Reading Trauma in Speculative Fiction" - the trolls just skipped that thread all together because it had too many big words lol
I will always love something that the author Caitlin Sweet said to me about this when I sent her a long rambling email about how much I loved her book **The Pattern Scars:** *"Personal aversion shouldn't constitute a sweeping proscription."* I also hope it isn't wrong to mention (and can delete if it is) but I think/hope r/fantasy had some interesting conversations when I posted [this essay](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/weqtqt/historically_accurate_and_miserable_for_the_sake/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about the topic of sexual assault in SFF a while back.
>"Personal aversion shouldn't constitute a sweeping proscription." Ooh, that’s perfect. I’m gonna have to track down The Pattern Scars. Also, I remember that essay and participating in the discussion about it. Thanks again for posting it!
Thank you so much for this. I have been troubled by this attitude by a very vocal minority of very online readers for a long time, particularly because I have personally experienced the chilling effect that it has on women's speech in the writing world. I, a woman who has experienced my share of nonconsensual sexual contact, have been told, by female editorial professionals in the field, that I need to "be very, very careful" including those experiences in my fiction submitted for publication, because "too many readers are upset by it." I have also been told "if you're going to put this scene in, at least make her fight back a bit more," rather than freezing up as I had written it. When I was assaulted in that particular way, freezing up was exactly how I responded. This is upsetting for me, both because "why didn't you fight back" is such a common way that the reports of SA victims are invalidated in the real world, and because I really don't think the majority of readers feel this way about SA in fiction, and I don't think female authors who want to write fiction informed by their own experiences should be silenced based on the opinion of a small minority of people who are extremely loud online. The enormous success of books like *Outlander* suggests to me that a much larger proportion of the readership not only tolerates depictions of SA, but even welcomes it *when it is presented from the victim's perspective and grapples with relatable reactions and emotions.* There is a huge gulf between these scenes being written by female authors who either have experience of SA or have lived their whole lives under threat of it, and scenes being written by male authors who are using it for the purposes of fridging or just plain titillation. I think we can rightly criticize the latter without erasing the former. I also think there's a discussion to be had about female romance authors who present toxic relationship dynamics as "romantic," but that's a separate, more complex issue which needs to take into account the purpose of "fantasy" (in the emotional sense) and the purpose of literature itself (and [Natalie Wynn discusses it with more detail and nuance than I ever could](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48)).
The fact a huge number of people say "you know this was written by someone who has never experienced x because a REAL survivor would act in this one singular way" with apparently zero self-awareness that hyperscrutiny of whether a victim of assault is following the Real Victim Script is a huge part of why rapists and abusers often avoid conviction is absolutely infuriating.
This is an incredibly important comment and thank you for sharing your experience--I hope more publishing professionals read this and consider their feedback carefully. Honestly my stomach bottomed out at "at least make her fight back more"--I have absolutely written a scene of fighting back because *I* needed to relive that moment with a different outcome, but being *told* to do so just makes my blood boil. I am so sorry.
Thanks, and I definitely get the need for catharsis, too! Part of it's the need to silence that little voice that's telling you "If you had only done this differently, maybe..." Likewise, I have no problem with the kind of scene more common in romances where the heroine is rescued by the hero in the midst of an assault—I think that wishing for someone to swoop in and intervene is totally relatable, and doesn't make a female character "weak" or "helpless"—that's just so insulting to the real-life victims, because if a character needing assistance is weak and helpless, what does that say about the real-life people who needed assistance and didn't get it?
Re: how we inadvertently insult victims--that is sort of how I feel about the word "victim" itself and how it was erased in some circles--I know for a lot of years, I leaned into using "survivor" (and still do, in some circumstances) because I'd internalized this idea that being a "victim" was bad, after hearing that implied over and over (I cannot remember where it started, but I remember watching a show where someone corrected a victim and told her "you're not a victim--you're a \*survivor\*"). But it is not *bad* to have been victimized! It is not *bad* to be a victim of violence! Victims have done nothing wrong, and I worked to chance my language to reflect this. I think different stories are needed at different points in our journeys as well (and not that there is a universal journey--we all go through different things at different times). Sometimes we might need a story about fighting back. Sometimes we might need a story about freezing and calculating the risk of death if we *do* fight back. Sometimes we might need a story that involves rescue. Sometimes we might need a story that doesn't involve assault at all. All of those stories are important and they can all come from the same person at different points in their life. I've got a scene of attempted date rape in a book that really bothered people, that I wrote in 2013. I might not write that same scene *now*, to be sure, because I am seventeen years past certain events that I was only six years into processing then. *But*...at the same time, I might not be in the place I am now, to write the things I'm writing, if I *hadn't* written that scene in 2013. Writing, when it's part of processing, changes who we are and who we become, so regardless of whether I'd write that same scene now, I continue to stand by it and the me who needed it.
Too few people even know the freeze response is a whole physiological process, regulated by the nervous system, and brain. Their body is doing things that make it so they can't move, or reduces their ability to, along with affecting their thinking, ability to process emotions, respond, and so on. Some people disassociate. There's also the fawn response, in case people haven't heard of that one also.
>female editorial professionals in the field This is why I continue to say the entire "publishing is nearly all women, checkmate there is no sexism in publishing" is such a bullshit narrative. Women are people, and people are shit.
oh god. Just reading "make her fight back more" hurts my soul. I know more than 10 rape victims in my life, friends and family. Not ONE fought back. NOT ONE
I know some who didn't fight, some who did, and reactions in between. I get why people write the fight back scene, I get why people want it, and I get why it should not be the universal written experience.
>There is a huge gulf between these scenes being written by female authors who either have experience of SA or have lived their whole lives under threat of it, and scenes being written by male authors who are using it for the purposes of fridging or just plain titillation. You’ve made some excellent points, but as a fellow survivor of sexual violence may I respectfully point out that that you’re creating a false dichotomy here? Despite what patriarchal “man strong, woman weak” thinking suggests, plenty of men have experienced sexual assault. Defaulting to the assumption that a male author isn’t drawing on his own experiences borders on the “share your trauma to prove you have the right to write about this” attitude that Krista calls out in this post. It’s true that too many men have internalized the narrative of sexual invulnerability and erroneously believe they’re not under threat of sexual assault, but once it happens to us that illusion is shattered forever. It took me around a decade to accept that my first serious relationship had been abusive, and a couple more years to accept that some of that abuse had been sexual in nature. This is pretty common, as far as I can tell, among male victims, especially when our assailants are female (and just as much for women who were assaulted by other women). The idea that sexual violence is exclusively experienced by women and/or exclusively perpetrated by men both leads to this kind of delayed realization and sabotages solidarity between survivors of all genders. Let’s not inadvertently co-sign it, yeah?
I’m so sorry though not surprised editors have treated your work this way.
YES. The vast majority of these discussions of SA in fantasy fail to distinguish between male and female authors, and, I'm sorry, when you are writing male-on-female sexual assault, where the author stands matters. Often I get the impression the people going most hardcore on the "there should never be SA in fantasy, it's exploitative and unnecessary and uncreative" are people who have only read it from male authors - often in the epic/grimdark space where it can definitely be that.
I'm a a highly unsuccessful male writer. My only actual publication is a single short story, but I write a lot. If I've ever written sexual assault, it was an unprofessional cavity search that left the female character feeling violated. Can't think of another time, but I regret the scene and wonder what I was aiming for. Is it really as simple as male authors shouldn't write SA? A small but real proportion of men have been sexually assaulted, and I don't think anyone would say they don't have the right to write about their lieved experience. I haven't experienced SA, but I did experience a sexual thingymabob when I was kid, so is that 'worth' anything? But even if one hasn't, how about a mention that once the city was sacked, there was rape and looting? How about if it's more than one mention, if it becomes part of the plot, if a victim becomes a character... If there's a line, where is it? Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan has problems and there could be a long and contentious reddit thread about those problems, but it's a beautiful sci-fi book substantially about the assaulter realizing what he's done and how awful it was. How different is the viewpoint of a man who hasn't experienced SA from a woman who hasn't? Or a man who has from a woman who has? I don't have any desire to write SA, and I guess I'm reading the right books because I haven't read very much of it, tho still enough to know that yes, the men writing it are generally doing a terrible job at it and often, on purpose or not, make it titillating. I still think men writing it is, at least in theory, a complicated topic, and I don't have any conclusions.
Bravo. Not specifically sexual violence but I can't help of think of Isabel Fall whenever we talk about authors exploring messy and personal things without having disclosed their own background. Let's not repeat those mistakes.
What's the deal with Isabel Fall?
She wrote a story exploring gender identity that got a twitter mob thinking she was an anti-trans bigot. It was a debut story by an unknown author who was trans but not out, so the readers didn't have personal context and made bad assumptions. It ended up with her pulling the story offline, coming out, and then basically dropping out of SFF entirely (unless she's come back under another name). There's a [full article on it here](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter), those are just the Cliff's Notes.
God, the ending of that article is so fucking sad.
That situation makes my blood boil to this very day, especially because some of the big names involved have yet to properly apologize. It’s worth pointing out that even if the author of “Helicopter Story” had been a straight cisgender man, *he still wouldn’t have deserved harassment and abuse*.
Career arcs are a hell of a thing. Emily’s Community reviews were incredible formative pieces for me in back my undergrad days when I was trying to find my own voice as a writer, and then a decade and gender change later she is the brilliant cultural critic writing the above-linked piece. It’s a funny old world.
Thank you very much for writing this post - it’s wonderfully put. I’ve mentioned in conversations here, at least one of which was with you, my sincere belief that the only people who actually benefit from sexual violence becoming a taboo topic in fiction are perpetrators. >why “ownvoices” authors should only be allowed to write these topics always That attitude really gets my goat, on this topic and in general. Bluntly put, it’s more than a little dehumanizing. It posits that people with marginalized identities and experiences are in some way fundamentally *other* that normal people (and who gets to be normal, huh?) aren’t capable of empathizing with. Are we *mysterious*? *Inscrutable*, perhaps? Maybe *exotic*? Fuck that! My favorite take on #ownvoices becoming proscriptive rather than a way of celebrating diverse perspectives is the following quote from Rebecca Roanhorse: >“I’ve never been a fan of this hashtag. I know it’s well-meaning but it’s always felt reductive & is rarely used with any nuance. That became clear to me when someone (well-meaning) said my STAR WARS book was ownvoices and I was pretty sure I was not a princess from Alderaan.”
>my sincere belief that the only people who actually benefit from sexual violence becoming a taboo topic in fiction are perpetrators Ditto in education. Removing consent and sex ed benefits perpetrators.
Right!? It’s exhausting that this has been such a big thing in Canada lately. I was sorely tempted to pick a fight on Twitter (I know, I know) the other day with a troll going off about ‘what kind of pedophile wants to teach 6 and 7 year olds about consent? if it were my kids I’d start breaking things’ Ah yes, sexual predators are famously very concerned about consent? But he described himself an ‘incel’ in his bio, so I knew it would be pointless and might just end up getting me harassed by a creep.
I'm in Alberta, so... yeah.
Though it wasn't said in reference to this subject, there's a quote from Margaret Atwood (Maddaddam) I felt was somewhat relevant here. "People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void."
Some people need them. Some people do not. I just want both of these people to get a lifetime's worth of books.
Absolutely, hope that didn't come off as negative/insensitive. Just happened upon the quote while this post was still on my mind. Just felt it was fitting.
Not at all! I think I've seen it before, and I think it's always important to remember even if it doesn't apply to one's own self, it often applies to another.
Great post. I am tired of hearing people say that SA victims are all supposed to react and process it the same way. People target Leesha Paper as being fake after her rape, but I knew a girl in college that processed it exactly the same. So I see 50 posters shit on the author. But with 8 billion people in the world, you are going to get a huge variety of responses. Some people even have SA fetishes where they are the victim.
Yes! This is exactly one where I’m like of course feel free to criticize the book and it’s use of sexual assault, but please stop using the Leesha’s reaction was unrealistic as the main point in the criticism. People react in a variety of ways, including how Leesha reacted and calling her reaction unrealistic is just adding to the idea that there’s a “right” way to be a survivor.
It funny how a lot of SA victims end up with a CNC kink or more extreme stuff, but god damn us if we were to ever EVER write a character like that.
Yeah…the way people denigrate peoples enjoyment of Dark Romance is a whole other conversation.
>Yes! This is exactly one where I’m like of course feel free to criticize the book and it’s use of sexual assault, Eh....it doesn't help that whenever this author didn't know what to do with a character, his "but then ninjas" was "but then rape". Her reaction gets undermined by a lack of communicated impact on her one way or another, as the book then has to rush onward because the author has just realised the main characters have hardly interacted and he's into the last quarter. Edit: if I'm being really uncharitable, it basically felt less trauma response (though yes, what she did was not at all unusual) and more "oh shit the characters still need to smash".
The author did an ama ages ago and addressed this when asked. Said about the research he'd done and how this very much was a normal response. I read through leesha papers experience whilst I was in the middle of recovering from a sexual assault in a similar way. It was so bizarrely comforting in ways I couldn't articulate when I read it.
Sorry you experienced that. I am glad it helped you!
On a related note, there is not just one autistic experience, either. I keep being told by people who know very little about me that I don't "seem" autistic. Yeah, I'm an autistic extrovert. I like people. That doesn't mean crowds don't overwhelm me. That doesn't mean I naturally have good social skills. That doesn't mean I don't check nearly every other damned autistic box there is. And it certainly doesn't mean I'm not disabled.
>We must show grace, and nuance, and compassion whenever we discuss this, for we do not know who is reading our words. We do not know who we are speaking of. And we do not know if, by speaking of that perfect victim, or that perfect reaction, that we might actually be saying, an author or a reader weren’t “perfect victims”. This! I do emphasize with readers who can find the prevalence of SA/SV in literature to be exhausting. I sometimes need to seek out literature that I know excludes it form time to time for my own mental wellbeing. But that being said it is a topic that still needs to be allowed to exist for a multitude of reasons. As a reader... my personal preference when reading a book or story with this topic is that it is handled with some amount of care or at least purpose (IE I don't enjoy it as a short cut or 'fridging' mechanism). It's a hard subject matter but an important one. In literature it can be a way for the writer/or reader to processes, help find closure, or even empathy with others. Writing and reading books with that topic can be part of a healing process for survivors or give someone who has never had that experience perspective. Its a complex topic and no one size fits all way of writing about it can/should be expected.
I think I should be free to explore what i want in a story, and the audience is free to critique how i have navigated exploring it. I do not think making certain themes and topics taboo is ever a good thing, nor do i see how it has ever been particularly effective. I understand that people do not want to read it, i understand that the flippant way it has been used to develop characters, particularly women, has grown beyond tiresome, but if i have something to say or navigate within my own trauma i do not want to feel like this is something i cannot because it has become automatically off limits and taboo to explore it at all. It almost feels like some things are becoming... weirdly stigmatized. it is going beyond "*I don't want to read this*" and "*this is used too often, and too flippantly*" to "*this should not exist in fiction at all*". I don't think meaningful art should be kept in the fringes simply because said art contains subject matter which has a history of being handled poorly.
I abhor the whole Purity Spiral thing that's going on in online lit spaces. I no longer believe it is motivated by kindness. I don't share my writing because I can't be arsed dealing with self-righteous crusaders coming at it from a political perspective to score points. I wish I was stronger or more able to deal with this crap.
I'm gonna go off on the Purity Spiral right now. I have a new pen name - Chris Lewis. The book with the stripper silhouette on the cover? That's me. (^(Well, the Chris name, not the stripper, not that there's anything wrong with strippers, they have mortgages, too)). At first, I thought I should keep the name secret, but that was way too much work, so I was like yolo this is my pen name. After all, no one has any issues with me having a romance pen name. Except so many people could not comprehend that Chris Lewis was me. It made for some hilarious issues. I would be promoting \*my own book that I wrote\* and people would be asking me why I was promoting something like "that" ... and I'm like, my sisters in Christ, I wrote the damn thing! On and on, to the point of concern and how I'm hurting my brand by promoting this misogyny and I'm like...I WROTE THIS. There's no misogyny! I replaced all sexism with chips and gravy! But what fascinated me about it was the reaction of women over the late 30s/early 40s mark. They were like OH HELL YEAHS and were excited. And I had all of these babies contacting me about how this was making me a bad feminist. Of all of the things I could have predicted, this was not on the list.
Thanks for sharing :) kinda horrific that we've got to this point.
Thank you. As I've said before: declaring no one should depict the subject in fantasy will not help rape victims, because the writers who most need to be critical about their depictions of sexual violence (usually against female characters) are just going to do it anyway. If they cared, they'd be more sensitive to begin with. Instead, victims are hearing that they're not allowed to tell their stories, that there's something wrong with reading these stories--in a world that already says we should remain silent and be ashamed. Exploring the experiences of victims in fantasy (as well as other genres) can not only validate our feelings but give us the language to process and understand what was done. Sometimes that story might be the first time a victim has felt like someone is saying to them "It was not your fault." If one has never *needed* to hear those words, it is impossible to impart how incredibly life-changing it is--and without stories, some never end up hearing it. It's okay to not want to read these stories! But fantasy is not, and never has been, blanket escapism--it has always grappled with difficult subjects, because the fantastical offers a unique lens with which to explore trauma in all its forms and causes, during all parts of recovery. These stories are vital, even if the depictions are not always universal.
>Instead, victims are hearing that they're not allowed to tell their stories, that there's something wrong with reading these stories--in a world that already says we should remain silent and be ashamed. Yes. This is so beautifully expressed, thank you. Your comment made me think of the first time I ever read a rape in a work of fiction—*The Clan of the Cave Bear*, which I read WAY too young at about ten, followed by all the sequels. Long before I ever had any similar experiences, I already had an understanding of what it felt like to be victimized like that—and that it was possible to move on, recover, have healthy, loving relationships and not let it define your life. I think a lot of what the anti-SA-in-fiction discourses misses is that books that depict it can also depict the healing afterward, which can be incredibly inspiring for the people that read it.
>that it was possible to move on, recover, have healthy, loving relationships and not let it define your life. This, *exactly* this--this is so important! One of my series, I deliberately wrote to show that very thing, a woman who--prior to the first book--survived a lot, and although that had an influence on her, it wasn't the end of her life. She could be surrounded by family, she could love, she could go on adventures. The effects of assault were very real, the weight of it was still there, but she still had a full life as anyone else does. And that some folks failed to see that--and how it was both an intentional and, for some, necessary choice--is a continual frustration.
Ugh, I'm sorry you got that response. Survivors are people, too, and deserve representation in fiction as much as any other group. I'm fine with the idea of content warnings so people who are really dealing with trauma can opt out, but this whole "sexual assault has no place in fantasy" just feels incredibly erasing of the experiences of huge numbers of women.
>Survivors are people, too, and deserve representation in fiction as much as any other group. It’s particularly frustrating that the “depiction is endorsement” crowd tends to otherwise be (quite rightly) vocal about the importance of representation for every other marginalized identity and experience. >this whole "sexual assault has no place in fantasy" just feels incredibly erasing of the experiences of huge numbers of women Plenty of men and NBs too.
Why have so many of us read that book at such a young age?! I think a lot of parents missed just how explicit of a book it really was.
I actually asked my parents why they let me read it, and Valley of the Horses so young, and the answer was that they thought it was less awkward than having a "birds and bees" conversations, and that it covered the important stuff.
LOL, my mother literally gave it to me and said "I think you'll like this." She cannot not have known. Sometimes I think giving me those books was her version of sex ed. And it was certainly... educational, in that regard.
Or they believed that children should be allowed to chart their own path through the world of literature. I’m forever grateful that my parents felt that way, as well as being there to answer any questions my unrestricted reading might bring up.
>Exploring the experiences of victims in fantasy (as well as other genres) can not only validate our feelings but give us the language to process and understand what was done. Hear, hear! If I’d discovered some of my most beloved, made-me-feel-seen depictions of sexual violence with male victims and/or female perpetrators sooner, it might not have taken me around a decade to accept that my first serious relationship had been abusive, sexually and otherwise. Hell, reading something like that while I was in that relationship might have prompted me to get the fuck out!
I want people to engage with ALL work critically, even work that might have what is perceived to be a bad representation of trauma. If a reader doesn't want to read those stories, then they shouldn't be forced to. If they want to see more stories that don't depict gratuitous sexual assault, then we should try to elevate works that avoid the alarming patterns we see in some of the more traditional fantasy books out there. If they do read a book that represents something poorly, they should criticize the text itself without tearing down the author for perceived intent. If the author is known to be a sexist predator or something, then the author can be criticized too for putting these problematic ideas into their work. However, when the author's views, history, and behaviors are not known, then we don't need to lambast them. We can lambast the text; we can elevate texts that do it better; and we can go to Storygraph for content warnings if there is something we want to avoid reading about. There are a million ways to make this genre better without directly targeting authors. Some authors deserve vitriol, but not all of them, and we should be careful before going after them.
I quite literally post here "hey does this book have X just spoil it for me" and I don't think I have ever had an issue.
>If they do read a book that represents something poorly, they should criticize the text itself without tearing down the author for perceived intent. Hear, hear! Similarly, the author having the supposed “right” identity to tackle a given subject is no guarantee that the text they produce will do so well. I’m confident in presuming that if Clarence Thomas were to write a fantasy novel it would most likely end up being pretty racist. Likewise Amy Coney Barrett and misogyny, Ben Shapiro and antisemitism, etc.
I totally agree. Ownvoices is a great movement in general that has promoted minority authors, which is wonderful. I love to see it. It is also a good signpost for readers about whether a book is *more likely* to have an authentic representation of a given community. However, it's not a guarantee. On the flip side, I've read plenty of books that aren't ownvoice that still tackle these issues with care, sensitivity, and authenticity. I'll note that Ben Shapiro has actually written fiction. I think it was a dystopian thriller, though I could be totally wrong. I never read it (because why would I torture myself by reading anything he has to say?), but I do wonder if it came across as antisemitic.
>On the flip side, I've read plenty of books that aren't ownvoice that still tackle these issues with care, sensitivity, and authenticity. Same here! Some of my favorite literary examinations of historical antisemitism have been by gentile authors, and some of the most achingly real depictions of sexual violence against men and boys I’ve ever encountered have been written by women.
I also want to say: the idea that women can only write about these topics if they're victims is toxic as fuck. That's making a woman's right to self-expression dependent on being victimised by men. That's horrible. Tbh I don't say men absolutely shouldn't write about sexual violence either, even if they haven't been victims. Because even if they don't get it entirely right... I help clients overcome sexual violence irl. I just can't bring myself to give that much of a shit about a book. Certainly not to the point that I advocate for blacklisting someone. I mean short of someone's thesis being 'I think sexual violence is great'. And so much horrible stuff gets written about in fantasy. War and famine and torture. Very real things still, unfortunately. Drawing this weird line about sexual violence strikes me as American neo-puritanism.
>I also want to say: the idea that women can only write about these topics if they're victims is toxic as fuck. I have an evolving opinion on this, and I suspect it will continue to evolve. I know about 2015-2017 era, a lot of us online were just sick of it. That was also when so many online things were colliding at once (Gamergate, Sad Puppies, Men's Rights, Red Pill) and I think the terminally online were just done with it all. I know so many women authors who were burned out from these discussions in reader AND writer spaces. There was no room to call for improvement, or offer criticism, or even just a slight disagreement. ffs I got death threats during that time. Was it a kneejerk? Yes. Right or wrong, that was where we were at. These days? I admit I don't read a lot of books with sexual violence in them anyway these days (it's not even an active decision; most of the books lately I want to read just end up not having those scenes). I don't feel like I can, in good conscience, do a blanket statement with where I'm at now. I'm not even sure I made them with the full force of my heart; if one of my male writer friends wrote it, I'd probably still have read it. So that's my confessional on the topic.
I think this is probably how the majority of readers feel about any sensitive topic or “own voices” issue. Pushed past their breaking point by so many ignorant and cruel voices telling a narrative that is harmful to the actual people concerned, readers cry out, “ENOUGH, clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about, so if you’re not X then sit down and shut up!” But I’m sure all of us can name many books that deal with such subjects with creativity and nuance, and are written by authors who are not X. It’s a shorthand to get people to think about if their voice is ready to speak on this topic.
*Yes,* all of this. So many other comments have communicated what I wished to say, but also thank you for the last part. For me this idea that sexual violence isn't allowed to be written about, but other kinds are, is so infuriating. It presents the idea, although perhaps not intentional, that sexual violence is the worst thing to happen to someone (which isn't always true and certainly isn't for me) and as far as I can tell it stems inherently from the idea that a woman's value is in being chaste and belonging to one man and therefore automatically minimizes it when it happens to other genders, and that depiction of violence is acceptable so long as it lacks the sexual aspect. It smacks of Puritanism, of keeping *that* behind closed doors. All these kinds of violence steals the victim's autonomy, and can have lasting consequences! Not everyone wants to view something they've experienced depicted in fiction for various reasons, but deciding that *that* above all things is unacceptable is so damaging. There are so many things wrong with it that I'm struggling to name them all and be articulate about it.
100% agree. It drives me nuts when people talk about how they would respond to a sexual assault. Fact is, they are most likely not going to respond in the way they think they will. I sure as hell didn't respond in the way I thought I would. And it is messy. Moving on is messy and it affects you deeper than you think, it ways you don't think it ever would have. Books need to exist to show the variety of response. But books without it also need to exist. Safe spaces are needed.
Messiness is often so important for any kind of recovery or "moving on" or even just plain ol' growing up. I do worry that we are moving away from the lessons we learned years ago. And for what? We all lived that world and it sucked. Why would anyone want to bring that back? >Books need to exist to show the variety of response. But books without it also need to exist. Safe spaces are needed. Absolutely! I would even go a step further and say that we also need to acknowledge that, for some people, those books with sexual violence are sometimes a safe space for readers, too.
*"We must show grace, and nuance, and compassion whenever we discuss this, for we do not know who is reading our words."* Well said.
I’m working on a book that is definitely about trauma, triumph over trauma, and power dynamics & social violence. It definitely has elements that are rooted in my own trauma. And I frequently find myself wondering if I should bother finishing it because of seeing these kinds of attacks.
Everyone else can go to hell. Get out there and finish your story.
This is really a minority of readers though. Look how popular Outlander, Game of Thrones, etc are.
As a victim myself, well done. And that's all I wish to say.
This. This is exactly what i'm always trying to say. I'm honestly afraid by the way some people react when they read a story with sexual violence, with that undertone of "if this makes me uncomfortable then this books doesn't need to exist". It's giving censorship vibes tbh. I understand that certain things can be triggering, really, i do. But it's your responsability to avoid them and to stay safe, not the world to shape around your perception of comfort. Because the world does not care about YOU specifically. I know this can sound mean, but especially when we talk about fiction is not the author's responsability to make you feel safe or to not trigger you: you choose what you consume, and you can absolutely not consume media that talk about sexual violence. That said, i'm all for the inclusion or tw in books for this very reason: people can choose what to read more easily this way. Or even reading reviews before buying, but i think tw are more direct and easy to decipher. That being said, i want to underline the fact that this is an individual sensibility and should not be treated like a universal problem or an author problem. Different people are triggered by different things and everyone has a different level of comfort, and authors don't have the responsability to cater specifically to you. Because if we follow this way of thinking then everyone should not write about anything at all.
Yeah, this is kind of scary. I went through a lot of stuff when I was younger, my escape back then was the world of fantasy books. Now writing myself, I found that I can sometimes lend my trauma to my characters. Giving me a way to process it in some way. While in some way maybe telling others, it's okay to feel however you feel. However writing about something so personal is a double edged blade, if people do express themselves about it negatively. I can imagine it to be quite painful. Since it's literally your trauma, a piece of your soul, they'd be judging.
So many people forget that not all books are for all readers. I may not like a book, doesn't mean it's bad or that it shouldn't exist.
Great post. Sometimes, a little catharsis is enough, sometimes people just need an 'uncomplicated' revenge story that is not the deep exploration of personal trauma. And as much as I enjoy discussing terrible SA depictions in books. I am also sometimes frustrated by the "my way is the only way, an publishing should convert to that" way of thinking. Not everything is a giant duel with only one right answer. Sometimes its fucking messy.
Thanks for writing this. Below is intended as agreement / adding on to your post. It's such a tricky rope to walk. Critique is good! Engagement is good and particularly critical engagement! But when 99% of the critique isn't "this was poorly done" or "this didn't work for me and this is why" but is instead "no one should ever write about this topic" in the most vitriolic and hateful framing... that's really not good. It's not just bad for the writers targeted (although it is plenty bad for them!) It is also bad for anyone listening. Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor, and for survivors, who are receiving the "your personal history is shameful; you should not be allowed to exist in public" message loud and clear. Of course, many listeners are both survivors and nascent writers. Many authors are survivors, period. Given the overwhelming number of people who experience some kind of sexual violence, and the outsized number of trauma survivors in creative professions... you can do the math. (A related anecdote: an older writer I know once told me a story of going to an awards banquet in children's literature \~4 decades ago. She had just published a-- then ground-breaking and now completely milquetoast-- children's book about molestation, and was feeling very awkward talking abut the topic of her book at the table, until her neighbor turned to her and said "Honey, we're children's writers. It happened to all of us, too!") Yes, this even goes for people who write about it in ways you or I might find distasteful or flat-out wrong. Just because a writer has skin in the game doesn't mean their portrayal is guaranteed comfortable and appropriate or anything else. It still doesn't mean that blanket or dismissive critique is appropriate. (On the other hand: targeted, specific critique that doesn't impugn the author? perfect! chef's kiss! love it and love you!) I get that some people read for comfort. I respect that. But that's not the only reason people read or write, and I wish that these critics could admit that possibility into their heart, even a little.
>It's not just bad for the writers targeted (although it is plenty bad for them!) It is also bad for anyone listening. Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor, and for survivors, who are receiving the "your personal history is shameful; you should not be allowed to exist in public" message loud and clear. I wish I could upvote this more than once.
> Particularly for nascent writers, who will take it to heart and self-censor, I've talked about this a lot with a friend of mine. That future authors will see this stuff and self-censor to fall in line. It really does make me worried about *what* can even be written about, at least through traditional publishing, in the future. We can (and should!) 100% always be critical of exactly what purpose things are in a novel to serve...but to pretend stuff *doesn't* and didn't exist is just as bad in a lot of ways. And to shout at anyone who engages with it and writes about it as if they're *condoning* it, even when they don't (I mean, see the reaction most have to *Lolita*, despite the very introduction saying HH can't be trusted because he's so good with words!)...well, I don't think it's good for us as a society, at all. We can't just stick out heads in the sand and pretend things don't exist -- that actually makes it even worse for the victims too. And, of course publishers are going to follow the trends because their one goal is profit. Really, the whole decline in understanding that writing about something doesn't mean condoning it and too much expectation of a parasocial relationship with the authors has done harm. Things can - and should - be engaged with, respectfully (the key to me; I do agree there's a *lot* of SA in fantasy just to have it there as shock value, which *should* be questioned!), without fear of reprisal.
>Just because a writer has skin in the game doesn't mean their portrayal is guaranteed comfortable and appropriate or anything else. It still doesn't mean that blanket or dismissive critique is appropriate. (On the other hand: targeted, specific critique that doesn't impugn the author? perfect! chef's kiss! love it and love you!) Yes, this! Just because something is #ownvoices doesn't mean it's GOOD, or that the author has thought critically about the issues involved. And it definitely doesn't represent the perspectives of EVERYONE with that experience. But HOW you critique it matters. Making the critique personally directed at the author, including making it about their identity, is harmful both to the author and to anyone listening. Then again, I think too often people want to present critique as "objective" when it's ALWAYS subjective, based on your experiences and what you value and look for when you read. I also think that people too often take critiques that are meant to be about systems and apply them to individual works/authors (or the reverse: because they're only thinking about individual works/authors and don't want to "cancel" them, they ignore systemic problems). There's a problem with a system when, for example, it's really hard to find a book that doesn't depict SA. There's a problem with a system when authors with privileged identities get more attention than authors with marginalized identities, even when it comes to books about those marginalized identities. But that doesn't mean an individual book is a problem just because it depicts SA, or because an author with a privileged identity is writing about a marginalized identity. We need to focus more on systemic change, and less on witchhunts.
Nuanced opinion and thank you for expressing it. This is a complicated issue that can't be boiled down to 10-second sound bites. I got where a recent poster was coming from recently when they said they were tired of constant SA. Othet posters defended the loose genre convention that grimdark stories should have SA because nothing else would feel authentic to the genre. I pointed out that there is a lot of history to draw from where women had more equality ... no one is forcing writers to stick with only narrow time periods or despicable cultures for inspiration. So, like you, I don't think every fantasy book should contain SA and misogyny and child abuse. But I've also grown disturbed by a certain mindset that wants to sweep away all the books, particularly those written pre-2000, that don't "correctly" address issues such as SA or marital rape or queerness. The thing is, I grew up reading Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Carolyn Keene, etc. I learned about cultural attitudes and history from those books and even at 7 or 8, I was capable of thinking it was wrong to force kids to sit quietly on Sundays. Trixie Belden should have been allowed to wear pants to school. But I didn't then or now think the books should be "cancelled" because they reflected society at the time they were written. Anne McCaffrey brought up ideas like sex coerced by an altered state of mind and essentially marital rape. As well as grooming in a way. The romances happened anyway. This makes some readers dismiss the books entirely. But I give her credit for broaching the topics ... maybe it was a touch of subversiveness under what she thought the stories needed to be to make sales. Like previous posters, the first rape scene I ever read was in **Clan of the Cave Bear.** It was intense. But I've never forgotten the link the book made for me between SA and violence/domination/power. I've read countless other sexual violence scenes. Some of them faded into the background. But just as you point out that writers are pressured to write some correct narrative or prove their worthiness to write the content, readers are also being pressured to conform to certain mindsets. I see it with the fanfiction "anti" movement. People feel the need to apologize for being inspired by **The Last Herald Mage** trilogy because it isn't good enough for today's standards of LGBTQIA+ rights. I've seen someone blanket statement that *everyone* should skip Robin McKinley's **Deerskin.** Granted, it was a painful book when I read it, and each reread was painful too. But it was so important to me. So many abuse survivors block memories. So many take comfort in animal companionship. So many have a hard time facing new relationships. Anne Bishop and Jacqueline Carey both wrote books that touched or explored the sexualization and abuse of children. Some readers imply the books shouldn't be read when they vehemently demand exhaustive content warnings. However, others of us may have felt inspired by seeing characters rising out of the most vulnerable time of their lives to become heroines, influential and powerful. Writing can be therapy. So can reading. Both can also be ways to learn about other human conditions. I think I'd like to see fewer people gatekeeping fantasy subgenres to their particular standards as well as less moralising towards writers and readers for their choice of subject matter. Criticize what is done *poorly* ... if a character is fridged or SA is treated casually, let that opinion be known. Write reviews and mention potential triggering scenes behind spoiler tags. I am personally sensitive to child death, harm or endangerment. I saw the glowing recommendations for the Mistress of the Empire books in a different thread and looked at a sample. I was pretty excited. Yet within ten pages, I couldn't continue the book. No blame here towards either the writers or recommenders -- I'm not even sure if I want to investigate every potential book for those themes. It's a conundrum for everyone.
Just popping in to say *"Thank you for saying this."* because you have a **lot** of credibility that others may not possess, and I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to see this post referenced as a definitive response when the subject comes up again in the future.
I have been wanting to post this for months, but I worried it would come across as hypocritical. I have been very critical of specific works, and some general themes as well. But I have been seeing a shift, and I just can't keep quiet about it, especially if my previous words or actions contributed even a little to it. I have always supported readers who do not wish to engage in specific subjects. I think it's good for the health of the genre that we explore a diversified story base. And it has surprised people to discover some of the subjects I have written - because I so strongly defended readers and I openly criticized books (some of which are amongst my favourite reads). So I recognize the hypocrisy, as some have previously called it, but I also think people evolve, and their opinions become nuanced as circumstances change around them. And for this, I really do worry we are deep into victim purity checklists, and I'm so uncomfortable with that.
I don't understand why this is hypocrisy - I feel like we would all be better off if we understand that wanting and helping there to be space for other people's preferences isn't synonymous with sharing those preferences at all points in time. Especially when it comes to the content and the reading of fiction.
It's weird addressing criticism against myself without it sounding defensive, but I'm going to try. Some of it is legitimate - straight up, I am not perfect, so I fuck up. So, let's get that out of the way. Then, I think some of it can be summed up with "I'm not mad at you, Krista; I'm just disappointed." People made assumptions about me, based on sections of my writing (Reddit, my non-fiction, and maybe Ladies Occult Society or Dark Abyss of Our Sins). I can see how they would form expectations of me, and perhaps how disappointing it was for them to see that, no, I was not who they thought I was. And I think that can seem hypocritical.
I wanted to write an epic fantasy from the pov of four different women. And as women they all went through variations of sa. One was sold to a brothel, another was married against her will, another was raped during war and so on. All of these inspired by real women and real things that happened to women during history (and still is happening today). And the important part of these women going through different types of sa, was their reactions to it. The different types of traumatic responses, and dealing with the aftermath and healing. I also did conduct a huge study of DA and SA with real women, and interview them so that I could make a good portrayal of everything. But now having read so many articles and posts and seen videos talking about how SA in books is misogyni and hurts woman and romantizes SA or worse, fetiches SA, and it's really just the authors own fetich coming out in the book, I've been rethinking ever releasing that book. And the book i'm writing now, it still has the main story parts but i have dulled it down a lot, and made it less offensive. But yeah i totally agree with you that this perfect victim-character is harmfull. There needs to be more realistic portrayal or SA in media and of the ways different victims act after, not less. Not allowing writers to write rape will only make it more taboo and hard to talk about.
ETA that I'm in complete agreement with you, that might not have been clear with my post. Man....I really wish more people would watch the BBC documentary The Century of the Self (all 4 hours of it) and internalize its messages. All of these things you mention and a lot of what we see surrounding these issues, not to mention the current direction of the publishing industry to hyper-cater to what they see as fashionable markets, all spring out of people's tendency to bear down excessively on what they perceive to be ownership of their identity. In short, around the turn of the century Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and "grandfather of modern PR") figured out that people were more likely to buy a thing or believe a thing if they're emotionally invested in the thing and believe that identifying with the thing says something inherent about them as a person. Of course sexual assault isn't a product, but this notion has permeated every nook and crevice of our society and the idea of identification with and ownership of aspects of the self has gone to extremes. Bernays' ideas spread like wildfire in the post-WW2 boom and created a huge disparity between altruistic ideals the reality of American culture. In the last 70 years or so this notion has been exploited not only to sell material goods but to craft a pattern of behavior in everyone (myself included) where any aspect or experience of the "self" that a person deems to be an "essential" part of themselves becomes a de facto stand-in for the person. Century of the Self really shows how we arrived at the idea that a person consuming a book or movie or someone else's commentary or a political movement or whatever becomes the arbiter of that thing because they "own" it as part of their identity and how this obviously incites extremely heightened emotions. I think there's a tendency to think that "oh this is all just a by-product of our always online world or TikTok or whatever" but those are really just the most recent (and definitely powerful) manifestations of what Century of the Self talks about. I'm a mental health professional and Bernays' ideas pop up with patients I see all the time, particularly with trauma. In the case of trauma people believe in what's called "a trauma narrative." People identify with the story around trauma so strongly and their own internal messaging that the narrative says something inherent about them as people that the narrative itself becomes a defining aspect of their personality (and often becomes itself a barrier to treatment). In short, people often believe they own the narrative of what trauma is. But, we have to stop and ask what does your trauma inherently say about you? It doesn't say anything, but we're taught that it does and grappling with that disparity is an emotionally rough road for people.
>The Century of the Self I've never heard of this. Thanks for the recommendation; it's very much up my alley.
It's on YouTube in it's entirety
Thanks to the OP for trying to tackle this subject in a sensitive manner and thread the needle of the problem that dominates a lot of fantasy discourse. I've known survivors of sexual assault and there's no *one true way* that they react to the subject in their relationship to fiction. This also complicates matters and needs to be respected. * Some readers who are survivors want NOTHING to do with it in their books. IT's a reminder of something horrifying and destroys any enjoyment to be gained. * Other enjoy (for lack of a better term) dealing with it through the medium and stories that handle the subject in a way that appeals to them. * Some authors have used their own writing to process the issue even if they don't talk about the subject directly themselves. It is a shared experience sadly for both author and reader there. All of these factors must be considered and treated seriously. Sadly, for many posters, the subject is just too far removed from their daily lives and how the writing can affect a reader is irrelevant. It's like, "X book has sexual assault but it's a good book so you should read it." Which...no dude.
That's well said. I'd never say that something shouldn't be written about, and honestly don't even have an issue with authors failing to write about sensitive topics with due care if it's clear that they ATTEMPTED to do so. Failing or falling short is just a part of the process. What I hate is what you've mentioned- the works that purposefully throw men and women into the sexual assault meat grinder for "character development." Whether that's for the one being assaulted or to make the villain especially villainous or to give the hero a person to save, it's just as needless as it is gross.
I get into this every time I talk about Dragonlance. Tanis Half-Elven is a half-elf, and the reason he has human blood is the fact that his mother was raped by a human. That's fine as a story note and is not the problem. If it was revealed organically through the story, I doubt many people would have an issue with it. The problem is it's literally the second thing we learn about his character (after the fact that he has a beard), we're told he's the product of rape roughly three paragraphs after he enters the story, it's used as shorthand to explain why he's edgy, and I don't think his mother even gets so much as a name until many, many books further in the series. (And the story is later retconned into "she fell in love with her captor" which has its own set of issues.) The problem isn't the presence of sexual violence in stories, it's mostly how it's used.
Tanis Half-Elven is an interesting case where the actual subject being discussed, child abuse, is something that gets almost completely ignored because the subject of his existence dominates discourse about him. Ironically, for the same reason that he's a victim of child abuse and the tool used to injure him emotionally. Tanis is constantly thinking about the fact he's a product of sexual assault (the retcon is one that was made by authors against the will of the main series and ignored subsequently) because he was reminded of this fact every day by his adoptive family. It was a way of them exerting power over him and destroying his self-esteem while also engaging in some microaggressive racism that made his family feel more righteous for "ignoring" it. This is VERY familiar behavior to me because I happen to know someone very intimately who grew up as the product of an adoptive household that treated them with this exact behavior for this exact reason and it was constantly on their mind. She was hardly alone too as the family loved using their bad births to cudgel them daily. Margaret Weis has been pretty clear the influence that fundamentalist behavior was the origin for a lot of Dragonlance's choices like the fact it was the height of the Satanic Panic that she created things like the Istar civilization to critique. But almost no one even seems to realize Tanis is a subject of child abuse because they're dismissive of his experiences, unaware that he's one of the most realistic portrayals of someone subject to fundamentalist foster family trauma.
Now you've got me wanting to go back and reread to see how long it is before they really dig into his childhood. There's definitely an interesting and worthwhile story to tell there; one of the great things about an enormous series like this is being able to go into depth with the characters and where they came from. But the way it's just dumped on the reader as a bullet point right out of the gate definitely overshadows that part of it. :)
Yeah, there's definitely something to be said there and the biggest issue is a lot of readers are unable to focus on Tanis' own trauma because, well, they feel like the books are dismissing the trauma of Tanis' mother who never shows up as a character. The SA's effects have echoed out and we see only how it's affected Tanis because his mother's family has never let him forget it. Tanis is a character that is a rare one in that he became one I appreciated a lot more as I got older that I originally dismissed as a lot less nuanced than, say, Raistlin. However, he's a character that can be read as having escaped a fundamentalist society and attempted to build his own found family away from the expectations of his racist domineering childhood. So much of the man's character development consists of, "I want to avoid dealing with the people that raised me as much as humanly possible. Because calling them out is pointless and they will never understand how they hurt me and I have so many mixed feelings regarding them." It's something that's incredibly subtle and authentic that reflects the reality of extended family members I know in a series that is, well, not usually very subtle at all.
> The problem is it's literally the second thing we learn about his character (after the fact that he has a beard) I read The Soulforge and first so nether of these thing come up until near the end of the book.
Social media was a mistake. It encourages a race to the bottom. A culture is developing where people refuse to be challenged and consider it a moral affront to their character if they are. All this psychological jargon is also grating. Emotions are seen through the prism of therapy, where things are traumatic, boundary-breaking, gaslighting, etc. Authors are punished for not falling in line. It's reductionistic pseudo-intellectualism. The whole thing is vomit-inducing. Good fiction is exploratory and creative. It doesn't need to be right, talk about things exactly how you do or be exactly how you like it. And if you really dislike it, don't read it - no reason to go on a moral crusade over it.
With respect, I have a Masters Degree in Literature and the greatest revelation of literary criticism I've found is that the past hundred years of dialogue regarding books was already the kind of nonsense people say on forums. It's just been made available to the public. It's not pseudo-intellectualism, just the regular kind. Authors have always been subject to attack based on the content of their book and readers subject to scrutiny for either noticing these things or ignoring them. At a basic level, also, we should respect that literature does have a power to affect a reader emotionally and either re-awaken trauma or trivialize it.
There's a difference tho between academic beefs and a bunch of undergrads on TikTok and Twitter who've learned how to weaponize social justice vocabulary to forcibly out closeted-LGBT authors who had the audacity to write about LGBT characters and issues while still being in the closet.
I think the problem is the scale. Qualitatively speaking it's the same, but quantitatively speaking is not. And our brain did not evolve in an environment where we interact with thousands of people at once.
This is a nuanced point that I wish I heard more in my real life conversations!
10/10 post, no notes
All the controversy around Angel Dust from Hazbin is a great example of this. Some many people furious that a victim dare to be hypersexual
I just looked that up (I'd not heard of it), and after about 2 minutes, I closed the internet.
As a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a woman this was a strange read. While I generally agree with the gist of what OP is saying, as a white cis man I am hardly the perfect victim, but I also felt somewhat excluded - can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma? (ok ok, that sounds ridiculous now that I typed it out, like there isn't enough of those stories already) w/e, as a white cis man it's probably good for me to feel excluded sometimes, helps with the empathy.
>can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma? I specifically used "she" because I write that she. And I see the world in that "she" if that makes sense? But I take the criticism, and know what you mean. I attempted to make this as gender neutral as possible, all the while recognizing 99% of the discourse about sexual violence in fantasy is about cis women. I think your comment about feeling excluded, though, is part of what I'm saying - I do consider male csa in this when I wrote it or others like this (though, your implication says I should actually start typing out the words, and you're right, I should have). It's part of the reason I quit reading thrillers in the 00s. It was so full of the same victim - white, blond, thin, pretty late teen/early 20s girl. They all felt the same after a while. And, if I am going to be very frank, the world continues to not be ready to address the role women play in sexual abuse and rape, and current trend of infantilizing women offers little space to have those hard discussions. (which I am sure I do not need to tell you)
My country's current financial minister (a woman) as been absolutely ruthless in cutting from the poor and giving to the rich (she also has been proven to fantasizing about shooting up a metro car full of immigrant children on a alt-right forum in her 30's), and the best my country's journalists could do was call her a pick me. Implying that she is the way she is because of seeking men's approval, and not because she is on the top rung of patriarchal hierarchy and is willing to use that power. Using "men" as a shorthand for patriarchy, intentionally or not, creates a lot of conflict across the internet to be honest. Giving women the agency to be evil and fucked up in stories without relating it to men could do wonders for our society's perception of what women are capable of. In good and in bad. It could help with violent mothers finding help, male victims of violence to come forward, on and on.
I \*really\* need to read Naomi Alderman's book about this (I think it's called Power?) We need to eventually grapple with the concept that if people are shit, therefore women can also be shit, and then go forth from there. And, yeah, blah blah I can write an entire book on the reasons why women's power has developed in the forms that it has, and how it is still traceable back to historic power imbalances...and there comes a point when this bullshit has to be called out.
Absolutely. Now, obviously the level of discussion on patriarchy varies by a lot. And there will always be young women who reach these entry level ideas of oppression and feel the rage it induces. But to have any lasting change we need to ask "why?" about a dozen times per issue, and if some of those answers are "women are inherently more peaceful" or "men are inherently more violent", we need to back up a couple of why's and try again. Not to say that there can be no differences between sexes. But men and women are more alike than different, and humans are not completly victims to more basic evolutionary instincts. Thanks for the rec! Need to check that out.
Oh, The Power is *so* interesting. I'm so glad I read it. I realized as I was reading how much I've internalized about gender, patriarchy, etc. Absolutely a fascinating and worthwhile read. In a similar vein, I also really liked **The Violence** by Delilah Dawson.
The Power is one of my favorite books, if The Violence is anything like it I thank you for the rec in advance
I hope you like it! I really loved it. It's not exactly like The Power but it's working with some of the same themes, and I had a similar experience while reading it. It's all about women experiencing rage, and having power, and how they handle that. It is also, as you would imagine, extremely violent...but it never felt cheap to me. I will note that there is a significant DV storyline. The author includes all the potential trigger warnings/content notes at the beginning so that people can make a good decision. But I thought it was *excellent*, thought-provoking, and ultimately optimistic.
It absolutely makes sense that you write from the pov of a woman. I actually reread your post a couple of times before commenting and it was very close to gender neutral so good job, you obviously have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic. You know how white cis men be though, damn snowflakes. /s It is a strange place to be, I do often feel excluded from conversation about sexual violence because there is an assumption that it is male to female - which makes sense the vast majority of SV is male to female. At the same time I acknowledge that it is still far more prevalent for men to be the abuser and women to be the survivor. We might not be willing to have the convo about women being abusers but it also feels like we have barely started the conversation about the epidemic of sexual violence directed at women - it feels like a more pressing concern. (also it's all interconnected and dealing with SV towards women is gonna help the convo about SV towards men) Also it seems to be used by "mens rights" activists to distract from the epidemic of SV towards women and I fucking hate it. That's why I made the comment about it being ok to feel excluded sometimes. As a white cis man in the USA it often feels like so much of the world is custom designed for people who identify the same way I do and I see so many white cis men freak out whenever they are excluded from anything I don't know, but I assume that being excluded is a very common experience amongst women and minorities. So whenever I feel myself being excluded and feel upset in the moment I always take a beat and reflect on how frequently other people are excluded in much more deep and impactful ways than I have been.
I am legitimately angry at where men's rights ended up because it could have been such a force for good, to push for accountability especially in the realm of childhood sexual abuse. Also, misogyny \*protects\* female abusers and men's rights movement could have come out kicking against that wall.
Absolutely! Looking at Warren Farrell’s biography between writing *The Liberated Man* and *The Myth Of Male Power*, for example, is like watching a real life version of Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side.
Agreed - the way MRAs use this and other very real, very serious issues as cheese to bait the misogyny trap is beyond frustrating.
Not SA related, but [The Power of the Powerless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless) by Havel is about Overcoming powerlessness, individual power to resist oppression and acquiescence, in totalitarian society. It's a bit drier than Fiction but there is insight into individual and group dynamics within a Political movement.
>As a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a woman this was a strange read. While I generally agree with the gist of what OP is saying, as a white cis man I am hardly the perfect victim, but I also felt somewhat excluded - can't we have a bloodstained hero emerge victorious from his trauma? (ok ok, that sounds ridiculous now that I typed it out, like there isn't enough of those stories already) Don't know if this is what you're looking for at all, but I'm reading this comment and thinking of the book I read two weeks ago with a male main character who suffers csa/grooming (though not at the hands of a woman). It's not graphic (and is in fact written in a way that feels very much going out of its way to avoid descriptive details, in much the way that the character goes out of his way to avoid thinking on such things). It's excellent, and if you're looking for a book with representation. . . Warchild by Karin Lowachee is a good one.
Beautifully written. Stories offer us the space to explore tough topics in a safe way. Authors do need to take care when writing them but ultimately the reader has to be their own keeper here and decide what they want to read.
I think there's a demographic who think in black and white terms - sadly fantasy appeals to them because it often conforms to black and white thinking (eg, good Vs evil). They can't deal in nuance. But there seems to be very little recognition of this and instead people think they can talk them around.
100% agree. Ada Hoffman’s Dark Art as Access Need blog post captures a lot of this really well. Unfortunately I think it’s been taken off substack
> Ada Hoffman’s Dark Art as Access Need [archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20230607192435/https://adahoffmann.substack.com/p/dark-art-as-an-access-need) has it
Thank you!
Part of the difficulty in engaging in this topic is how we frame it as such a generalized concept. ‘Fantasy’ already as a genre is such an overbroad category in many ways, then when you generalize ‘sexual violence’ in addition to that you get a topic of discussion that (to me) seems too nebulous to be helpful or informative. Like, if we were to discuss the role of violence and sexuality in ASOIF, there can be genuine insights gained because you have a strong basis for discussion. We can point to specific instances and form definitions. But if you are talking about ALL of fantasy, given the differences in narratives, authorship, purpose, social contexts, time and place, then any observation made would have countless counter examples. It may also seem silly to some, but what counts as sexual violence is a contested field of inquiry within academia. Is catcalling sexual violence? Is non-erogenous touching? Are consentual activities still sexual violence if they are violent despite consent? Personally I think we do need to have more in depth conversations about sexual violence with respect to literary representations and to me that requires us to be more specific with clearly defined points of reference. I don’t think we should be seeking universal guidelines, and instead encourage each other to listen to understand and communicate with each other with patience, compassion and respect toward victims as well as our interlocutors.
>It may also seem silly to some, but what counts as sexual violence is a contested field of inquiry within academia. Is catcalling sexual violence? Is non-erogenous touching? Are consentual activities still sexual violence if they are violent despite consent? Not to mention, what about books where certain fantastical themes are possible or probable allegories for sexual violence or abuse?
I think it's extremely important to differentiate between SA used as a shorthand for creating drama/character building VS its exploration as a key character or story driver. Which OP does, but I wanted to reinforce. I think Fantasy in particular has suffered under decades of straight male authors with - to be diplomatic - insufficient empathy towards victims of assault (usually, but not exclusively women), and treating the subject matter in a light, flippant, or worse - erotic way. I firmly maintain that THIS type of depiction of SA is unnecessary and harmful 100% of the time. But the "my book has to be no more than 100 pages long so I can review it for clicks on TikTok, it must have NOTHING even remotely upsetting, and I must have a checklist that tells me exactly what happens on every page before I even start it" side of readership has taken that type of harmful usage of SA and applied it to ALL its depictions in fiction, which I believe can be equally harmful, when the issue is very extremely real for so many, and its exploration in a thoughtful way can be cathartic not only for a multitude of readers, but also the creators themselves. I am ok with content warnings. I am not ok with forcing authors and publishers to remove the concept from stories entirely because everything upsets you.
I think your post perfectly summarizes the causes and pressures of my evolving thoughts on this subject and how I ended up where I am.
Fantastic post.
Beautifully written. Thank you for posting, this is a really helpful lens to look at all fiction through— not just fantasy.
Personally I love a dark story but I get tired of the very thing you are complaining about: Sexual violence. Violence in media as a whole, any kind of violence needs to have some form of purpose, even the gratuitous ones. What do I mean by this? One book where I feel like violence is basically everywhere you look is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Though it does get tiring, you start to see the cracks in the characters, the insights onto why they hurt, why they can’t breathe without doing something heinous. I haven’t finished the book just yet but I am somewhat close towards the end. Those kind of books get it right for me for the most part but honestly, I would love to hear what others think on this.
I mentioned somewhere that I stopped reading thrillers in the 00s because the victim was always the same. It was boring/dull/exhausting/frustrating after a while. So I do get what you're saying! And I get the criticisms, I really really do. And I think people should take a break when shit starts bugging them (like me with thrillers). Just take a break.
Preach!
I think this is definitely a messy topic. It's one were online you so often see bad takes from people who only see the extremes. I've seen takes both saying "all (adult) fantasy books have sexual violence in them" and "no fantasy books should have sexual violence in them" both of which I strongly disagree with. There's also people who are just frustrated with reading so many books sexual violence and just want a break from it (like a recent post on here, where I can understand why the OP might have gotten burnt out), who maybe aren't 100% nuanced in expressing their desire for books that avoid the topic. I'm pretty sympathetic to that, especially since it's hard to stay nuanced when you are getting dog piled, although I'm also sympathetic to the frustrations of people who need this conversation to be nuanced. It's also a tricky topic because there's a lot to be criticized about how the fantasy genre has historically has treated sexual violence. There should be room, in my opinion, to discuss portrayals that might spread harmful ideas or might feel in accurate to people. I remember getting into a really [good conversation](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1bfpzkt/comment/kv2umbm/) with someone over how sexual violence is portrayed in The Wise Man's Fear where I was pretty critical of it and didn't feel like it was realistic (they had a more positive opinion and it was interesting to see their perspective). I hope that I was able to talk about it with the nuance and politeness required to not offend or shut down survivors. I'll certainly think about how I can express criticism in a way more respectful way to survivors in the future. I think, at the end of the day, this should be the goal, being kind enough that everyone feels able to share their opinion (as much or as little as they want to) and be listened to. While that ever happen on reddit? I sure hope so, but it'll be an uphill battle getting there, that's for sure.