Polyamorous Vulpine

Oh gee, the Vampire Diaries is exploiting Caroline's suffering in an objectifying and gratuitous way that they'll never allow her any kind of meaningful triumph over. It's fridging through torture, their favourite tired old horse, because when writing skill fails, why not fall back on your tried and true? Plec and Williamson's tried and true being gratuitous rape and/or abuse of vulnerable girls. (And occasionally boy, so progressive.)

Wait, the Vampire Diaries writers honestly just supported Damon referring to his attempts to rape, murder, and torture Elena as 'making it easy for her' (to reject him, when all of these instances where in response to her rejecting him based on what she wanted and being punished for it) and unironically positioned him as the wounded party in a discussion about her telling him no. Positioned her rapist as the wounded party in a discussion about her telling him no.

The last time Jeremy saw Elena and Damon kissing, he interrupted Elena sobbing 'no, no, no' and Damon then murdered Jeremy to punish her for saying no. To frame his concerns about and objection to their relationship (which is abusive) as being 'young' or somehow lacking perspective or deep knowledge, is misogynistic with a deeply troubling intensity in something marketed to young teen girls.

Especially since punishment is designed to alter someone's behaviour. When Elena tells him no - especially in sexual circumstances - Damon murders her little brother, throws her into walls, brutally violates her and tries to break her arm. His behaviour has not altered in the slightest and to be perfectly honest this casts doubt on the consent of further sexual interaction without serious shifting of dynamics and examination of his actions.

Damon changes her (explicitly, canonically) into someone exhausted and frightened and afraid to stand up for herself. He challenges her right to consent and her right to make decisions for herself. Sorry Rose, much like when people 'challenge' my right to health care, marriage, and oh not getting beat to death on the streets with no repercussions for my killers, I'm unimpressed by your argument.

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I honestly loathe the habit - I've seen it mostly in anime, as in American media they prefer to have their heroes be genuinely sexist and objectifying without it being contested - of having female characters accuse hapless male characters due to ridiculous accidents of walking in on them nude, their skirts blowing up, Big Misunderstandings, etc. It took me a long time to figure out exactly why, and then I heard people trash-talking Ashley Graham (...a teenage girl kidnapped and terrorized in a town full of monsters who nonetheless manages to remain determined, resourceful and remarkably levelheaded for her situation) for various reasons and really put my finger on it.

I'm not going to get irritated by a girl protesting sexual harassment, objectification or other untoward sexual behaviours towards herself. I refuse to find that abrasive - or comedic - the way they want me too, because I am a girl and I know damn well how nasty it gets for girls who speak up for themselves, and how relenting both cause and repercussions are.

And I'm repulsed - and pissed off - that these texts are trying to make a joke out of it, to portray these objections as unreasoning or hysterical and our poor dude protagonist as the pitiful victim of these terrible accusations.

(Also, if a guy accidentally pointed a rifle bead up my skirt I would be diving for cover, and he'd get a lot more shit about it than a brief exclamation. Those are sensitive parts.)

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And then there's the fact of what he wanted to do to her, and she was spared from only by Bonnie's timely intervention; an act of complete bodily violation for his own personal gratification that she would never be able to recover from. Elena could not have gone back from the damage he wanted to deal to her, the way he wanted to hurt her so as to extend her physical availability to him. She could come to terms with it, she could make the best out of it, she could try to adapt, but she would never be able to undo what he wanted to do to her: to literally physically and wholly - bodily and mentally - remould her violently and forcibly against her will into what he wanted.

She is not a person to him, and she never has been. And his abuse is not, and never will be, love.

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Damon/Elena is unquestionably misogynistic. There is no way to deny with any kind of integrity or validity that creating a romantic storyline between a woman and a man who has violated her, tortured her, abused her, repeatedly sexually attacked her, denigrated and abused and manipulated her verbally and emotionally and never suffered real consequences for it, never even been forced to admit that what he did was wrong in any meaningful way, never changed his behaviour, instead shamed and abused and beat her into a slow progression of protecting herself less and less and believing in her own right to live unmolested less and less, because each time her self-defense it was less successful - he murdered her brother in front of her, taunting her with it, because he didn't get to rape her - and no one was there to support her -

Creating that romantic storyline, and without allowing her any kind of trauma recovery or inner reflection to be suddenly - after two seasons of steadfastly defending her right to make choices about who she became involved with, and her right to not want a man who wanted her - all about the 'feelings' for her rapist that the rapist himself and everyone around her have been knowledgeably informing her she possesses for what, a trauma-fraught year now? About her 'obvious' sexual desire for him, because everyone but the woman whose body it is gets to be the arbiter of what happens to a female body.

This. Is. Misogyny.

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Guys, 'I can't shake him' is not romantic when her efforts to shake him include screaming, running, physically fighting and finally, when she's broken down and he's hurt her enough and threatened her enough, begging. And 'snuck up on me' includes rape, torture, emotional abuse, throwing her around and beating her.

Like, Elena is literally saying 'I tried to get away from this rapist and he wouldn't let me!' and Matt, Abusive Boyfriend Extraordinaire, says 'that's love!' and we are literally supposed to take this seriously, sincerely and at face value. We are supposed to find this moment - this moment of a teenage girl having been physically and emotionally abused with absolutely no support from virtually anyone who cares about her, constantly told that her feelings are irrelevant, "stupid", that her not wanting to have sex with him is a "lie" and "fooling herself" finally essentially giving up, resigning herself and saying "I can't escape, I'm trapped, all my efforts to protect myself from my abuser are futile" - touching and emotionally revelatory.

I remember reading someone talking about how they want to explore "what makes Elena want Damon" and how Elena/Damon is so sex-positive, because you can want someone physically - because she's "obviously" attracted to him, as is evidenced by the tears and the sobbing and the 'no, no, please, no!' - and not, like, want to be in a relationship or anything and it was so chokingly, nauseatingly misogynistic my mouth hung open. We know she doesn't want him. She's said so again and again and again: (rape. is. not. sex. positive. EVER.) the only evidence contradicting that is her rapist telling her she wants it and she's fooling herself. And then later on a resigned, victimized Elena, having been proved time and time again in canon that when he hurts her and she fights back or tries to get him away from her it is not only fruitless but she is brutalized and tortured and treated like she's hysterical for it, basically trotting out the most classic victim-blaming rape culture lines there are - it felt good, she didn't get away, she provoked him.

Like, to try and pretend it's Elena-positive or somehow a feminist angle when it requires you to completely erase Elena from the equation as a person and ignore and trivialize her protests and her hurt, to literally pretend her voice and her decisions are nonexistent or irrelevant? To try and pretend it's actually interest in Elena? That's just an incredibly special calibre of fandom misogyny.

It's beyond foul that she's not allowed emotional repercussions, she's not allowed to heal, she's not allowed to feel something that's inconvenient to Damon, that the man who sexually attacked her multiple times, beats her up and profoundly violated and abused her planting one on her is treating like a romcom moment, complete with the background chorus of friends chirping, "tell me more, tell me more!" It's made all the more chilling that Nina continues to play Elena as very uncomfortable with the abuse and the emotional pressures that refuse to acknowledge or to allow her to react to or treat her abuse like what it is. It's narratively irresponsible on a grand scale.

God, this show.

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The funny - not haha funny - thing is that there are shows that are like twenty years old that have more female characters better treated than those today. Especially kid's shows; just in the sense that they're not only there but they're there as people. They're people the showmakers viewed with ingrained, thoughtless limitations, but in many of their source material they weren't required to either meet ridiculously high standards or be the butt of the jokes and liked 'despite' that or for what's 'underneath,' etc. Obviously this isn't true as a blanket statement, but I've been noticing more than a few.

Whereas so many modern shows are so obsessed with their tokenism it's like they're pointing blinking red signs at her going 'look it's a girl. A girl! Look we have a girl. And isn't she cool?' Which yes, sure, I love cool girls as much as the next person, but when they're so focused on making her 'cool (enough)' she starts being not a person but a paragon (I love her still, but I have to fanwank depth sometimes) and the writers start to irritate me.


And by the way, later Scooby Doo? Velma and Shaggy and Scooby got in about as much trouble as Daphne, and in a collection of those instances you could safely say Daphne got in trouble because she was braver than the rest and stood her ground. Fred didn't get caught up in traps as much, but the side effect of that was that his screen time was often less interesting, because most of the time the kidnapped person finagled their way out of their situation.

(Also, I don't really appreciate the modern lampoonings making Fred a self-absorbed jerk for 'depth' or 'satire' or whatever - and yet still leaving him as unequivocal leader of the team. Fred may have made suggestions and come up with harebrained schemes, and everybody else was all right with following his lead, but Velma and even sometimes Shaggy and Scooby led the team too, just in a less authoritarian way. In fact, Velma probably directed them about more than did Fred - she and Fred were usually a tag team spear heading the investigative effort, with Shaggy and Scooby trying their best to bolt and Daphne curious and open to adventure but not driven.)

Boy, you can tell I've seen way too much Scooby Doo over the past month, can't you?

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