y’know, it’s been a while since I made this reasonably popular post about how my abuse was the fault of my abuser and my society, not the fiction she used as an excuse.
But I want to talk a little bit more about how I came to that realization, because it wasn’t easy, but it was extremely important to how I conceptualized what happened, and what systematic abuse means.
During and immediately after the abuse - as in, for a little more than a year after we’d broken up and I moved away - I hardcore blamed Twilight for what happened. She called herself the lion to my lamb, she called herself a vampire and said she couldn’t resist me, she…. basically LARP’d twilight at me (and yes, even then, when it wasn’t terrifying it was hilarious). Of course it was Twilight that made her like this, she’d all but explicitly said so. She compared her emotions to Edward’s on the regular; of course Twilight was normalizing those emotions for her. Everyone thought Twilight was romantic so of course she thought things like stalking and controlling me were romantic! I was so sure. I never harassed people, but it’s part of why I chose to study media in college; to analyze unhealthy relationships in media and try to get abusive content recognized as harmful.
And then, almost two years after leaving her, I started talking on tumblr about her, on my main. Just a little, a few stories, comparing her actions to those of a character in a webcomic and pointing out that casting those as romantic is why I’d gotten abused. How she’d talked about twilight’s romance and some of her more distinctive and awful behaviors.
And then I got a message. “Was her name *****?”
“She did those things to me too. But she said it was like iron man. Like, she was tony stark, and I was pepper potts who has to put up with all of this to save her from herself.”
I hadn’t known, until that moment, that there were others.
There were a lot of others.
We reached out to a few of her other close friends / closeted ex’s. Same story, different fandoms. And then we looked at her college, gently reached out to the person she’d dated freshman year.
The same story again, shifted to accommodate whatever fandom we shared with her, twisted to make her actions look romantic. After me it was another girl, summer after we broke up, 50 shades. Her college boyfriend, it was Steve and Bucky. Over, and over, and over, stories changed only in details, and each one she used fandom to cast herself as the tragic hero and us as the ones who had to save her, who should see her abuse as an expression of how much she loved us.
There were so many of us, and she’d used fiction on us all. She’d used it, like a tool, jammed into whatever gap in our armor she could find.
I can’t…. explain, how I felt then. I found all this out in the course of a couple weeks. An isolated incident of someone who loved me and who I loved, whose relationship had gotten twisted by a romance novel, turned into a story of intentional and systematic abuse. I hadn’t realized how much I was using Twilight to avoid fully blaming her until I couldn’t do it anymore. Until I had to fully face the fact that she’d been lying to me, she’d been abusing me, and she knew that she had to make me think it was ok somehow. She’d known it was wrong. She wasn’t brainwashed by Edward stalking Bella; she wanted to stalk me, and she used Edward as an excuse.
When I say “abuse is the fault of the abuser”, I don’t mean in just a pure metaphysical, “everyone’s responsible for their own actions” kind of way. I mean that abusers start with their abusive behavior, and then fill in whatever behavior and excuses they have to to justify it to themselves and their victims. Maybe it’s media. Maybe it’s substance abuse. Maybe it’s past abuse that they suffered. Maybe it’s some psychology mumbo-jumbo about projecting past trauma onto you. Maybe it’s mental illness. Maybe it’s anything.
I had thought - I thought that maybe she was a good person, underneath it all. That media had twisted her. That it Twilight has just been different, she would have been different. I thought media made her think it was ok.
There is a unique kind of pain in realizing that someone you loved chose to hurt you. There is something that changes you, to realize that they wanted to take an action, realized it would hurt you, and then looked around their life like a handyman looking for a tool: “what would make this ok?”
Abusers choose to hurt you. They know that their actions will hurt you, and they choose to do it anyways.
Everything after that is an excuse.
