The Mia tags are a shit show but it is low-key funny as fuck to see people acting like the Mia fans who literally brought the conversation of Mia being a victim to the forefront of the fandom (hi there, it’s me, ya boi) are somehow prudes who ignore her character because we aren’t sexualizing a child’s trauma responses as they themselves are not even showing BASIC reading comprehension
i cannot comprehend writing out headcanons entirely dedicated to the ways you want her to expose herself to more trauma but it’s okay bc it’s a trauma response and she thinks she’s healing actually…like! idk! just a hot take from me! you’re weird!
mia TEXTUALLY understands that she is a child being abused and gets herself out of that and at NO POINT, not even under winick’s mishandling of her hypersexuality, shows ANY inclination that she’d feel empowered (misguidedly or not) going back to the life she was trafficked into. are you guys on crack
I'm honestly not sure if we're thinking of the same post or not, but regardless: My take on Mia exposing herself to more trauma would be that it's repetition compulsion, a very real trauma response that some people (myself included) wrestle with, whether they like it or not. Sometimes it's a conscious choice but often it isn't. The idea is that you feel compelled to relive the trauma in a (very misguided -- but again you can't help it) attempt to feel in-control in a way that you were not when the initial trauma occurred. The thing is, of course, that it's not logical. It's not supposed to be. You can know you're a victim, you can know that what you're doing is unhealthy and damaging and that you need to stop... but you can't. You keep hurting yourself, over and over again -- not because you're stupid, or because you enjoy pain, but because a part of you is still clutching at straws, trying anything it can to erase the hurt. It doesn't matter that your actual logical brain knows that it isn't going to work. I can't speak for the author of the post (if indeed we're talking about the same post at all), nor can I speak for other victims or their experiences... I can only say that imagining Mia having those responses brings comfort to me, as someone who wrestles with the shame of having those experiences, and those responses, myself. It's not like we're ever going to have a comic character who is allowed to actually explicitly-in-the-text talk about things like this, are we? The ugly side of trauma and what it can do to you? The scraps we got about Mia's hypersexuality were about the closest we'll ever be able to get to identifying with a character who is as "imperfect" a victim as some of us are. It's woefully inadequate, but I get it -- I wouldn't trust comics to be able to tackle anything any deeper, anyway. This is exactly why it's so important to be able to imagine these things, though: because it's not something you're allowed to talk about otherwise. When your trauma responses are ugly, nobody wants to hear about that part. And even people who are otherwise understanding and well-intentioned will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're gross and a freak, because what you're going through is apparently so filthy and disgusting that imagining a character with a similar trauma responding in a similar way is considered some kind of fetishization. I'm not intending this as an attack, because I GET it: there are definitely people who do fetishize the experiences of characters like Mia. There are people who get intensely weird about it. I just want people to understand that this isn't always the case. Sometimes people just want to imagine their blorbo hurting the same way that they do. Mia is the closest thing we get to an imperfect victim in mainstream comics, but she's still heavily sanitized in many ways -- so much so that apparently even headcanoning that she might not always be coping in a perfectly healthy manner is enough to get you kicked out of fandom... or at least, maybe, blocked by people who love the same character. I hope I don't get blocked over this. The fandom is too small as it is, and as we know, canon just isn't bringing the content, either. I'm just so tired of victims constantly being told -- even by other victims -- that they're not being "normal" enough when they attempt to engage with characters in a way that reflects their own experiences.
We are actively talking about people calling us FASCISTS for saying that it’s weird to sexualize a child’s trauma responses. Which is what they’re doing.
And more than that we are talking about people who are incapable of reading the text in the comic to ascertain Mia’s AGE while trying to claim that they are experts on her character and characterization.
Mia being an imperfect victim is why I love her and why I identify with her. And yes repetition compulsion is a trauma response that many of us deal with, it is also per the text not something that Mia deals with. I am glad that headcanon gives you comfort but it also does not align with her characterization or the text. This isn’t an attack, but merely commentary on Mia as a character.
I also do want to push back on your claim that Mia is “heavily sanitized” - just because she isn’t showing all of the maladaptive trauma responses associated with CSA does not make her sanitized. To say so would be to claim that MY lived experiences are sanitized- and I assure you, they are not.
These people are actively fetishizing Mia Dearden and her trauma. They are not engaging with her story beyond creating a fixation on and obsession adult men that simply is not the reality of her character. They are actively insinuating that she wants to fuck a pedophile who has hunted her family for sport and are ignoring the actual text of the comics and Mia’s arc around healing and overcoming her maladaptive and self injurious trauma responses. They don’t even know what is and is not incest and they find the idea of Mia retraumatizing herself to be entertaining.
Okay, let me apologize for a few things here, and clear up some other things.
First: I didn't realize people were calling you fascist or anything like that for disagreeing with their takes. I only had an inkling of an idea about who you were vagueposting about (such is the nature of vagueposting, surprise), and I hadn't seen the interactions where that was happening. So I was very much reacting to the wrong thing. If they were saying those things, I definitely don't agree with them -- I don't believe you or anyone else disagreeing with that take makes you a "prude" or a "fascist" or anything like that. I don't think anyone defending Mia against wanton sexualization is any kind of prude.
I just wasn't aware that it was wanton sexualization at the time. I haven't seen any of their takes with Slade or anyone like him -- if I had, I probably would have blocked them myself, because I hate the idea of Slade and Mia interacting at all for many of the same reasons that I hate JayMia (Slade being the worst of the two by far of course). I'm not saying that I don't believe you, because I do -- just that I didn't know prior to this. I've only ever seen the really intense headcanons (some of which I share and some of which I do not), and always assumed this person was just a victim like me, projecting the same way I do. It never once occurred to me that they were sexualizing Mia for entertainment, because I am certainly not thinking of these things for entertainment. That sucks to hear, and you were right to call it out.
I also apologize for calling Mia "sanitized". I didn't intend to slander your experiences, or anyone else's. Maybe I don't just know how to explain what I'm trying to say here; what I meant was that there will never be a comic character portrayed who embodies my experience, and I know that. Because it's just a bridge too far. There are things that people just don't like to think about, and things they can't/won't portray. So sometimes it feels like when they do create characters like Mia -- who has at least been hinted at experiencing hypersexuality, etc -- they're just pushing the envelope with it only as far as they think they can get away with. Does that make sense at all? It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with Mia as a character, or that her experience doesn't reflect anyone else's. The problem isn't Mia. The problem is me, feeling sort of bereft and unrepresented and too dirty to ever see myself reflected in a character I can relate to -- and now being told that I'm not even allowed to do so without being some kind of monster, myself.
FWIW, I don't think Mia canonically experiences things exactly the same way I do. One of the things I like about her is that she's remarkably well-adjusted, all things considered. I like to think it helps that she has a good support network, and I like to think that she's in therapy, etc. even though we don't actually see it. But I personally take comfort in imagining the character I love going through some of the same things I have, and having these really awful things to struggle with, and overcoming that anyway. Doesn't everyone do that? Isn't that what most of fandom is -- identifying with characters, and sometimes projecting your own experiences onto them? This is a genre where we regularly have AUs where Superman is evil, despite it being very much against his nature. Is it so wrong, and so awful, to imagine that Mia could have developed differently from her experiences, or coped differently? It was a little bit upsetting for someone to basically say "Mia knows she was a victim, she would never do that"... as if I didn't know I was a victim when I was doing it? Do they think I was willingly putting myself in those situations because I enjoyed it? Or because I was too stupid to realize it was harmful? I was perfectly functional 99% of the time, had things to live for and love and was in recovery, but I fucking did it anyway. It doesn't matter what you believe or what you want, when it's happening to you, you cannot help it. I'm going to be honest: it fucking sucks to post something so heartfelt and personal, only to find an angry response and DMs going back and forth about how shitty I am. It's bad enough that I deleted the post shortly after making it because I realized I got far more personal than I ever intended to be on this website, only to realize that of course it's already been reblogged, so it's going to live out there in the universe forever... so I guess I may as well own it: I've never said it before here on Tumblr, but I'm a goddamn victim, and my trauma responses in my youth were ugly and self-destructive, and even though I've worked my ass off for forty years to heal from that, they've still affected my life in ways that can never be erased. (The very fact that I've made this stupid, self-harming post is evidence enough of that.) But because of that, I reacted defensively. It felt very much like people that I respect were calling me and people like me disgusting, and others were dogpiling on. It felt like people were saying that the things I imagine Mia experiencing -- things that I myself have experienced -- are just too filthy to think about. That imagining her sharing my experience is somehow degrading to her character. Do you realize how much that hurts? You were absolutely right to feel hurt that I implied your experiences were sanitized, so I hope you can understand why I might have felt hurt and very misunderstood by the implication that it's disgusting and gross to imagine a character dealing with what I've dealt with. Every single person who chimes in to say how disturbing or cringy or awful they find those headcanons is also, inadvertently, telling me how disturbing or cringy or awful my real fucking experiences are. It's like going back to 7th grade sex-ed, when the teacher chewed a wad of gum and then tried to get us to pass that gum around, equating that used, nasty gum with a girl who slept with a lot of guys. Filthy and used-up and unwanted. She wasn't intending to tell little girls who had already been abused that they were filthy, but that's exactly the message we got. And it re-traumatized the shit out of me at the time. Maybe that's why this has been such a trigger for me. I've had nothing but respect for your love of Mia, @lesbianspeedy , and your advocacy for victims and how they're portrayed in media, @thequiver . I'm genuinely sorry that I spoke too quickly, and too defensively, and said things that were hurtful. Now that I've outed myself in the most humiliating way possible and dredged up mountains of shame that I thought I'd moved past, I'll bow out.
