Follows back from @nothin2cere (inactive, I don't post over there lmao)
Follow @ao3feed-ratgrinders for updates on the latest Rat Grinders fics uploaded to Ao3
Heyo, this blog is dedicated to my favorite group of fucked up teenagers, Fantasy High: Junior Year's angry academic antagonists, the Rat Grinders!
Here you'll find a bunch of ramblings, meta posts, fanart, etc., about the season's villains because something about them just scratches the brain. I'm more interested in examining WHY they do the things they do than defending them without nuance, because who doesn't like a complicated villain?
I LOVE ASKS please send me asks about these guys!!! I'll do my best to answer every one I get!!
Tags List
#original post - my original posts (headcanons, meta, etc)
#rat grinders
Characters
#kipperlilly copperkettle
#buddy dawn
#lucy frostblade
#mary ann skuttle
#ruben hopclap
#ivy embra
#oisin hakinvar
Ships
#frostkettle
#kipperbees
#inkblade
No discourse here, it's all love now!
(credit to tumblr user @kipperlillyforpresident for the banner!)
Content Note: This fic has Kipperlilly Copperkettle as an extremely unreliable (and self-victim-blaming) narrator discussing the topic of grooming and sexual assault. There are no explicit sex scenes, but there are frank references to sex. Please read with caution.
It can also be read on AO3.
Kipperlilly Copperkettle wasn’t anybody's victim.
She wasn’t Riz Gukgak’s murder victim. She was an enemy combatant he killed in justified self defense.
She wasn’t Ankarna’s cult victim. She was an opportunist who accepted the Shatter-Star to pursue her own ambitions.
She wasn’t Porter Cliffbreaker’s rape victim. She was an accomplice who saw that her future God had a problem and offered herself up as a solution.
It was normal for a Divine Smite to feel like a mean orgasm. Occasionally, like a regular one. That’s what Porter told her.
It wasn’t normal for a mortal to eat ambrosia. Occasionally, there would be consequences. That’s what Porter told her.
What Porter didn’t tell her is that this newfound divinity increased his desire – to the point that Divine Smites could no longer provide him the satisfaction he craved. She figured that out all on her own.
She wanted this scheme to be a success. That wouldn’t happen if Porter was too horny to think straight. Clearly, they’d need to fix that, and having sex with her would be the fastest way to do so. That’s what Kipperlilly told him.
---
She might as well address the elephant in the room: Porter had a Goliath dick and Kipperlilly had Halfling holes. She made it work. What kind of adventurer would she be if she couldn’t handle a little pain?
---
After their first time (a quick blowjob beneath his desk), Porter said they had to keep their arrangement a secret.
She was insulted. Did he think she was an idiot? Of course she wasn’t going to tell anybody. Her parents would immediately withdraw her from Aguefort Adventuring Academy if they found out. She couldn't become Student Body President if she wasn’t enrolled. Even if they did let her stay, the scandal would ruin her campaign.
(She knew her campaign was already dead. It had been the moment that Kristen fucking Applebees decided that she wanted to become president. Whenever a Bad Kid wanted something, they got it.
But buried deep within her was an idealist, a pigtailed girl who believed in justice and fairness and progress. Who thought that a candidate with an actual platform would prevail over a candidate who only spoke nonsense.)
Belatedly, she realized his concern was more for his own reputation. That was understandable. He was a teacher, after all – it’d be bad optics if he was caught sleeping with a student. People would get the wrong idea.
---
Did she like having sex with him?
Physically, no. Porter had never been concerned with her own pleasure, and Kipperlilly never asked him to be. That wasn’t relevant. She was a vessel to relieve his stress, not the other way around.
Emotionally, yes. Not in any romantic sense: their relationship wasn’t like that, and neither of them wanted it to be. It was purely business. And that’s what she liked about it – it was proof that she was valuable to the mission, that she was useful.
---
A couple of weeks after Kipperlilly went to Hell, she was burdened with Figueroth Faeth’s company.
“I’ll get straight to the point, Kettlecunt. I don’t like you–”
“The feeling is mutual, Pruneroth,” she snapped. When she revisited this conversation in her mind (over and over, consistently searching for what the right words would have been to make this asshole finally understand), this was always a low point for her.
If she were a better person, she’d think that the whole thing was beneath her. If she were a better person, she’d think that fighting hate with hate (and that was what this was, hate – subconsciously and unintentional, most likely, but still hate. The kind she had been dealing with her entire life, the kind that made her embarrassed to be a Halfling) was no way to solve her problems.
She wasn’t a better person, though. She was mainly upset that Pruneroth was such a lame insult.
Fig looked unimpressed. “But, if you’d let me finish – I recently learned Porter was sexually abusing you. And it doesn’t matter how I feel about you as a person, I still think that’s fucked up.”
Kipperlilly explained to her that it wasn’t like that. She gave her a condensed version of the spiel: she wasn’t a victim, it was purely for the sake of their scheme, and she was the one who initiated it.
“Wow. I’m so sorry. I’ve been there - I mean, not with Porter, but kind of similar. Wanting older men to give you romantic attention–”
“Did you listen to a single word I said? I didn’t want him romantically. I didn’t even want him sexually.” She over-enunciated each word, as if she were speaking to a small child. That was certainly what it felt like. “I wanted him to become a new God. I did whatever was necessary to make that happen, and yes, that included making him cum a couple of times. I fail to see why you even care.”
“If you’d let me speak a complete sentence before interrupting me, then maybe you’d see why!” Fig didn’t even seem mad, just disappointed. Kipperlilly was loath to admit it, but Fig had a point. She pantomimed zipping her mouth shut, and motioned for her to continue. “First of all, pretty much anyone is going to care if they learn a high school teacher sexually assaulted a student. I know you don’t want me to call it that, but that’s what it sounds like to me. Second of all, it doesn’t, y’know… feel great to send a kid your age to eternal damnation? The Shatter-Stars were a valid reason to get the rest of the Rat Grinders pardoned, but it didn’t count in your case, since you asked for it. But this could be a way to get you out of Hell, if I argue you only did it because you were groomed. And you want to get out of here, don’t you?”
Against all odds, Kipperlilly did not immediately flip out at Fig. Instead, she took a moment to consider her words. Mainly the last part, about her potentially getting a pardon. And while Kipperlilly couldn’t be convinced that she was a victim (she knew better)... whose to say that she couldn’t scam whoever it was that had jurisdiction over her soul?
It was a tempting prospect. But an impractical one.
“Of course I want to get out of here,” Kipperlilly begrudgingly admitted. “But it’s not going to work. You already said the Shatter-Star wasn’t enough to get me out of here, so there’s no way this business would. My deal with Ankarna and my deal with Porter were basically the same: I offered my body willingly and they accepted it.”
“But that’s different,” Fig immediately said. Kipperlilly wished that she had pretended to think about it, at least.
the grooming implications are all over kipperlilly's story and it's almost cathartic to see it made explicit here. when you look at canon and the wider discourse around her you see a tendency to overstate the amount of agency she would have realistically had in her situation, so something about dialing porter's actions up to the extreme and applying the same logic of kipperlilly being an "active participant" (via kipperlilly's internal monologue and brazen description of events) only makes more obvious the flaw in her thinking and the horror of porter's actions.
one small moment that i think really cinched this for me while reading was that, since it's been so long since i've watched junior year, i'd forgotten some of the details. the start of the paragraph that describes how porter told kipperlilly divine smite feels like a mean orgasm invoked such a visceral feeling of disgust within me at such a flagrant display of grooming, and then i remembered that wait, this was an Actual Thing porter said in the Actual Show. its the type of thing that gets brushed off as a joke in the moment, until you have reason to recontextualize all these prior instances of porter canonically being poor at maintaining boundaries with his students. the actions porter takes in this fanfic are not far off from what he already canonically does, and that's what makes this fanfic work really, really well for me.
Inspired by this epic art by my oomf on twitter. Something something unanswered questions something something lack of closure something something the pain of absence and uncertainty. and also fuck you porter. someone needs to kill that dickhead.
the problem with taz balance is you first listen to it as a naive high schooler like "oh, funny dnd podcast made by those mcelroy guys i see in tumblr memes all the time! and they apparently have gay characters too! let me check this out! haha his name is taco that's so random XD" and nobody could have warned you that a decade later you'll still periodically think about lucretia and her martyr complex and be stricken with the urge to start gnawing your own limbs off
riz gukgak is so so sooooo important to me that hes so kind and loves his friends so deeply and will give anything including putting himself through immense stress just to make their lives the slightest bit easier and yet he STILL worries he'll be left behind that he'll never be as important to someone else as their romantic partners that there will always be something "wrong" or missing about him by virtue of him not being able to relate to this thing that everyone in his life seems to feel so deeply
as an aro ace person ive quite literally never felt as Seen as i did by riz gukgak in sophomore year who's greatest fear is literally the personification of his inability to measure up to normative ideas of romance, that the level of love, PLATONIC love that he feels for the people in his life does not matter because of the idea that a romantic partner will always matter More and that is something that he is essentially alienated from, that he goes to his father for advice and that even though his father is overwhelmingly supportive there's still the initial assumption that he's just a late bloomer and that "its okay, youll find someone", the assumed default that romance is what will make him happy.
asexual characters in fiction are already rare but im so glad that a story like his exists that is so clearly ABOUT being asexual and what is actually feels like to come to terms with your identity and how you relate to the world as a result, about the bone deep alienation and insecurity that comes as a result, but more than that im glad that despite all of this riz gukgak is still LOVED, by his friends and family who constantly reiterate to him his importance in their lives
I've become so Kipperlilly-pilled and so otherwise unplugged from Dimension 20 in the last 2 years that I just rewatched the introduction of KLCK in junior year and when Ally-as-Kristen pulled out the "what are you, four different dogs?" I wanted to fight them in real life. Which is a normal reaction of someone who's normal about this fictional character
