sashene

in dark times, should the stars also go out? // sunrise, parabellum

[sasheneskywalker]

about me

she/he/they • adult • multifandom & multiship

ao3: sasheneskywalker

masterlist of posts

fandom resources a guide to help with ao3 tagging useful resources for fanfic writers and readers

dc meta lists lonnie machin / anarky reading guide jason todd meta list

fic rec lists star wars fic recs

dc fic rec lists jason todd-centric fic recs dc/marvel crossover fic recs dc poly ships fic recs brujay fic recs brudick fic recs sladick explicit fic recs sladick mature fic recs batfamily fic recs that will make you laugh batfamily fic recs which are told through unusual formatting batfamily fic recs which are told from an outsider’s perspective batfamily/dc fic recs where original characters are main characters batfamily fic recs where the main character is transgender and/or non-binary dc/batfamily fic recs where the main character is asexual and/or aromantic

tags directory

tagging pattern: #[fandom], #[character], #[ship], #[category] tagging categories: #meta, #fanart, #fanfic, #fandom, #web weaving, #shipping, #fic recs, #web weaving, #book recs, #comic recs, #movie recs, #podcast recs, #game recs, #music recs, #essay recs, #anime recs, #rpg, #art, #writing, #idea, #bookmark, #resources, #academia, #wild tumblr, #humor, #negativity, #society, #history, #science, #technology, #ask meme, #[character name]-core

personal tags: #sashene creates -> my art (fanfiction, fanart, memes, edits) #sashene's drawer of wips -> my fic ideas #sashene commentates -> my meta #sashene reads [...] / #sashene watches [...] / #sashene plays [...] -> liveblogging my thoughts and reactions to books/comics/movies/tv shows/anime/manga/video games that i'm reading/watching/playing #sashene answers -> my answers to asks that i've received #sashene rambles -> my personal posts #sashene’s diary -> other people's posts that describe me well

(i don't tag nsfw posts and rarely use trigger warnings. consider this blog "not rated" and "creator chose not to use archive warnings")

[nomadthingsunderscore]

Angel of darkness 🎶

[three-semicolons]

One of my favorite schticks is Dick narrating some exchange between himself and Bruce and being able to see, from the panel, that he is completely downplaying it. Unfathomable levels of omission.

He’s Bruce number one defender even when Bruce is wrecking his shit. That man cannot do wrong.

Nuh uh. No way. Bruce? Never. A misunderstanding, it must be.

[fangs4faggots]

i think we should start openly mocking male creatives who can't figure out how to write women. like actually i think it's embarrassing that it took elliot page transitioning for christopher nolan to give him a good role. why did it take like ten years to get the first female lead in a marvel movie? why is it a Known Fact that stephen king can't write women? why is 50% of the population omitted from large ensemble works? i asked my friend to name a movie directed by a man with a majority female cast and he said ghostbusters 2016. ghostbusters. ghostbusters. g

[silversoulwithlove]

Jayeddie

[jejejijiju]

Nice day in Gotham

[charliejaneanders]

Every single craft has been paying “The Passion Tax” for generations. This term (coined by author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant) — and backed by scientific research — simply states that the more someone is passionate about their work, the more acceptable it is to take advantage of them. In short, loving what we do makes us easy to exploit.

Guest Column: If Writers Lose the Standoff With Studios, It Hurts All Filmmakers

[s-leary]

If the phrase “vocational awe” isn’t part of your lexicon yet, stop scrolling and read Fobazi Ettarh:

Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.

—Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I see it in every field I’ve ever worked in: publishing, open source software development, higher education. It describes pretty much every industry that relies on creativity, altruism, or both.

[queerdo-mcjewface]

@amarocit

[amarocit]

I think it is crucial we remember that “vocational awe” as a concept is two-pronged: it is meant to describe how librarians (& anyone working in a profession often described as a “vocation”, such as teachers, healthcare professionals, etc) are made “easy to exploit” because they are primed not to see their job as “just a job”, and it is also meant to underline a mechanism by which members of those professions will virulently defend their jobs & the institutions they are part of against any critique, most notably critiques that attempt to articulate how those institutions & those professions can be oppressive & violent & perpetuate exploitative & bigoted norms within society:

I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic [emphasis mine], and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. [emphasis mine]

& further down:

By the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. Therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianship’s center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. But because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution [emphasis mine], when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. Recently, Lesley Williams of Evanston, Illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. Although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the “Connecticut Four,” her actions were regarded as unprofessional.

Ironically, this focus on the way-s in which librarians et al are “victimised” by our professional context, while disregarding the aspect of “vocational awe” which is meant to critique all the ways in which members of “vocational” professions will close ranks & lock shields against any kind of analysis that does not accept those institutions as always-already perfect, could be considered an example of vocational awe!

If libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. As detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to God and their fellow man. Out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians. Another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on. Similarly, many Christians describe their religious faith as “serving God,” and to do so requires a life spent in service. Christians often reference Mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and God’s sake.

We are advocating for ourselves & our rights as workers while emphasising, ceaselessly & with great insistence, all the “selfless” ways in which we “serve” our community & how our “self-sacrificing” “passion” for our “mission” makes us “easy to exploit”. We are not advocating for ourselves by pointing out that a library is just a workplace, that being a librarian is just a job, & that if my cousin who works at an insurance company isn’t expected to buy work materials with her own money, to put in unpaid overtime as a matter of course, to accept that her vacation days are basically a fiction, to see her duties inflate constantly with no acknowledgment or compensation, to cobble together part-time positions for the whole of her career, etc, then it shouldn’t be expected of us either & really shouldn’t be expected of anyone. We are not deconstructing the outlooks that underlie vocational awe, we are reifying them.

What makes us “worthy” of advocacy & of protection are, specifically, our willingness to “sacrifice” ourselves for others & for the “good” of the community. This marks us as “exceptional”, “different” from “other” workers who are “different” from us because they are not motivated by “passion” (which like, for “passion” read “vocation”), & makes us unable to identify all the points of contact between our experiences on the job & that of a lot of other people in service positions. Our experiences of “exploitation” (quotes here because good gd, we do in fact have a white-collar job indoors & I think there is something a little obscene sometimes about the ways in which our profession discusses our issues when our offices are cleaned by like undocumented women of colour to whom most of us never even talk & with whom most of us feel no particular solidarity as workers) are not unique & are in fact common across many public-facing industries such as food service or retail - would you believe me if I told you how much overlap there is between my professional experiences as a librarian & that of friends who work the floor at Starbucks or at Aldi? A lot of the manipulative & coercive tactics their bosses use to make them accept job creep, excessive & haphazard scheduling, danger on the job, overmonitoring & micromanagement, but also the pressures they encounter when they take sick days or vacation days, etc are carbon copies of what I’ve seen happen to me & others within libraries. Bosses are bosses are bosses, whether your profession is one that is typically treated as a “vocation” within public discourse or not; it is not true that the ways in which we are mistreated are completely & wholly unique to us. When we accept this framing, we are essentially positioning librarianship as “set apart” from other professions, libraries as completely distinct from any other type of workplace & as wholly unique among them, & ourselves as essentially different from other workers, in exactly the way that “vocational awe” as a concept intends to critique!

As I mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. Those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. Librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. Librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career.

We are reinforcing those norms when we focus exclusively on how much we sacrifice for our communities & how “passionate” we are about our jobs as the primary reason why our communities should care about what happens to us - when the reality is, what would actually help us is an ability to see & recognise all the ways in which we are not unique, in which even within industries that are not identified as relying on “altruism” & “creativity” (which like, if you think there’s no altruism or creativity in working retail or in like industrial soldering or whatever I’ve got news for you, but that’s a different topic - who is marked as having a “creative” or “altruistic” job in our discourse? why is the power plant maintenance worker who gets up time & time again in the middle of the night to solve complex, urgent industrial problems with no standard solutions, using his hands & his intellect & his imagination, & this so that people will have continuous uninterrupted access to electricity, not considered to have a “creative” or “altruistic” profession within those discussions?), workers are exploited in ways that will be familiar & recognisable to us. We cannot use vocational awe as a conceptual delimiter between professions because that actually defeats the purpose of vocational awe as a framework. We are accepting & perpetuating the idea that we are markedly & measurably “different” from other workers, & we render ourselves unable to analyse the institutions we are a part of as perfectible structures which are not ontologically good or even ontologically different from other workplaces but which are, rather, just workplaces, with bosses & employees, & where exploitation will occur along lines and through tactics that are familiar to many, many people across a whole gamut of professions.

I think the essential conclusion is this quote:

It is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women. Not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood, characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been “complicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.” These white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century U.S. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and Americanization programs, projects “whose purpose was to inculcate European ethnics into whiteness”.

When we focus on our own victimhood, our own selflessness, our own defencelessness in the face of exploitation, the fact that we are just “too good for our own good” - what norms are we reinforcing within our profession? What foundational myths are we repeating & perpetuating, & what needs to they serve in us? Where do our loyalties lie, & what, ultimately, are we defending?

[amarocit]

My point, I think, made more pithily: “vocational awe” functions in a lot of professional discussions as a marker of noble victimhood (”too good for our own good” is really the best phrasing here), when in reality the most prototypical example of vocational awe might be cops. & in their case we recognise the inability to produce or even accept any critique of the institution they’re a part of as dangerous & violent, not as an indicator of selflessness & meekness especial (while also, rightfully, not being especially concerned with the way in which vocational awe is used & weaponised by their bosses to make them work round the clock, weekends, to call them back from holiday, etc, & not really developing a huge amount of interest in the way in which belief in the police's "mission" most likely contributes to high burnout rates among cops - we recognise cops' vocational awe as something that is first & foremost dangerous to others). We also see how this esprit de corps & stubborn loyalty to both the institution & the concept of policing - perceived as impossible to perfect & always without reproach, both today & historically - become dangerously powerful reactionary forces that are typically turned towards a kind of oppressive “doubling-down”, particularly around matters of white supremacy & racism. How would discussions around the concept of “vocational awe” change if we recognised it as something we have in common with the police?

[archivisa]

Stephanie feels anyone

[mazeeque]

discowing & jaybin for @trafalgarlovr via @dcforgaza <3

[cashmerecorey]

For your art requests would you perhaps be able to do a Helena B/Dinah L romanc kinda thing please

yes 👍

[creetchure]

my beautiful son sigh

[orphetoon]

yeah so you remember when my old mentor told me that my path to revenge against the evil king would only leave me cold and empty? yeah it turns out that was a lie. yeah i actually feel really great now. the blood washed off my hands super easy

[arch-aeology]

Roy and baby Lian bc I miss them

[janmisali]

legalize copyright infringement

[janmisali]

to be clear this is a fully sincere political belief that I have. I am pro copyright infringement and in fact anti "asking for permission to make derivative art"

[three-semicolons]

In example #???? of mind rape (literally this time) that gets swept under the rug thereafter: Raven’s mind manipulation. It’s so frustrating how unnecessary it was. It’s simultaneously overindulgent and underbaked, and it happens right after Brother Blood. There was not any stop gap between when Dick was controlled then and now.

Essentially, post Brother Blood, Raven is able to experience her emotions. She loves Dick. This, along with her not understanding why she shouldn’t manipulate emotions if the manipulation is “positive”, causes her to conclude that the solution is to make Dick love her.

It goes exactly as it sounds.

The entire thing is contingent on Dick still being unsure of his feelings after the VERY RECENT 1+ YEAR LONG MIND MANIPULATION from Brother Blood. His struggle with reality and his own self is such that he can’t commit to Kory, since their entire relationship occurred while influenced.

Raven takes this wound and uses it as a wedge. It starts with enhancing his own doubts, introducing extra hesitation where there wouldn’t otherwise be.

Then it leads to further romantic feelings being injected, which Dick is demonstrated to be startled by after the fact. ALL OF THESE romantic thoughts or actions are all done via compulsion. THESE ARE NOT INNATE.

It’s vile. It is, again, contingent on Dick already being so bent and broken that he cannot trust his own actions or thoughts. To manipulate him by itself would be bad, but done on the back of such prolonged mental abuse is exceptionally horrible.

It both acts as a form of non-con and exacerbates his other mental problems post-Blood. He was already struggling to reconcile his own perception, his own sense of self, and to further further treat him as a thing to be possessed rather than a person worthy of their own self-agency is so frustrating.

But then there’s the dreams. The fucking dreams.

For an entire month, Dick is forced to have dreams of having sex with Raven. This is rape. The fact that he perceives repeated non-con in a fake world rather than the real one does not negate that he experiences it.

And, luckily, this is where it ends. AFTER A FUCKING MONTH. But even how it ends is maddening, because as you can see starts to happen in the next dialogue boxes, the entire situation is waved off as “whoops, you know, she was just in love with you”. Capped off splendidly, after Kory takes Raven on a trip of self discovery and she learns to delineate her emotions, by a fucking joke where the punchline is one final forced fucking kiss. HAHA VERY FUNNY. HAHA. ARE YOU LAUGHING? ARE YOU?

I can’t villainize Raven, given she was ignorant of the harm (though you’d think after Wally and the remorse she showed for making him fall in love with her for only a little while, this would have been established as a bad thing). But Marv had to fucking do it, so it was done. And just because there’s no villain doesn’t mean there’s no victim. Dick has been controlled again for the umpteenth time. His confidence and his agency and his fucking EVERYTHING are IN FUCKING SHAMBLES. EVERYTHING. HE CANNOT THINK OR SPEAK OR BE WITHOUT ANOTHER AGENT CONTROLLING HIM. AND THERE IS NOTHING DONE ABOUT THIS.

And it’s not too long after this that the next mental manipulation occurs. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU BE DICK GRAYSON AND EVER ACCEPT YOUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY AGAIN? HOW CAN YOU EVER FEEL SAFE AGAIN? I FUCKING HATE IT HERE, MARV. WHY DID YOU MAKE RAVEN DO THIS???

[ohhhdeeer404]

My poor boy can't get a break!!! And another instance of his SA trauma being brushed under the rug LIKE PLEASE LET HIM HEAL FROM IT OR ATLEAST ACKNOWLEDGE IT!!!! And for Raven I feel bad but also like whyyyyy did your write her to do this??? I would like to know if this was put of left field or?

[thebestestbat]

i want to start off my reply by stating some points i agree with OP on: 

this storyline is an example of dick being victimized sexually/raped

marv wolfman did not write the storyline with the gravity it deserved

this situation and similar has happened to the character dick grayson many times, and is upsetting 

my reply is not meant to rebut any of these arguments or the general content of OP’s post. i am writing this reply as a raven fan, because i think that understanding raven’s character and where she is coming from during this arc is:

interesting from a raven fan perspective

gives additional depth to dick’s trauma and overall the “titans as a group of abused teens” vibe

as a fan of raven and NTT, i want to talk about where raven was at when the arc happened, by discussing the three plot points that happened to raven immediately beforehand, and then going over the arc itself. i hope i can contextualize the magnitude of what she is dealing with at the time, and this arc’s significance in raven’s story of overcoming abuse. this is not to minimize what dick was also dealing with, a list which includes raven’s mind control.

all those caveats being given, let me yap about raven.

trigger warnings in this post: rape, parent/child incest

-

the Terror of Trigon arc happens not very long before the arc where raven mind controls dick into loving her. TOT includes several instances of raven’s bodily autonomy being violated in ways that are differing levels of metaphor for sexual abuse. in TOT, her father trigon wears raven down for months by appearing in her nightmares (many of which include raven being naked and other imagery that implies sexual abuse), until he is able to possess her. this is an example of the type of nightmare:

trigon has wanted to claim raven since she was a child, and is explicit in this:

trigon and demon raven attempt to conquer earth. in the battle, demon raven dies. azar possesses raven’s body in order to destroy trigon. she reveals that this was always her plan for raven. she raised raven, and taught her to deny all of her emotions to keep trigon at bay, knowing that trigon would eventually possess her anyway, and this would give azar the opportunity to possess raven herself, and end him. in TOT, raven’s body is literally taken over by her father and the woman who primarily raised her. here is raven's body possessed by azar:

raven returns from her TOT death as white-cloak raven, seen as above. this white cloak is a representation of her freedom from fear of trigon, as he has been defeated. she also is freed from azar’s rules against feeling emotions, since she no longer has to worry that she will be possessed by trigon when she feels strong emotions.

there are two main things that happen to raven between the end of TOT and the arc where raven mind-controls dick.

the first (prior to her wearing the white cloak in life) is that she was kidnapped by a group of people who realized that she had healing powers and used her for them. raven’s healing powers work when she absorbs others’ pain, and she does not want to do this for them. they tied her to a stake and kept touching her to heal themselves by transferring their pain to her. visually, this included tearing her clothes off while she begged them to stop.

RIGHT after this (which itself was RIGHT after Terror of Trigon, in which she was possessed by her father in a way that had sexual abuse subtext, died, then possessed by azar), raven is kidnapped by brother blood and mind controlled by him, while brother blood also has dick captive (and has been mind controlling him for months and months). 

brother blood as a villain is a cult leader and has very uncomfortable vibes with women. when he interacts with raven, he tells her to “feel his godly power” and that they are a “matched pair”. mother mayhem, who is pregnant with brother blood’s child, sees raven as a rival: “how dare he hold her close now?” these are implications of sexual violence targeting raven. (in a later comic, teen titans 2003, brother blood explicitly targets raven for the purpose of marrying her and having a child with her.) also, the visual framing of brother blood and raven as well as brother blood’s rhetoric about taking over earth parallels trigon’s use/abuse of possessed demon!raven, a situation which raven has very recently gone through.

raven mind-controls dick into loving her right after dick and raven are rescued from brother blood’s compound. so, coming around to raven’s mindset during this arc and what she was dealing with: she was possessed by trigon. she died and was possessed by azar. she returned to life freed from her lifelong fear of/ban on feeling emotions. she is immediately kidnapped by people who torture and undress her, forcing her to use her powers. she escapes and is immediately kidnapped and mind controlled by brother blood. then, she and dick escape. 

prior to trigon’s defeat, raven pushes down her emotions, and is repeatedly shown as scared of sex and sexuality. this is true of raven’s character afterwards as well. some years after this arc, raven dates a man named eric forrester who sucks and we all hate him. here are some panels where raven talks about her fear of sex and intimacy.

during the mind control arc, raven is open to experiencing emotions for the first time. the first emotions she felt were terror, guilt, and pain when forced by her kidnappers to use her powers. then, she is once again cut off from her emotions by brother blood’s mind control. i don’t necessarily think that it is out of character for raven, having gone through all that, to latch on to dick, the leader of the titans and somebody who went through a part of her ordeal with her (though again, he was mind controlled by brother blood for far longer; i am not comparing their trauma here or saying one was worse or better). so, yes, she (thinks she) loves dick romantically.

i also don’t think that it is out of character for her to use her powers to force the matter. who in her life has modeled proper boundaries or relationships for her? even azar only preached that raven could not let herself feel emotions, while raising her in order to become possessed by trigon (in a metaphor for sexual abuse), and then possess raven’s body herself. of course that doesn’t make her actions okay, or change their effect on dick. dick is a victim here, but as OP says, there isn’t really a villain either… 

the arc begins when raven (who has already started to have feelings for dick) and dick are both wounded while fighting. dick is taken to the hospital while raven disappears into her soul self. she heals herself, and then uses her powers to heal dick. 

it is this moment when she uses her powers to mind control him into loving her. i argue this because, in a later issue in this arc, raven also heals another man, whom she is not in love with, and this is his reaction: 

this also, in my opinion, shows that raven did not maliciously, consciously do that. at the end of the arc, kory confronts raven and says as much:

when raven realizes what she has done (mind controlled dick; aka he did not kiss her out of his own will), she is overcome with guilt. the fact that raven did not know she was doing it doesn’t make her violation of dick’s body less real. but it is important to know. 

after she mind controls him, dick is confused about his own emotions, kisses her and apologizes, and has nightmares where he and raven have sex. the nightmares are extremely distressing to him. i will argue that these nightmares came from raven’s seed of mind control--however, the raven in the nightmares is not the real raven. she is not actively a part of these dreams. at this point, raven is several years away from dating eric forrester, during which time she is still not ready for sex and terrified of intimacy. again, this doesn’t change the fact that she initially mind controlled dick, thereby causing him to have these dreams in which he is raped. but i do not believe she is in the dreams as an active participant, nor does she realize that her mind control has caused dick to have them.

during this arc raven uses her powers often. here we see her use them on catcallers, only understanding what they want as ‘happiness’...this raven is not ready for sex! 

i very much agree with OP that there are parts of the writing in this arc that are minimized and the story itself doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what is being shown. for example, the “joke” kiss at the end is horrible, ignoring that dick is now and has been for months deeply upset by this, minimizing of sexual assault, and also something that i do see as out of character for raven (who has so many arcs that show her as afraid of sex and sexuality!). 

however, there are also places where the story shows us the negative consequences of raven’s actions. raven also uses her powers to force ‘positive’ emotions onto people other than dick, often people whom the titans are fighting. when she does this, the color of the panel backgrounds turns red. it also turns red when her mind control of dick is clear, such as when he kisses her. the implication here is that her actions are not good; the readers are not meant to take raven’s words about doing good/not doing harm at face value. we are meant to see the harm she is causing, though raven does not see it yet.

her powers work by her taking others’ pain into herself. azar taught her that this is good, this is what she was made for, and she should strive to not feel emotions (good or bad). this arc has a raven coming off a year or more of being tortured and controlled by others, now feeling free to feel emotions and be in charge of how she uses her powers for the first time in her life, with no idea of how to do so. the arc ends with raven asking kory for help, then realizing that she has friends (vic, etc). she is not a perfect victim. she has hurt dick deeply (and instead of a full honest discussion of his rape, the narrative hands us a “joke” kiss). but it is a step on her journey to recovering from a lifetime of abuse. raven’s story of dealing with and recovering from abuse is very meaningful to me and, in my opinion, one of the times (if not the only time lol) that marv wolfman wrote a good story about rape. so i wanted to speak up in defense of this arc a little bit. 

thank you for reading this post. 

[three-semicolons]

Yup yup all of everything said here. Reading it, I hear, makes you at least 12% cooler.

I’m a Dick-centric blog so I didn’t go in-depth on Raven’s side of things (I think I would die if I tried to write another 20 paragraphs of relevant context), but I would hope my clarification not to villainize Raven would be enough. She’s not evil. She was also a victim of Brother Blood, and Trigon before that, and numerous other circumstances.

There are no villains imo, just a lot of very very shittily-treated victims.

Anyways, thank you so very much for the additions @thebestestbat!

(Also just a side note, but I’ve always kind of wondered whether how she was conceived also plays a role? Because Trigon had also relied on significant mental influence on Arella, including both compulsions and distortion of form? While Raven understands this to be wrong, she also had no exposure to other, healthier forms of love, meaning it could be another way in which her circumstances failed her.)

[ravensvirginity]

Oh yeah, re: your question, I would definitely say that's part of it too (though perhaps not as big of a part as what @thebestestbat already outlined). Going back to the Eric Forrester arc again, how Raven was conceived still impacting her to this day is a big theme in her struggles in her relationship with Eric.

(Though I will say, I tend to read Raven saying "I'm traumatized because of what Trigon did to my mother" as kind of a shorthand for that as well as everything else, because they couldn't explicitly reference Raven being a victim of incest, even if subtextually it seems quite evident. The main idea is that Raven is scared of sex because of her father.)

Also, I have to recommend this interview from George Perez about Raven's sexuality:

I would say that Raven was set up for failure by the way she was raised. She was raised to internalize the idea that she was born wrong and bad because she was a child of rape. That already would be more than traumatizing enough, but then as she grows up she's repeatedly sexually assaulted. Poor Raven just does not have a good life 😔

I would also just like to say: yes, Trigon did 'trick' Arella by appearing to her in a human form initially, but a very common misconception is that the trickery was the main traumatic event for Arella. It wasn't. Trigon didn't let her go immediately after revealing his true form. He held her captive for several days longer and violently raped her.

Again, this is an extremely common misconception, and maybe not the most important distinction to make in the long run, but I think it is worth pointing out that emotional manipulation wasn't really the main abuse happening with Trigon and Arella. If anything, I would say that Raven manipulating other people's emotions without understanding what she's doing or why it's wrong is more something she gets from Azar - the mother figure who manipulated and abused her, who Raven still sees as a goddess who only had her best intentions at heart.

[sasheneskywalker]

Detective Comics (1937) #590 // Batman (1940) #424

[astrovvitches]

grave digger