stop normalizing sexual assault in the roadrat fandom
(tw: rape, consent, csa, mention of ableism)
here comes my ass on the Kink Shame Train toot toot
so i was going back and reading some old roadrat fics that i hadn’t read yet and i came across one by an author named redKardinal that honestly made me sick to my stomach. it was tagged “iffy consent” and so i prepared myself mentally and to be honest i thought maybe it would be a positive healing story because it was called “tell me to stop.” it was so much worse than i imagined. roadhog never ever says that phrase while he’s violating junkrat, and it takes him until nearly the moment of climax to notice that anything is even slightly off, which i think is wildly out of character for someone who has supposedly known and loved their partner for years.
the fic starts with roadhog coercing junkrat into sex even though junkrat is occupied with something and clearly less than interested. roadhog goes on to rape junkrat because rat is afraid to say no, and when junkrat confesses that he didn’t want it (but didn’t know how to tell roadhog), roadhog says “that’s stupid” and then “forgives” junkrat when he apologizes. in the comments section the author said “junkrat needed to learn a valuable lesson” and, just…????? how much more victim-blaming can one be?! it’s sickening! i told them what i thought on the fic itself but hey, author of that fic, if you can see this, i’m calling you the fuck out. as someone who was in junkrat’s position numerous times as a teenager, it hurts so much to see that, and it hurts even more that all the other comments were so entirely uncritical.
[[[edit: the author has taken responsibility and apologized, which is really all i can ask of them, and i appreciate it.]]]
but like, there’s way too fucking much of this in fanfiction in general, but i see it a lot in the roadrat community. don’t get me wrong, i absolutely love this ship, but an age gap like that needs to be navigated with the utmost care (especially when dealing with mentally ill characters). people somehow think it’s sexy to have junkrat get intoxicated or be a virgin and have roadhog exert his massive size over him in a not-always-consensual way. something i’ve seen frequently is that it’s somehow cute and funny to have junkrat sexually harass roadhog because he’s just so crazy that he can’t help himself!!! (heavy sarcasm)
and who knows, young people and teenagers especially can have really toxic views of consent and that’s not necessarily their fault. it’s society’s fault and (god forbid) their guardians’ fault for normalizing rape culture but we should still be vigilant about it in our fandom communities. there’s probably a good amount of minors in this ship’s fandom despite the big age gap. i want to believe that i’ve never seen or read smut written by a minor but the internet can be a very bad place to enable that kind of shit (take it from someone who started writing smut at 15).
still, a lot of adults have bad views of consent too! and assuming that smut writers are all adults and know that minors will find a way to read smut, possibly to explore their own sexuality/gender identity (not saying it’s a good thing, but it happens), we need to be so careful about how we treat the topics of rape and consent in fic. i personally think it’s wrong and disgusting to put it in the same category of a kink like breathplay or bondage. sure, it can be a powerful plot point or a mechanism for character development (albeit very overused and insensitive if only used as shock value). BUT if you want to portray two characters as good, respectful people who love each other, DON’T WRITE ONE OF THEM RAPING THE OTHER ONE AND THEN FEELING NO REMORSE WHATSOEVER. sometimes bad shit happens in relationships and people forgive it, i’ve been there many times. but that’s not always what happens and it should absolutely not be normalized to just automatically forgive your partner of sexual harassment/abuse. that’s all i have to say on that.
dailybridgerton
andulkaphoto
izzy806
kianamaiart
