the moral decay of andrew graves

[sphacelating]

let’s get one thing straight and i will generously explain this to you people like you’re five. rape is not about sex, it’s about enforcing power and control over another person, taking their autonomy and agency away from them in one deeply impactful and life-altering act, and if you analyze the rape scene in decay where ashley sexually assaults andrew through a lens where this was them “having messed up dubcon incest sex” as if it had anything to do with sex, you’ve completely lost the plot before you even started writing your rape apologist thinkpiece.

stop watering it down and call it what it was: rape. go unpack why you’re allergic to using the only appropriate word for what played out on screen, and why you’re so disinclined to validate a male victim of rape and a female sexual aggressor. nemlei shows you an unconventional abusive dynamic, quashes the lie that only men abuse and rape and women are incapable of it right in front of your eyes, rubs your face in how this works out in ashley’s favor a dozen times, and you miss the whole message because challenging society-wide misconceptions about abuse and gender stereotypes would put you way out of your comfort zone.

i have deep appreciation for both of these characters, individually and together, and the sexual assault scene was shockingly unambiguous and very hard to watch. it was uncomfortable and upsetting and presented to us as anything but sexy. and yet here you people are, talking about how the siblings’ first time together was a disaster, framing it as barely more than a messy drunken mistake between dysfunctional codependent individuals— toxic, tragic, angsty. you’re denying andrew victimhood in a situation where he absolutely is one, piece of shit abusive sick creep who’s going to hell or not, and cushioning ashley from the fact that she added rape to her long list of morally appalling offenses.

she dehumanizes her brother so completely that she sees nothing wrong with raping him. that’s how deep her entitlement goes. andrew isn’t allowed to say no to her, deny her anything she wants, refuse her when she demands something from him, and this includes demanding that he has sex with her. her aggressive emotional manipulation and coercion causes him so much distress and is so indistinguishable from the way she treated him in childhood that he regresses into a flashback from the day he was coaxed into murdering nina. you know, one of the worst things to ever happen to him that fucked him up mentally beyond repair, orchestrated by ashley then used against him as manipulative leverage his whole life.

all of that said, let’s wrap this up by returning to my original point. it’s pretty evident to me that you’re all opposed to seeing this as rape because you think rape is about sexual enjoyment and fulfillment, which ashley was undeniably not getting out of this, and in your heads, her not enjoying the act that she forced andrew to participate in any more than he did means she cannot be a rapist. she assaulted andrew to tighten her metaphorical grip on him when she felt it slipping, to reassert control because she is only stable when she has significant power over him, and he was shifting the scales too much for comfort. there you fucking go.

but to you, if she didn’t exploit andrew for sexual pleasure because she was fucking horny, then it doesn’t fit your false idea of what rape is. you’re neck deep in the myth that rape is about sex rather than power. until you change your frankly real concerning outlook on sexual assault, i suppose you’ll keep spewing this insulting garbage in the tcoaal tags and spitting in the faces of rape victims in this space.

[sphacelating]

sometimes i call you ‘the husband’ lmao

i’m perfectly fine with being known as that around here.

[sphacelating]

why do ppl always forget that ashley chained andrew up so that he doesn’t kill her??? like helllo??? it’s not for the lol

she did it because he tried to leave the demon realm without her, and in the scene where andrew wakes up in the apartment there’s not even a mention of that being the motive.

she is indeed afraid that he’ll kill her once she releases him, because she has kept him chained up, and he’s clearly extremely displeased with her specifically over being “imprisoned in that shithole” with a chain around his ankle while she’s off gathering souls. the first time she expresses that she’s afraid he’s going to murder her again during this ordeal is when he explodes because she continues to refuse to release him and give him the keys. but media literacy is in short supply around here.

[sphacelating]

in the tcoaal fandom, people believe that you can turn a person into a rapist by hitting them, and they would absolutely never have done such a thing if you just hadn’t punched them.

[sphacelating]

what would be your reaction if andrew actually does rape ashley in a future chapter??

anybody here who’s read my fic can probably make an educated guess.

[sphacelating]

my hot take on S&S is that if andrew never lied & beaten ashley up then she wouldn't have responded by raping him & both continuing the cycle of abuse & rape in the new apartment

[sphacelating]

i’ll share my thoughts on this one more time, as it’s seemingly the only thing people bark about in my inbox to this day, months later, and nemlei’s devlog update provided additional context.

andrew “desperately tries to recreate the experience” where ashley enthusiastically initiated sex with him while drunk and appeared to thoroughly enjoy herself, unrestricted by her otherwise crippling emotional hangups about sex. it’s very telling that people chose to vehemently insist on a narrative where andrew attempting to recreate this encounter meant plying ashley with alcohol in order to take advantage of her in an intoxicated state, supposedly because he prefers to force himself on her while drunk, rather than trying to recreate ashley enjoying sex.

given that ashley seems able to overcome her sexual repression (largely due to internalized misogyny and her belief that women who enjoy sex are whores) when she’s under the influence and too intoxicated to care, the fact that andrew has tried “to no avail” would imply that the alcohol is not involved when they fuck after that. 1+1 = 2. her inhibitions about being allowed to enjoy sex with her dignity intact remain an impossible obstacle, and andrew cannot successfully replicate that enthusiasm in her when she’s sober no matter how hard he tries.

additionally, andrew not wanting to feel like he is forcing an act on his sister that she only consents to for his enjoyment, is somehow the mentality of a rapist? cut the crap. prior to ashley sexually assaulting him, andrew repeatedly emphasized the importance of her genuine consent, stressed that he did not want to sleep with her if she didn’t want it, and ashley went ahead and forced herself on him when this made him continue to refuse even when he was shitfaced drunk.

if andrew stopped initiating sex with ashley in shots and such and relieved her of the supposedly horribly unwanted duty of enduring it, do you genuinely believe that she would be happy that her brother no longer wants to fuck her? that she’d be pleased with that development, as opposed to losing her whole head over this perceived rejection? the devastating prospect of andrew finding her undesirable and unfuckable? over andrew losing interest in fucking his wife because he’s not attracted to her enough and can’t get it up for her anymore?

if so, you’re being dishonest. we’d be looking at a horribly negative reaction from ashley and if you ask me, it would most likely result in a desperate second round of her aggressively trying to convince him to have sex with her again, because he’s never been less allowed to not want her than he is now. they’re married, he chose her, chose holy matrimony and this shitshow of an unhappy ever after. he owes her that.

or are we supposed to pretend that she is a better person than she was prior to their mutually abusive downward spiral? that she respects her brother rather than resents him as much as she loves him? would you argue that she’d have newfound reservations about crossing andrew’s boundaries, the brother who’s now beating the shit out of her? you don’t think ashley believes that she’s owed his romantic and sexual attention and his undying eternal love?

not a chance. that is all, carry on.

[sphacelating]

"Double noncon rape" is crazy. Just making up shit to win an arguement. Also "noncon rape"? All rape is non-consentual?? That whole ask reads as the last paragraph of an essay.

i haven’t the faintest clue what that is supposed to mean. rape is not “sexual acts you voluntarily participate in but don’t enjoy” without any coercion involved, and if somebody believes that a person simply cannot consent unless they enjoy the sex they’re saying yes to, they do not actually understand consent. that’s not my problem. nemlei made a pretty damn clear statement to debunk the idea that the sex in shots and such wasn’t consensual with the “andrew and ashley have sex” update— the choice of title alone says enough, they’re having sex, nobody is being raped. unless, of course, you’re delusional enough to believe that nemlei would do her own characters so wrong she would describe a rape scene as them “having sex”.

it does not take a genius to put two and two together and conclude that it was posted in response to those takes becoming widespread among certain fans, to prevent blatant misinterpretation of the story she’s writing in her game. if people want to continue being wrong and ignore that they’ve been corrected by nemlei herself, that’s their business, but i’m certainly not obligated to entertain it.

[sphacelating]

If Ashley “deserves” getting beaten up by Andrew, then apply the SAME fucking logic to him because of the things he did to Ashley, Julia, and other people. Otherwise, it's double standards and hypocrisy.

They only see one side of the perspective while completely ignoring the other in favor of biases.

In Shots and Such, Andrew thought about baby trapping Julia, forced Ashley in a shotgun kiss, wanted Ashley drunk so he could have “accidental” sex. He did lie to Ashley about Julia twice during the interrogation scene (the abuse was NOT equal).

Andrew took it too far with the beatings when Ashley interrogated him while they both blamed and lied to each other. So if that didn't happen, then the stuff that happened later on, such as the double noncon rape, wouldn't either.

In that route, their toxicity is amplified, and neither party is willing to communicate and admit the accountability of their actions.

The game explicitly states that Ashley’s issues are CAUSED by Andrew’s issues.

They chose not to actually fix themselves and not to communicate.

Andrew decides not to help Ashley because they're both miserable on said route anyway.

Even after Ashley’s meltdown, Andrew is STILL actively trying to recreate the experience to no avail. And based on the ending, the noncon stuff is still happening.

I don’t understand how people can cheer for Ashley getting beaten up and then sympathizing with Andrew during the double noncon rape. It’s weird to me.

considering i have never said anything even close to “ashley deserves to get beat up” and talk extensively about everything under the sun that andrew specifically does wrong, i ain’t reading all that. and i have no genuinely no idea what “double noncon rape” is supposed to be.

[sphacelating]

when i read certain tcoaal takes, the only thing i can really do is pray for y’all that you never end up intimately entangled with a manipulative mentally ill person with abusive tendencies. none of you would make it out alive, i fear.

[nesphia]

[sunshine-jesse]

So not only were Andrew and Ashley both drunk, ASHLEY WAS THE ONE WHO INITIATED IT.

@sphacelating

The two of us are gonna be smug about this forever, I hope y’all know.

[sphacelating]

if i had started a harassment campaign by calling people in my fandom disgusting rape apologists for refusing to validate my baseless headcanon, urged everyone to block them for being awful deplorable stupid people with no media literacy and then had my supposedly unambiguous and rock solid interpretation of canon debunked by nemlei herself in a dev log update, i’d be feeling pretty embarrassed today.

[dead--maggots]

// silent hill f mild spoilers?

i can't believe kotoyuki is considered a groomer and a pedophile when it's said in the story that he and hinako are the same age and also like each other. and also, it is stated that kotoyuki was groomed to be the perfect husband and head of the clan since he was a child.

both hinako and kotoyuki were victims of the patriarchal system. hinako was the one who free them both from it, and changed kotoyuki's views and his way of living.

people saying "illierate," "you didn't get it," "not the main point of the story" are crazy or just go with their moral panic and don't want to dig deeper (which is strange as hell because this is a silent hill game?). silent hill f has many themes that we can also pay attention to.

[solns]

i’m pretty sure the people who say those ass takes are people who haven’t actually played the game and only saw snippets from streamers or screenshots lmao

[dead--maggots]

trust me when i assure u these ppl are silent hill main accounts. who post silent hill content on the daily. and are also playing the game. that's what the survival horror community come to.

[sphacelating]

i think people get (arguably rightfully) itchy when people say men can be “victims” of the patriarchy, rather than impacted negatively by a system they simultaneously greatly benefit from, so they reject that by refusing to engage with the narrative in silent hill f from a point of view where the male characters are anything but perpetrators and the game’s villains/antagonists. which results in an extremely reductive interpretation of the plot, because this is a silent hill game. we’re not being spoonfed feminist analysis for 12 hours of gameplay where the male characters exist to represent the patriarchy personified so you can hate and kill it with a lead pipe.

[sphacelating]

Andrew and Ashley are both victims and perpetrators from generational trauma and abuse.

Both of them have issues tangled up together and have some self reflection in the Cliffhanger route.

They both raped each other while the other was drunk as fuck in Shots and Such ending and lived an even more miserable life.

These two can be both viewed as sympathetic and hateful simultaneously for their characters and agency.

i certainly won’t object to the point you’re making, but i’ve made my stance clear on comparing ashley raping andrew to the drunken encounter described in shots and such. that’s not discourse i wish to return to and it became abundantly clear last time that it’s not a topic people are equipped to respectfully and civilly disagree on.

[natsuhi-supporter-archived]

[sunshine-jesse]

Behold, the two types of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley fans.

[sunshine-jesse]

Another confession post: I feel the arguments about Andrew and Ashley being equally culpable as corruptive influences on each other are unfair and/or lack perspective. Even setting aside how Decay Part 1 showcased that Andy was flatly denied and castigated by Renee if he ever tried to distance from Leyley or pushback against her brattiness until he eventually gave up completely on even the subconscious level.

Like sure, Andrew is a chronic enabler, and an argument can be made that he subtly encourages her worst quirks both intentionally (deliberately picking verbal slapfights even though he claims to despise when they bicker, early instances of egging on petty mischief) & unintentionally (his default response to her tantrums is appeasement), but he’s rarely if ever the driving force in Ashley causing serious harm. She proposes malicious courses of action entirely on her own every time. She’d be exactly the same without him there, and if her worst excesses were toned down it’d only be because she didn’t have a larger body to hide behind if she got herself into a situation that poses legitimate physical risk to her.

I’d say the story also tacitly lectures against a reading where Andrew is the root of what’s wrong with Ashley: What is the single topic of all of his constant soul-searching, the issue that the Narrator is perpetually snarking about and raking him over the coals for? Andrew’s own, internal Moral Decay; his entwined lust & desire for murderous payback against Ashley, his barely restrained contempt towards other people besides her, his unconscious love of violence and growing habit of solving all his problems through killing to make himself feel big and strong. Him fucking up Ashley by spoiling her as kids is incidental and ancillary to the condemnation the narrative incessantly screeches for over the crimes he commits by his own hand, and as you yourself point out his admission of guilt on that front is framed as more wrong-headedness and/or abused person logic from him in that moment.

The only thing Andrew did wrong (specifically on the Leyley front) is not firmly curtailing her when there was still a chance of instilling a sense of ethics in her. And if we’re gonna advocate treating Ashley with kid gloves because she’s mentally ill (despite you posting multiple times disapproval of fan-diagnoses, a stance which is officially shared by Nemlei) then I don’t think it’s right or reasonable to hold Andrew culpable for not standing firm on that course of action when basically his every formulative experience aimed to actively beat the wish to let Leyley face consequences out of his head (some of the time literally).

It's complicated. I don't know if I'd call either a corruptive influence to the other, so in that sense I'd definitely make the claim that they're equally culpable.

What I will make, however, is the claim that the two of them will corrupt themselves without the influence of the other. I'm going to speak on Andrew first because you summed up Ashley rather well here, although I still have more to add.

Both of them were deeply fucked up people for a long time. In Andrew's case, it's somewhere between heavily implied and outright stated that what Andrew loves most about Ashley is the parts of her that reassure him; that give him permission to do whatever he wants. Even before three months of isolation with Ashley, he lusts after her, feels empty without her, and has violent sexual fantasies all of his own accord. Between that and the fact that he was fucking blushing when he heard Ashley's violent calls, it seems like Ashley's abuse of him (and others) gave him what he wanted: A convenient excuse (and valid reason) to self-victimize, Ashley's attention, the chance to defend and advocate for her (fulfilling his fantasy of being a good big brother), etc.

(I use that phrasing on purpose, btw. He didn't want the abuse itself, it just filled specific emotional needs he had.)

Andrew's mindset shouldn't be too far removed from how a lot of people who have had chronically abusive relationships think, although perhaps few of them feel comfortable framing it that way. Many abuse victims- especially ones who were victims from such a young age- have a very unfortunate tendency of building their emotional needs around what abuse gives them, which is part of why it's so hard to leave.

To name an example so people HOPEFULLY don't misconstrue what I mean:

Andrew needs to feel like a good brother and putting up with Ashley's shit is good person behavior to him. Defending her from other people makes him feel like a good brother, too, given his fantasy of being her protector.

She also gives him excuses to vent his violent tendencies, all the way back to episode 1:

"That's a lot of meat."

"Though, I mean….. Is it still illegal if we didn't kill the guy?"

They were on the same page all along, and his first concern was illegality. Many such cases repeat throughout the story, leading to the narrator saying the following:

Which feeds into the whole "Ashley didn't make him be anything he wasn't already" thing.

HOWEVER.

It's frankly victim blaming to judge Andrew for not enforcing boundaries on Ashley from a young age knowing what we know (retroactively apologizing to Andrew for that one. I'm sorry, my precious blorbo, I didn't know how bad it was). It's also accurate to say that she didn't "corrupt" him so much as enable him... in the same ways he enables her, although I disagree that fighting is part of that.

But what we do know, thanks to Decay pt.1, is that Andrew setting a firm boundary is good for both of them. So, you raise another very good point here with that in mind, because it's shown that treating Ashley with kid gloves is actually the worst possible thing someone can do for her. She NEEDS to be treated like an adult, taken seriously, have her merits (and, as an extension, the threats she can pose) be acknowledged and treated with the gravity they deserve, etc etc.

Treating her with kid gloves is the opposite of what she needs, because the moment she does any of that, she starts to feel out a new dynamic, self-reflect, and maybe even change!

Anyways Deltarune came out so that's gonna consume my mind for the next week or so, toodles.

[sphacelating]

it’s secret admirer anon . uuummmmm . i miss you

i wasn’t aware i had one. i’ll try to post more when life allows me a breather, someone’s gotta keep the tags alive.