Why I woke up today with the overwhelming need to ask this ask, I don't know but -- it's a Tabula Rasa question: what about this story was self-indulgent to you?
Goodness what a question. What part wasn’t?
I mean for a start writing a crack AU of my own fic, very far removed from the original canon and therefore appealing to the four people who still remember flower show and thought it wasn’t angsty enough, that was pretty big for me, to deliberately write something with a very limited audience.
Also that there were some elements I just knew would be unpopular, like Raph and Esther, Eve both in concept and in execution, well, half the concept really. Everything about Esther, actually, I know people loved her but no one loved her like me. I know the genre is what made the story work, it’s impossible to hit an audience with the horrors of domestic abuse if they don’t already love the abuser as much as the characters, but I knew it would be a big thing to take on and I know some people hated it. I had to want and love all this stuff very much to put it on paper.
And you know the biggest thing was just... I’m not even sure how to express it. CW: DV coming up here. DV is terrible, and unless you’ve been there it’s hard to understand why smart, loving people stay, why people defend their abusers, why it’s hard to walk away, why people who should know better still victim blame, why it’s easy for a victim to blame themselves too. I’ve heard a lot of really shitty takes over the years from real misogynists to the most staunch feminists - it’s fucking hard to talk about and not have someone slap your hands away from it. The division of sympathy can turn from support to revictimisation real quick.
“The abuser is always at fault” quickly becomes “the victim has never done anything wrong” becomes “the abuser is an inhuman, unfathomable creature to hurt a blameless person” becomes “actually, now that he’s explained it, I can understand and she’s not blameless” becomes “maybe she’s just as bad as him” becomes “well if she didn’t antagonise him...”
It’s hard to say “I loved him and he was in real trouble and I couldn’t help him” without someone reminding you he’s an awful monster and even expressing sympathy for him is battered woman syndrome or something. It’s hard to say “he took me apart with a thousand paper cuts and I don’t know how much was abuse and how much was honesty” without someone pointing to police or hospital reports as the real abuse rather than a symptom of the cancer.
So, yeah, it was important to me, and self-indulgent, and fuck what other people think, to show it all play out. To make the absolute worst scene in that whole shitshow a moment when criticising the colour of someone’s jacket is as bad as any of the torture porn out there. I wanted a trauma narrative, I wanted to show at least a little slice of the reality of it, that it’s not an inhuman monster and a damsel in distress, there’s more to it. And I did it knowing it would tank my AO3 stats and that’s okay.
The hard part is sometimes reading through the comments and seeing I’ve done my job too well, reading how many people go “Well, maybe it was Aziraphale’s fault, really?” Which can be tough, but was also literally the point, to show how easily we fall into these patterns when it’s someone we care about.
Oh dear, this got a bit long, I hope I answered your question without traumatising you <3
