tatraas replied to your post “Reading CRUEL BEAUTY, and I’m almost finished, but I’m having a real...”
you're absolutely right and you should say it and also i'm doing my best to make my girls angry and bitter too
i’m getting vivid flashbacks to all the fiction i’ve watched/read that has had this bullshit “women should forgive and not get angry, even if they’re survivors of abuse/trauma” nonsense shoehorned into it. CRUEL BEAUTY doesn’t do this, so i’m exempting it from this particular rant, but the first season of True Blood had this fucking AWFUL MOMENT where Sookie tells Bill about her “creepy uncle,” and she confides in him this truth because she trusts him and wants him to know a little more about her past, however ugly that past might be. And Bill is rightly horrified and wants to help her, but she takes on this bullshit saintly stance of ~no it’s okay, it could’ve been worse.~
But Bill doesn’t think that’s fair. So he goes to find the guy and attacks him.
The entire dramatic moment after that is Sookie getting mad at Bill for doing this to a predator. And the show wants us to take her side, or see what Bill did as wrong and bad. How fucking tone deaf can you fucking get? If my vampire sweetheart wanted to kill my abusers, I’d fuckin let him and not care.
The book, CINDER, does a similar thing with the “abuse survivor needs to forgive her abuser because ~ugly feelings are wrooooooooooooong and baaaaaaad~”, and it’s infuriating. It’s insulting. It’s bullshit.
The one female character in modern fiction I can think of who is allowed to be “ugly” is Clara Oswald. She isn’t a trauma survivor, so again this kinda misses the major point I’m going for here, but she was still allowed such tremendous growth and depth that I’m quite frankly shocked it even happened at all. She lied, she got angry and violent; she was reckless, impulsive, demanding; she could be vain and proud. She was also loving, caring, compassionate, self-sacrificing. She cared so much that it literally tore her to pieces thousands of times. She was an amazingly nuanced woman, layered in such a way that she was allowed all of these multi-faceted aspects without being trapped in any one. She wasn’t ~saintly and pure~, and she wasn’t some horrible harpy/shrew. She was a person. She was a woman. She was fantastic.
And in the case of trauma survivors, they aren’t allowed to be any of these things. If a story deals with a heroine learning to accept that she can be angry and bitter, then I’d be totally fine with these things being points of contention in the story. I’d be totally fine with having her internal struggle be a conflict--but it’s never about accepting her brutality. It’s all about denying it, rejecting it, and that’s fucking stupid.
So let’s make this a new thing, bab. Angry women who are allowed to be that way and many other moods besides.
