armand and lestat kind of have parallel human lives... given over to a christian place where they want to stay (though armand believes wholeheartedly it seems, whereas lestat did not), until their father(/brothers) come and drag them away while they protest... i think that lestat's wolves are like armand's kidnapping, the moment when they are at their lowest in fear and know that they can be destroyed. and yes, this makes nicki to lestat what marius is to armand... i must think on this
thinking of armand in the context of paradigms: Christian moral values vs art/beauty, human connection, sex. he is like the center of these two sides which are constantly fighting over him.
as a child he paints so beautifully he must be holy, and he only paints jesus christ. then he is kidnapped and raped over and over, which he perceives as sin, sin, HIS sin. then he emerges, without memories of his life before, into a world where painting is done for the beauty of it, for art's sake only, and sex is for pleasure, and he has sex so much, and indulges until he is destroyed. then a vampire cult burns all this down and he is back to goodness as a measure of God vs no God. then comes lestat who destroys the vampire clan and makes armand into the leader of a theatre--art again!
The Vampire Lestat has a theme of goodness, what is good, and then what is evil/sin? and the two opposing sides are: Christian moral values vs art/beauty, human connection, sex. (it is art as beauty, man-made, un-natural beauty. which makes gabrielle's longing to be alone in nature kind of the polar opposite of lestat's longing to connect via art...)
there's a complication which is the Meaninglessless. if the Christian moral values are correct, then there is meaning to the world and an answer at the end of life. a reason for suffering and a reason to be good. but in this world, art is sin, feeling good (for lestat) is sin. if Christianity is real, he is evil. but if it is not, then life is meaningless and there is no answer. suffering is meaningless, and goodness is also meaningless, so what is the point then of art, beauty, connection?
and then there's the hypocrisy, which is that even those who supposedly are devout and believe in god, can't actually stand behind those beliefs! do they really believe in god and miracles and etc? they don't!
and this is a theme throughout the series overall. i just came to say that i find nickistat so sad. this is the thing that ultimately got between them. nicki is a christian.
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"
very sad to be in love with a beautiful artist and then you realize that he thinks that 1) Art and 2) Your Relationship are both sin and that always to him you two are partners in sin. and you go crazy realizing the world is meaningless and you will never have answers, but at least there is art which can make people feel happy. but he thinks art is meaningless, he does it because he likes it, and doesn't think that his happiness or your happiness is good, because it is sin. and then you go to paris together yayyyy
ive been recently learning about high meat. which is like the carnivore diet but you also ferment the raw meat before eating it. and by 'ferment' i do believe you just let it rot. i cant decide if i think modern au trigon would be on a high meat diet or not. on the one hand, concept-wise it feels very trigon. on the other hand, it is, and i hate to be so blunt but truly it is the most "i am scared to death that i am not masculine enough" way to have an eating disorder. and that is not trigon's situation at all
As a raven fan i just want to thank you for your addition to that post. u very succinctly described her circumstances & mental state in a much nicer way than i would have, bc every time i think back to that part of ntt i'm struck with how truly awful of a time raven was having & how she literally did not catch any breaks at all
it is always a pleasure to post in the service of raven! i love her a lot and love talking about her. she has suffered so much ;-;
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???
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?
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
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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.
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.)
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.
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