why would you like this fucked up killing stalking? it's homophobic and romanticizing abuse. isn't this the opposide of what you're normally stand for...? i mean i thought you're against dc because of the way they treated barbara gordon's disability and such.
Itâs a horror comic
The genre is relatively new but has a solid history in subverting mainstream genres. When you see one in the theater itâs going to be meaningless because itâs just Hollywood âfunâ but real horror, like Killing Stalking, is about critiquing society.Â
Horror is the genre where disabled people finally got leading roles, itâs the genre that directly criticizes socially acceptable bigotry. I said this before when Iâve had similar questions but if nothing else I think the genre deserves a little respect even for just rape revenge movies. It began in the 60s/70s, motivated by the civil rights movement of the time, and is a sub genre of horror in which women are attacked and raped and the movie it self is about the women hunting down their rapists and killing them graphically. It was/is a backlash from the lack of support for rape survivors and criticism of the normality of sexual molestation in mainstream films.
Thatâs not for everyone, I get that. Itâs not meant to be for everyone. In fact, itâs not meant to really be for no one for it to get the job done.Â
They essentially delivered the statement that: there is a real destructive aftermath to rape and itâs all put upon the victim. What if women just got tired of it? What if women gave in and behaved as men do? And it can, if a man is sympathetic enough, put rape culture into better perspective for male viewers. They have to identify with the rapist and they donât get all the fun of seeing the rapist hunt down victims and torturing them, for the majority of the movies itâs about women and/or sexual and gender minorities banding together to destroy rapists.
Horror has been used to look at racism in similar ways. There are revenge stories for racism but horror at its best tends to be very diverse because it is indie and made by actual people, not demographic statistics.
Take Night of the Living Dead for example. Putting all the social commentary aside it was a 1968 film that happened to have a black man as the hero.
Ben is just a regular guy that gets swept up in a zombie apocalypse and the majority of the movie is about him being the only one with common sense and heâs constantly trying to keep the white people from getting themselves killed. Beautiful movie.
It strikes me now that these are two things I see people on tumblr saying they want to see: women loving and supporting each other while they murder rapists and a horror film where not only is the black characters arenât the first one to be killed, Night of the Living Dead is pretty much about how exhausting white people are.
Literature and art in general is useless unless it can spark interest and active dialogue. Killing Stalking definitely has done both of those. It starts off as a pretty classic mainstream horror premise but stays true to the genre by making you empathize with everyone, be frightened by everyone, and legitimately not know whatâs going to happen because anything could happen.
I could go over a lot of things that the comic presents that I find value in but let me share two examples which are the prime reason horror is so valuableÂ
This was absolutely agonizing and since it was released I have seen fans talk about domestic abuse, incest, and autonomy.Â
The conversation is often fans talking about how they would get out if they were in that situation and trying to reason as to why he didnât leave. I donât care if it only helps only one person but thereâs someone out there that has benefited from those conversations because they thought about their own escape options (which all women should do but donât) and coming to understand why someone would stay in such a bad situation. If more people took time to actually listen to domestic abuse survivors it would be a million times better because we could skip over all of the âdid you have it comingâ and âit must not of been that bad if you stayedâ
Oh my God, this part. Seeing able-bodied fans trying to understand this scene was awesome. They couldnât understand how people can see and even be approached by someone who looks in distress and repeatedly turned them down or accuse of being gross for asking for help. They couldnât understand why this girl who knew nothing about him except that he is a disabled man would call him a pervert out of the blue.
And they talked about what they would do.
If they were there they would save their precious baby, they wouldnât be so callous as to judge someone based on the way they look or their abilities. They would take his word for it if he said he needed help and they would go out of their way to help him.
⌠No they fucking wouldnât. The majority of them would act exactly as this girl did, exactly as real people do to us constantly, but it would start the association in their head with ableist behavior as bad. They wonât learn the word from this but they see actual representation of a disabled person and the author makes it impossible for you to not empathize with him.
Does this romanticize sexual and domestic abuse? Absolutely. Do I care? Absolutely not. Sexual and domestic abuse are already romanticized in mainstream media without critical social commentary, if there is any commentary at all. Horror isnât there for you to consume and enjoy as a sadist, itâs a radical subversion of social taboos
Will anyone understand that? Most probably wonât because it seems like a lot of readers are just now trying horror so I wouldnât expect them to.Â
Will there be people so ignorant and/or bigoted that they will refuse to understand? Yes.Â
Will it convince anyone that abuses okay in the real world? Undoubtedly, but just as much as a cartoon will do.Â
Will it save lives? Yes.Â
Will it connect people who have gone through similar things and can help support each other like the amazing women in the rape revenge films? Yes.
And for some disabled people this is the only type of representation we get and it shouldnât be taken away from us because able-bodied people donât understand it.
