Australis

This is harder and harder for audiences to grasp, and I sympathize, honestly, because we have become more keen over the last couple of decades, and we've noticed how many stories have been sold to us as an ideal we should reach for that would be harmful to us if we did so - stories intending to propogandize values centered around control or subjugation

but you have to learn to recognize when that's what is happening and when a work is simply clumsy, indulgent fantasizing shared with others, and how to settle your jerking, trigger-happy reflex when you notice something in a work of fiction that shouldn't be emulated in real life. That's not what fiction is. That is not, at base, its purpose or intent.

recognizing that a situation would be abusive if it were real does not mean that all stories where those situations happen are inherently ABOUT abuse. Unless we have reason to believe the writer is indeed trying to propagandize societal control on some level, then the story is about what the writer says it's about, because it's not real

there's no one with agency involved, there is only what the fictional fantasy writer wanted to happen in their fictional fantasy world. You being able to identify "if these two people existed this relationship would be abusive" doesn't change the intent of the text. It's GOOD that you can identify that! It's actually excellent! It's a necessary component to experiencing fiction and keeping yourself safe in the real world, but it doesn't change the intent of the text

You are absolutely, Capital R Right: if these people existed and treated each other this way, it would be abusive. But they don't exist. They are Anne Rice's Barbies, and she makes them kiss rough and mean and murderous and underage and incestuously, but through it all they remain Barbies, and she had zero responsibility to explicitly designate those Barbie relationships as abusive for the benefit of a reader who feels like they can't trust a fictional text unless it spells things out for them in real-world morality parables.

Instead, I have over 100k hits and almost 2k bookmarks (including private ones) and people commenting about how much they love it, my writing, the characters I've made for the story, and the story I've come up with.

I am so genuinely flattered and thankful to everyone who clicks in, reads a few and dips, and those who have been there since the start or take the time to comment as they read. People who have it saved but thats it, people who come back to it when they remember it, and everyone in between!! Its been such an amazing motivator and creative/emotional outlet for me during some truly insane, trying times in my personal life.

If she asks for the antidote, she will be assisted with it, and everyone is free to go, alive and relatively unharmed. If she doesn't ask for help, or tries to make her children help her instead of asking another adult, she will die, and her children will either die also, or be maimed for life. She doesn't know which option will happen, but she knows for sure that they won't be safe nor okay unless she gets the antidote in her system, and she cannot do it without asking any of the people in the room.