Crystal Dawn

A vast, vast majority of the reylo blogs I see are 15/16/17 year old girls, and I can’t actually say I’ve seen any that aren’t that specific demographic. What that says to me is that the issue with Reylo isn’t teenage girls romanticising abuse, it’s with the way that romance is sold to young girls.

I consumed a lot of “girl” media when I was younger, I read so many YA romance novels. And I know that a lot of people are aware of this because of all the jokes about “brooding YA love interests” but it’s really obvious the way it bleeds over in the fact that young girls, when presented with this angry, abusive character, automatically interpret him as a love interest. They hear the “I can take whatever I want line” and there are so many similar lines that have been painted to them as swoon-worthy. Young girls are taught to see the anger and aggressiveness characters like Kylo display as attractive qualities- especially when combined with his conflicted nature, which shows them he’s in some way “redeemable.” The “save the angry misunderstood loner from himself” narrative is sold to teenage girls so frequently that it’s almost impossible not to look at the way Kylo talks to Rey and see dozens of books I read when I was a kid.

Everyone remembers Twilight, how young girls were crazy over it and thought Edward was the boy of their dreams despite him stalking and manipulating and abusing Bella, because he was painted as such a romantic, misunderstood character. It was obvious with Twilight, because it became so endemic and everyone read it, but how many adults can say they’ve read a romance novel targeted at teenage girls in the past five, ten years? Because, let me tell you, Twilight is not alone in painting abuse as love, it’s just a very famous (and, admittedly, somewhat extreme) example.

I haven’t read Douglass’s work in years. But I can tell you now, without doubt or hesitation, that pretty much every single relationship depicted in those books is abusive and rapey as fuck, with every negative aspect pretty much continuously excused in the narrative Because He Loves her. Like, these books are MESSED UP, and adult!me is horrified by it.

But I didn’t know that when I was twelve. I didn’t know that when I was nineteen, even. But I know it now, and it retrospect, it chills me to recall that, when I first read Kate Elliott’s King’s Dragon aged fourteen or so – which is to say, at a point where Douglass’s works were my internal template for fantasy everything – I struggled to understand how a character that Elliott had purposefully and clearly written as abusive was, in fact, a villain. Hugh is an abuser, a rapist, and deeply manipulative, but he’s also described as beautiful, and he wants the heroine, Liath. He’s portrayed as tormented by how much he wants her at times, and in other contexts, we see him do good deeds, which… is basically the template for every. single. one. of Douglass’s romantic heroes. And as such, I remember reading Elliott’s books and feeling deeply conflicted, because even though I was intimately in Liath’s perspective – she hated Hugh! feared him! loathed him! – a part of me kept wondering at what point the narrative was going to redeem him or push them together, because that’s what I was used to.

Anne McCaffrey’s books were another early source of the same problem. I mean, there’s a lot to love about the Dragonriders of Pern, but it entirely escaped my teenage notice (for instance) that F’lar literally uses the word ‘rape’ to describe his sexual relationship with Lessa in the first book, which the story treats as totally fine, or that Kylara being a victim of domestic violence was maybe not okay, instead of a thing she somehow deserves for being mean to Brekke. So that when I finally did start reading authors who portrayed abusers as complex characters who were nonetheless unquestionably abusive, I had no narrative frame of reference with which to interpret that information. At times, I’d even feel frustrated that a particular story wasn’t doing what I’d anticipated – why wasn’t the heroine together with that guy? Why had the narrative set them up romantically, then dropped him off the board?

Answer: because the story hadn’t been setting them up romantically. The story had, in fact, been at pains to establish the dude’s abusiveness; I just didn’t know to call it that until I started reading authors who clearly, loudly debunked the tropes – authors like Robin Hobb and Kate Elliott, whose books I still read today; who I’m lucky enough to have met, even – that sustained my misapprehension.

So, yeah. While there’s a lot of YA and SFF around right now that’s perpetuating the same problems, and especially in media directed at teenage girls, it’s not a new problem. Which is why we still need to discuss it.

Chicago buried nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee on Tuesday. Police allege gang members lured the boy into an alley and executed him in a revenge killing aimed at his father.

Father Michael Pfleger, a white minister in a predominantly black Chicago community, eulogized Lee and castigated our society, blaming the boy’s death on our “lost conscience.”

How can we argue?

The execution of an innocent black boy draws the attention of a handful of local dignitaries while the death of a black teenager foolish enough to wrestle a cop for control of a gun helps foment unrest on a nearby college campus seven months after then-attorney general Eric Holder destroyed the fallacy of “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.”

Lies stacked on top of lies create the bullshit we’re witnessing in Columbia, Missouri. Clever faculty members, in my opinion, baited a small group of misguided black students into stirring a racial shitstorm strong enough to attract Twitter-addicted journalists looking for their next relevancy hit off the Black Lives Matter crack pipe.

“kneel”