Part of the OA fandom hates Hap for all kinds of non-canon reasons.
It’s not enough he locks people on his basement to study them (It should be doe). They turned him into a rapist. That when you can’t find a single scene in which he touches Prairie without drawing back. Guy can’t even touch her hand without clenching his fist with guilt afterwards. He can’t admit to himself he has any sort of interest on Prairie apart from scientific ones.
When haters are confronted with this, they simply say “In the final scene he has her beneath him in the woods with a knife on her throat. He could have done it then”
Yes, and he didn’t. It straightforwards shows what happened afterwards, there is no time lapse, no cut. It’s plainly there. He has every power over her and he doesn’t cease it. Like he had for years. Now more than ever he had the chance and he doesn’t do it.
“Oh, but the scene made me uncomfortable, and triggered, and Hap gives me the creepies” News for you, your emotions don’t dictate facts. Just because a woman lives alone in the woods you can’t say she turned you into a salamander and burn her on a stake, your medieval twit.
“But Prairie can’t bare to be touched. That is a rape survivor symptom” Haphephobia can be consequence of rape, yes, but of a infinite number of other stuff as well. Is a phobia, just like fear of birds and dwarfs. It can have the most initially sensible to the most illogical and disconnected reason to be there. Human mind is not as simple as A + B = C. Professionals try to identify the reasons behind ways of feeling by looking to each person as an isolated case with a unique life history so filled with reasons she or the psychologist may never be able to identify all of them (only enough, hopefully)
To figure out Prairie’s reasons without making up stuff we never get to see on canon is simply realizing the only person who has been touching her for 7 years was her captor. Add to that she was blind for a great amount of that time, touch was one of her limited resources to get to know someone, and the only person she was allowed to was killing her every week. She generalized the bad feeling of being touched by him to being touched by everyone because he was everyone for a while, the way she interacted with someone else, and it wasn’t pleasing. She even highlights how she was never able to make contact with the man she loved.
“But there is a theory in which Hap is a projection of Papa that traumatized baby!Prairie created to protect the image of a loving father after he sexually abused her and…”
I know this fandom leaves space to many theories, which is great, but keep in mind that is what they are: theories. Look how far you’re assuming to state Hap raped Prairie. You’re assuming Prairie is delusional, raped at her childhood by a man we only knew as a caring father, and that Hap is her father’s projection.
Hap can give you the creepies for all sorts of reasons, but there is no evidence that he is a sexual predator. In the position of power he has above the captives, it should be easy to find one scene in which he is too close for comfort, one scene of lustful stare, anything. Instead, we see him, as Prairie told herself, doing nothing besides work, trying his hard to keep emotional and psychical distance from his subjugates and overall keeping control of his impulses and personal desires to be practical for the research. I think there is nothing more scary to Hap than losing control, specially towards Prairie, the one who pushes him over the edge more.
That is why, by the end, when Hap is losing his cool for good, what is the first thing he does? Get Prairie off the equation. Even as a scientist I believe that to him the idea of being irresponsible towards a research tool, using “it” to such a animalistic thing, or acting irrational is degrading.
Gosh, even when he asks her to leave with him he is trying to justify it through saying she is a great partner to the research. He is not trying to convince her he only see her as that; he is trying to convince himself. Still. After everything.
So no, having sex with Prairie in any sort of way - even trying to kiss her - would be admitting defeat, something he can never do.
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
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