Fear the Captain

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

"Maya angelou's family killed a pedophile that raped her, and that just traumatized her more. "I thought that I had caused the man’s death, because I had spoken his name. That was my seven-and-a-half-year logic. So I stopped talking for five years." Read I know why the caged bird sings."

and here is my comment:

the fantasy of killing a pedophile to defend your child is... an escape from reality. as with all fantasies where a single act of violence stands for a lifetime of effortful care. it lets us off the hook for the day to day labor of actually protecting the human beings around us. it gives us an excuse to look away from what abuse actually looks like.

it allows us to ignore that setting boundaries is a daily practice. it allows us to ignore the subtle ways in which we punish children for having boundaries. it allows us not to think about things we can do, the effort we can put in, in smaller repeated ways, to be kind and caring. to be safe to talk to.

it is a grand gesture that, were you to actually go through with it, would neither prevent the harm that you fear nor help your child to heal from it. it is an idea with no bearing on reality for 99.99% of people, while rape and abuse are a reality for a large fraction of people.

it is not useful to imagine killing a pedophile. it is not useful to claim you would kill a pedophile. it wouldn't be useful to actually attempt to kill a pedophile in almost any situation.

it is useful to think about how you can help your child know they can get help. they can say no. they can tell adults to stop. they deserve to be comfortable. they deserve to be informed.

the entire point of the post is that your child will not be saved by your imagined wrath. the entire point is that your day to day actions, and your attitude towards children as people, are more impactful to your child's well-being. far more realistic. more important.

not least because your child doesn't need you to be wrathful. they need your love. they need care. they need attention.

meanwhile, the public performance of wanting to kill child abusers doesn't do anything to child abusers. most child abusers believe they are doing the right thing for their children.

saying you want to kill abusers doesn't signal anything good to children, either. as others have said, it makes children more afraid to speak up and ask for help. that might be their mom, their coach, their troop leader. it gives those abusers leverage; the children cannot tell if they want things to be stable.

and it makes it harder for adults to BELIEVE children, too! because if their child was really abused, then they've staked their honor on committing that violence, even if it was against their brother or spouse or grandpa or pastor or neighbor or their other kid's favorite babysitter. and if they don't want to do that, well... then they must decide whether they believe completely their child, or whether their child's boundaries must really be respected, or... if maybe it's impossible to know.

how many abuse survivors have tried to disclose, only to be told that so-and-so wouldn't do that, or they didn't mean it, because so-and-so loves you and we all like so-and-so. this dichotomy goes both ways, psychologically. if a child abuser is entirely evil and has to be killed, then someone who's not entirely evil and i don't want to kill can't be a child abuser. this must be something else. there must be a mistake.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff.

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took at step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

I'd also like to point out that the idea that you can prevent a wholesale genocide by like, killing the RIGHT individual, is a rather...simplistic understanding of what causes genocide.

Frollo, to use him as the example, is a priest (in the book), and a judge (in the Disney movie.) He's not just a bad guy. He's an extention of the Catholic Church/The State (depending on which version you want to lean on here.) His power to do harm comes from his position within those institutions and the power of those institutions themselves. The persecution of the Roma people within France isn't because there was a bad guy, but because of those systems of power being used to kill the people that the church and the government wanted dead. Frollo getting dropped off a building wouldn't stop the persecution of the Roma in any world that isn't, maybe, a Disney film.

In the real world, it's very easy to hold up Hitler as the boogeyman. But if Hitler had died, but the war machine of Third Reich Germany hadn't lost the Battle of Berlin/the War as a whole, the Holocaust wouldn't have magically stopped just because 1 guy died.

Look. I'm not saying that there's never been a situation in the world where killing 1 guy wasn't the objectively best option in a high stakes, immediately dangerous situation. The world is full of Trolley problems and self defense situations and nuance and context.

But this post is about Restorative vs Punitive Justice *systems*, and about how many people, in general, start and end their analysis of Justice with "did the bad guy get killed?"

I would even argue that this mentality, where as long as you are sure in your heart that it will SAVE LIVES, killing people is just and good and shouldn't be questioned because some people are just bad- that mentality? Forms the core of Police killings in our culture. Justifies shooting first and asking questions never. Because once you decide that someone has done harm, they need to die for there to be Justice?

If the criminal justice system isn't making crime go away, to the fascist it just means the cops are too lazy and not punishing the bad guys hard enough.

Credit to Sabre (@/bottleneck_loser) on tiktok.

The points that she's making are super important and very true in the current disk horse around masculine identity, specifically but not limited to, trans men, in the queer community.

as a nonbinary amab, sometimes it scares me a bit that if i embrace my masculine side a bit, im just gonna be treated like a boy. i wanted to enjoy androgyny, not be trapped in it. sometimes it scares me that i might have to perform femininity to balance the gender scale or something. sometimes i like acting feminine, sometimes i like acting masculine. but it kinda feels like im stuck performing masculinity irl, and femininity online. it sucks, i identified with agender to be free from this, why am i still stuck in boxes?

The difference is shown below. Study it.