Please direct black- mail to my office

teachustobestill:

radically-feminist:

“I don’t want to do rape stories on the show because I don’t find them entertaining. I think that they’re exploitative,” Fuller told BuddyTV in 2014. ‘A character gets raped’ is a very easy story to pitch for a drama,” he added. “And it comes with a stable of tropes that are infrequently elevated dramatically, or emotionally. I find that it’s not necessarily thought through in the more common crime procedurals. You’re reduced to using shorthand, and I don’t think there can be a shorthand for that violation—it’s an incredibly personal and intimate betrayal of something that should be so positive and healthy.” In a TV landscape where rape is nearly universally used as a springboard for a male character’s development or as a way to stress how brutal the world is—while glossing over rape’s impact on survivors—Fuller’s refusal to enter the fray is refreshing. Neither sexual assault nor its survivors are props to be thrown on-screen to make a scene more “dramatic.” When shows treat them as such, they perpetuate rape culture. Turning on the television should not be an invitation to watch a laundry list of ways to destroy women.

… but nearly all the violence done to women in this show for the male characters’ development. There are many crimes out there that victimize women, just because he only avoids one shouldn’t be lauded for abusing the others. The only difference between Sansa Stark and Abigail Hobbs is the crime that’s done to them. Their suffering happens to develop a male character’s angst.

THIS!!! You don’t get a medal for avoiding rape if you replace it with another trope that uses violence against women for the same reason.

So there’s this novel.

And this novel takes a female protagonist who tries her best to follow the way of the world; try to listen to it’s heteronormative rules and finds herself at a crossroads, feeling furious that the stories about these dead women won’t ever be known. That men won’t fully understand their stories. She eventually breaks from those rules to go and save the latest of those girls whose story is only known because of the power she’s connected to (which is also feminine, so kudos!) rather than the fact she’s a missing person.

It was written nearly 30 years ago. 

Basically, the series that focuses upon telling women’s stories as heroines and victims has been reduced to: ‘At the least they’re not raping anyone! :D’ (I can go how by not saying Francis is a rapist and avoiding that part of the Red Dragon story isn’t a good call at all; though it’s amusing on a level.)

Not even. He took a very female positive series (written by a male, which we need more of) and made it male focused. The fact that it’s homosocial, homoerotic or queer baiting or whatever is supposed to make it okay but it doesn’t. You can argue he didn’t have the rights to Clarice so he choose Will till you’re blue in the face (and I am so fucking sick of people telling me that, like you don’t think I know that? Where the fuck do you think I’ve been for 3 years?) but that’s no excuse for what he’s done to the females he has or the lack of focus on female issues. He could have made that fake Clarice he’s always talking about.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been rereading James Gilligan’s Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (that one and Baumeister’s Evil and Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain are my favorites on this topic), but I feel like the show started to look at the negative effects of violence in season 1, particularly on characters like Will and Abigail, and then sort of stopped. I think that exploration of grief and the resilience of the soul in spite of exposure to repeated acts of violence added a spiritual element to the show that we completely lost, I think, when Bella died. Bella, really, was our guide into this world more than any other character – confronting her own mortality gave her a grace and levity that none of the other characters have.

One of the remarkable things about Harris’s novels is how feminist they are: both Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb are not only killed by women and not only killers of women themselves, their violence is also a result of a dual love and hatred of women. Both men were abandoned by their mothers and that loss permeates every act they do. (Will, too, also has no mother, but unlike Dolarhyde and Gumb, he doesn’t hate women.) Clarice is the ideal person to solve the Buffalo Bill case precisely because she, as a woman, is able to see the world differently – the FBI only has men on Gumb’s trail and this is a huge part of why their investigation fails. Clarice’s FBI is still an old boys’ club operating by masculine rules and ideals, and her refusal to conform to those ideals – her “smart mouth” (i.e. her refusal to submit to male authority) and her refusal to be Krendler’s mistress – ultimately ends her career.

This feminist bent also translates into the novels’ approach to violence: that nature is both cruel and kind but these conceptions are mankind’s constructions. Nature is but man does; man makes choices that nature doesn’t. As Dr. Lecter discovers at the end of the novel Hannibal, we can try to force our own ideas of a thing’s nature upon it, but ultimately we have no control over it, no idea of whether it will be bad or good or even a bit of both.

Those of you who have recently became a fannibal/didn’t watch the show as it aired live on NBC or who have recently become critical of aspects of  it, take a look at some of the comments in these notes. You’ll get a taste at what us early critics had to live through when it was either BRIAN FULLER AND HANNIGRAM ARE THE GREATEST THING EVERS or you were harassed and then marked a bully for standing your ground and arguing.

Also, my friend brought up a good point and mentioned how the male characters that DID die were usually bad guys, nameless, or those that you rooted against- Tobias Budge, Francis Dolarhyde, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, etc. You felt rather triumphant when they died. You knew they did horrible things.

The women that died were either victims with little backstory or were the good guys that you wanted to root for- Abigail Hobbs, Beverley Katz, Bella Crawford, Georgia Madchen, etc. You felt sad when they died. They were used to build up male tears (Beverly is a good example).

Gotta be honest, this was absolutely bewildering to read. ‘Could I really have missed that?’ I thought, staring at my phone as I caught my bus downtown. ‘I’ve only ever seen like two gifsets of Margot and Alana, compared to the veritable thousands of gifsets of m/m pairings. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a POST about their relationship. Am I just following the wrong people? Am I complicit in this?’

So I figured I would put it to the test. Does this fandom love Marlana the way it does all of its non-canon m/m ships?

(This one was obvious, so I won’t count it against Marlana. Hannigram is a fucking juggernaut and I don’t expect Marlana to come close to the numbers it has.)

How does Marlana, a canon ship, stack up against all of these moderately popular m/m ships? I’m sure, given that this fandom is CRAZY about Margot and Alana, and they’re actually more major characters than Zeller and Price, that–

Oh. Yeah.

I wanted to try out my new ink pen and of course the first thing i drew was chilton in questionable clothing.

my good pal @drgaybelgideon and i are trading raúl related works and his prompt was nevada in hotpants and cat socks. I promptly deliver. 

Bonus - The Butt, feat. less clothes 

F is for Flowers

“Patience is a virtue.”

Frederick never claimed to be patient, let alone virtuous. What he lacked in that, he made up for in persistence; the nurse had told him it could be weeks, even months before Will Graham could take visitors. So Frederick had sat down in the waiting room anyway. He wondered how many days of waiting it would take before he would have to arrange a new bouquet. He sometimes got the feeling that being back in the hospital, even just as a guest, should have sent him running the other direction. The barren white walls, the smell of anesthetic and Windex, the sounds of heart rate monitors and oxygen machines, were the same whichever hospital you went to. The familiarity struck him somewhere between pain and comfort, like nostalgia. Will would hate it, he assumed. But he would appreciate the flowers. Frederick certainly would have.