Never Swear By the Moon

The spectre of back pain that has haunted me for the past while has been, for the most part, saged and exorcised from my body. I'm still feeling some lingering effects but not nearly so bad.

I'm taking some R&R time before getting back in the saddle and finding a job I can do without hurting myself. So that might even mean that I finally tackle some of my drafts in the meantime!

They've got a fundamental thing in common: they both are victims of something done to them by someone who has, as of yet, received almost no consequences for their actions. Milly is a revenant, killed too soon. Ig is a werewolf, bitten against his will. Both Milly's murderer and Ig's progenitor are still at large.

Both their experiences leading up to and during the culmination of their confrontations with those people differ vastly, both from each other and from the expectations placed on trauma victims based on their gender.

For all intents and purposes, Ig's trauma response is very "feminized", meaning he acts in similar manners to how female victims of trauma are usually displayed; fearful, angry, emotive. Milly's is masculine by contrast; withdrawn, silent, stoic. She doesn't tell anyone about what happened to her to the point of actually obstructing justice for herself. She has her reasons for this, as does Ig for his own experiences.

And their character development is not decided by a flipping of responses. Ig doesn't learn to suck it up, he learns to deal with it in a healthy way and move on. Milly doesn't let it consume her, she reaches out for help getting closure.