bleak butler..

But I realize I'm a little anxious about having acknowledged the violence that was done to Ciel's body in my writing. As a victim of abuse myself it would feel particularly bad to be misinterpreted.

As if by writing and naming it I was somehow participating.

It's not that I don't see or get it. It's not that I was born pure enough to see no evil. It's not that I've grown into a morally virtuous person who sincerely has no clue what could be going on in those evil shippers' heads. I am in fact so aware of what goes on there that I could, if I so wanted, argue in bad faith that Yana planted erotic undertones, and that I am therefore allowed to go wild. I could force myself to write smut about it and it would even do numbers, just like I forced myself to read smut in the past (in that other fandom) just so I could fit in, despite how much it disgusted me. I could sink deeper into amorality and shame as I'd only follow and reblog form people who'd treat abuse as an intellectual joke and who'd amorously describe a child's body in sexual situations to the point I could no longer tell whether the line between my own – healthy, lesbian – desires and the fetishes of a niche online crowd (and the rest of the fucking world, let's be honest) is at all blurring.

I could live like that.

But I've grown. I've worked for this growth.

And so now when I see a shipper I can say: I could try to become you, hoping that if I master the horrors I won't be hurt by them. But I refuse.

I refuse to participate in the culture that raised me. I refused to take my cousins' and uncle's inappropriate touching, my ex-boyfriends' sexual violence, and make it a part of me, and think I've dealt with it, and that I'm sublimating it through fiction, and that this fiction isn't hurting anyone.