Time To Overreact Over Fiction

it's such bs that the whole guilt-ridden stoic self-sacrificing martyr thing doesn't work outside of fiction. repressing all your emotions and neglecting your physical wellbeing should make you god's most tragically beautiful morally unassailable little soldier of righteousness but all it does is give you bad skin and gastrointestinal problems

to be honest i think there’s a large number of people who conflate the very real and widespread phenomenon that women tend to be written off as just mothers or love interests in order to diminish their importance in a given story with the fact that a huge reason they’re sent to narrative purgatory in this way is BECAUSE the labels of “mother” and “girlfriend/wife” are systematically devalued and seen as inherently inferior because they’re terms that have been associated with ownership and/or control over women. like the amount of people who’ve told me that a certain female character is uninteresting or badly written because she happened to have a kid or be a man’s girlfriend or sister just to find out she was actually fleshed out very well and carried significant narrative importance frustrates me soo bad. there’s a huge problem with how those roles (specifically “wife” and “mother”) are systematically devalued and yet also perpetuated as the only viable options for women to achieve their societal roles in the patriarchy but acknowledging the devaluation of those labels to begin with is an important discussion in itself.

it is really such a big ass shame that i wasnt born knowing the full history of every country in the world and all of their geopolitical relations and who lives there and where they came from and what their culture is like and what unites them and what their food is like and what writers lived there and what music was born there and what its like at the borders with each of their neighbors and when the current government as it stands today was formed and what came before it and who set it up and why and what theyve experienced. et cetera

my real #serious thoughts on how rocky would feel about stratt after learning the whole Everything is that he really really wants to be the "my friend isn't mad enough at the person who hurt them so I make up for it by being 10x as mad as is reasonable" guy, and that's absolutely what he externally shows to grace, but internally he's eating himself alive because he does actually get it. he can only put so much of himself into the argument when grace gets into a weird mood and starts playing "devil's advocate" about his own kidnapping and attempted murder and he feels like absolutely the scum-of-the-earth worst friend ever. what's even worse is that while he can sympathize with grace's story, he can't quite empathize; he's watching grace sleep one night and thinks to himself "...but why wouldn't he just say yes?", followed two minutes later by grace visibly (audibly?) getting one of his regular nightmares about being tackled and restrained. torment nexus.