#*child grooming

Nathan Prescott? From the game Life is Strange? …do you usually leave comments on posts talking about characters despite not knowing who they are? Because let me tell you that kind of destroys all your credibility if you don’t know who this character is or what he’s been through.

But anyway, the post is addressing a lot of the issues going on right now in the LiS (Life is Strange) fandom, one of which is that Nathan – a violent, mentally ill teenager who it has recently been revealed has been manipulated into helping out a male teacher who enjoys taking photos of drugged up girls – does not deserve protection from said man, even though it’s obvious that this adult is abusing him and he no longer wants to help him but is basically being forced to. I do not agree with this sentiment since it implies that abusive people don’t deserve to be taken away from the perpetrators of their own abuse because they themselves are abusive. 

Many people think this is somehow excusing an abusive person of their abusive actions but it’s really not – it’s just fulfilling the bare minimum of decency that every human is entitled to. Pretty much all fans of Nathan know that he’s still a bad person for doing what he’s done and that he should be punished for it in future. Just getting acquainted with the character tag should be evidence enough of this since his fandom nicknames are basically “trash bby” and “problematic fav.”

And yes, the second part does imply that you can’t have a mental illness due to one’s background/history of abuse because the post itself is calling out people for excusing an abusive person’s actions even when they’re “based on their background and/or character traits” and believing in the ableist idea that violence and mental illness go hand-in-hand. It’s basically saying that even with the mental illness issue aside, the fact that one’s bad actions are a result of a person’s background and/or character traits makes those actions inexcusable and/or not associated with mental illness because these things are commonly associated with a person’s moral center. 

While this ableist stereotype that mentally ill folks are violent by default is not true, a person’s background can in fact affect a person’s actions negatively in ways that is out of their control, such as in Nathan’s case where it is clear that he’s been abused for quite a while now by multiple adults and so his perceptions about what’s healthy behavior and what’s not may be skewed. On top of that he has a severe mental illness – he takes anti-psychotics which means he’s either bipolar, schizoaffective, or schizophrenic – which could leave him more vulnerable than able-minded folks to manipulation. In fact, it is highly implied that he is being groomed into becoming a sexual abuser by a man that he’s supposed to be able to trust.

So basically, I found that one post not only inaccurate and uneducated as to how Nathan fans perceive him as a character, it’s just fucked that it’s implying he doesn’t deserve to be protected from abuse even though at the end of the day he is a teenager in an abusive environment who is a victim of child grooming from an adult he is supposed to be able to trust just because he’s done bad things. How is taking him away from that environment and putting him into one that will rehabilitate him/hold him accountable for his actions somehow not ok or excusing him of everything he’s done? That’s the main problem I had with that post in particular.