#coel

Doing this to you

Coel!!! (He/they)

They're the god of the bounty/harvest, he's married to Kion, and the two have quite the number of kids, including Adelastres. They had a lot of twins fndsdsfj

Adelastres got a lot from him in terms of personality, both are very anxious and shy, with Coel avoiding even interacting with most mortals, in part due to how the gods have a reputation that preceeds them a LOT. He's good friends with Garcodeu, though, who did help them a lot when Adelastres was a baby and helped with the other pregnancies too

Our society was built on exploitation, and violence is everywhere, in the cracks and the brickwork, and in us—the survivors of violence—as well. The effects of living in a world like this are, to put it bluntly, a mess of harm and trauma; but surviving it is, despite the hurt, also full of joy, love, and contradiction. This chaos is the heart of Michaela Coel’s hit BBC/HBO drama I May Destroy You, the story of a woman who, after being drugged and raped during a night out with friends, sets off on a path of pain and discovery that blends past and present in its attempt to reconstruct the violence she suffered and the pieces of herself the attack left behind. Written, directed by, and starring Coel, the 12-episode series is an exploration of rape culture that leans into its gray areas, its pervasiveness, and its portrayal of imperfect victimhood.

Coel plays Arabella, a Black British millennial writer whose career and fame began on social media and who is “a bit lost” in life, struggling to finish a draft of her second book and seeking the love and attention of a moody, emotionally unavailable Italian drug dealer. The show’s narrative arc is partly autobiographical, depicting an assault and aftermath similar to what the 32-year-old Coel experienced when her own star was on the rise with her debut series, Chewing Gum. Like Arabella, she was pulling an all-nighter in advance of an important writing deadline; like Arabella, she met friends at a bar where her drink was spiked. I May Destroy You from the start establishes Arabella as the kind of sexual-assault victim we’re used to seeing pilloried, disbelieved, and blamed: We see her drinking, dancing, sniffing coke before the assault, and understand exactly how those things will be turned against her. Indeed, when she tells her would-be Italian boyfriend about the assault, he screams that it was her fault for not watching her drink.

One of the show’s strongest points is its depiction of the space between experiencing a sexual violation and realizing that it happened. With only fragmented images to go on, Arabella tries to convince herself that what she experienced was simply a fabrication of her mind by watching YouTube videos about false images. The phenomenon of False Memory Syndrome has been used by psychologists for decades to discredit sexual-abuse survivors despite having no backing from diagnostic organizations like the American Psychological Association. But the fact that Arabella, at least at first, finds comfort in the possibility that her own mind is tricking her shows how complex the trauma of rape can be. I May Destroy You captures the disorientation of post-assault processing: Arabella obsessively retraces the night of the assault, questions the male friend she deputized to make sure she didn’t get too drunk to finish writing, and finally goes to the police when the reality of her assault becomes undeniable.