#pericky

'so people in the show constantly make unnecessary, derogatory, degrading comments about the abuser's body. he is an extremely marginalized person who has been dehumanized from birth for having that body, up to and including being considered legal property; he has been tortured in a pressure cooker of abuse targeted at his minority status for a quarter of his life. this is Quirky and Witty and Whimsical, no one has a problem with it, and we are going to just skate right on by that without ever even acknowledging that he's oppressed. moving along now'

like, in pericky's case it's interesting to explore how ricky does say some genuinely extremely shitty, bigoted things to pericles that are presumably part of why he snaps and hits him, but he's doing that in the context of being abused, and pericles is reacting to it in the context of abusing him. ricky's not a great person and does not spend his time around great people, but he's trying to stand up for himself with the verbal and emotional vocabulary he has available. the person he's trying to draw on for the strength and the beliefs to do that with--the language to do that with--is his only real example of someone in pericles' life who has never, ever bowed to him.

......aaaaaaaand she's super fucking racist. and is the one who makes the bulk of the body-shaming comments about pericles in the show. so no wonder ricky turned around and incorporated that into trying to imitate her.

but see, she also has a reason to be racist/ableist to pericles: he preyed on and traumatized her and the people she loved, and ruined all their lives (and tbh, my personal read is that he was probably pretty emotionally abusive to her when she was a teenager). like, sure, that's a lot less of an immediate reason not to take someone to task over being shitty about their abuser than Currently Being Abused the way ricky is. cassidy's a grown adult who's had two decades of distance from him to heal, and has had plenty of opportunity in the meantime to unpack that hey! your abuser was one (1) shitty person from this extremely vulnerable demographic of people who have otherwise never done jack shit to you! maybe don't do things like call them 'it' and threaten to put them down because you're mad at that one guy! just a thought.

but still, she had a reason, right? right.

and when marcie uses the fact that he's much smaller and weaker than her to grab him and threaten to break his neck; tortures him in a way that can only be done to him because of the kind of body that he has; and intentionally calls him the wrong species to compare him to a nonsapient animal, with the connotation of preparing him to be cooked and eaten ('one wrong move and i pluck this ugly little chicken').... well shit, dude, you can't exactly hold that against her under the circumstances, can you? just, like, gestures at EVERYTHING that's happened, including the fact that he'd just spent god knows how long torturing her by keeping her trapped in a box, and she's a teenage girl who's doing this to hold the line with the knowledge that she's about to die violently. which she does. at pericles' orders. like, jesus, that's not exactly a situation to lecture someone about Problematic Language.

after all: she had a reason. right?

right.

this is something i see over and over, especially in sci-fi/fantasy settings where it's easy for the writers to make up their own social contexts, exaggerate Bad Things to the extreme, or both.

on the one side of this equation you have the hatebait: a minority character who's written to be Super Evil and Monstrous and Hateable, who says slurs and kicks babies into traffic and often as not is a sexual predator--the worst of the worst, and you'd never defend someone like that, would you? they deserve any bad thing that happens to them, don't they? anything they say they don't like about their situation (god forbid want to change) must just be an excuse, a sob story, maybe outright hypocritical given how they treat other people, right?

awesome, glad we've got that out of the way. now we can move on to the part where you cheer for brutal violence targeted at that minority, or at least go 'well, that's rough i guess, but they're a Really Bad Guy, so....'

(one of my least favorite examples of this ever is the trope where the villain in their True Form(tm) is physically small, weak, disabled, and/or Really Really Old, and when they're defeated they're stripped down to that state to hurt/humiliate/imprison/kill them. and/or watch horrific things happen to their body as a direct result of being removed from the source of their size/youth/power/basic fucking life support. it is DEEPLY distressing and i hate it so much.)

it is really fucking upsetting how well this works. i tend to get really invested in characters like this.

so we have our object of 'justified' bigotry, hatred, and violence. but then you have the other half of the equation:

the person who Always Has a Reason.

there's been a lot said about the appeal of bodice-ripper fantasies: they're popular in large part because in a sex-negative society women are shamed for their sexuality and for wanting sex, and there's catharsis for some people in stories about being Allowed to cut loose and enjoy it because you had no choice in the matter. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(in real life they can and will, because society is shit about survivors and hates us. but that's real life; this is the safety of your own fantasy to work things through, with no voices spouting bullshit at you except the ones you're allowing to talk for the express purpose of telling them to shut up.)

so there's that. and somewhere there is an excellent post about SPN, and similarly full-of-whump shows marketed to the same demographic of men, being maybe the same thing for those men in a different way: if Every Possible Terrible Gutwrenching Devastating Loss and Trauma and Torture happens to you, then surely it won't make you any less of a man if you cry and break down, show weakness and pain. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(i don't know where that post went. if anyone has the link to pass on i'll add it here, because it is a Really Good Post and worth reading.)

all well and good so far. understandable.

and then you get to the person who Always Has a Reason. and what they Always Have a Reason for is bigotry, hatred, and violence toward minorities. or representations of real-life minorities with a hasty oppression-swap fantasy AU slapped on.

they oppressed the character's people. they tortured them. they murdered their family. they genocided their planet. they're abusing them. they raped them. they ruined their life. maybe the character is a kid who's young and in over their head and going through enough shit already, and can't really be held up to the standards of an adult who's not currently experiencing War Crimes.

you wouldn't begrudge them defending themself, right? you wouldn't begrudge them hating their tormentors and lashing out at them when they get the chance, and savoring it when they land a blow (no matter how low)? you wouldn't expect them to be a hundred percent progressive and politically correct and careful of their language in the face of that?

nobody could blame them for that, right? right.

right.

(funnily enough: it doesn't go the other way. the minority hatebait is always a hundred percent responsible for any shitty thing they do in retaliation for what they're subjected to, or attempt they make to stop it. often as not, their actions mean that whatever injustice they were yammering about should be dismissed for everyone suffering under it, because this guy used it as an Excuse and that's why you can't have nice things (basic rights).)

HMMMMMMMMMM

for this fic i would say that sr, pericles, and ricky are looking for the disk pieces (as per usual for them in any given au), and are tenuously working together for the time being; on one of the planets they visit to chase a lead, it becomes clear that the only way to get into the area they’re investigating is to be married in the eyes of the local law. 

since none of them trust each other (rightly), they all choose to be in on it despite the baggage between the three of them. talk about testing their dedication to their search lmao

they proceed to get engaged, trick their way into finding the piece--which is in a crystal box they’re not sure how to open--and get the local authorities on their tail in the process of trying to escape with it. whoops!

then they manage to get away from them, only to crashland on a desert island on a planet they’re not even sure is inhabited. double whoops!

then it turns out that the process of being bonded by that planet’s marriage ceremony involves being actually bonded during the engagement, so that the engaged are better able to evaluate whether they really want to be married by the end of it. they have to stay within short range of each other, share injuries, and may or may not have a psychic link of some sort or another.

guess which planet, the only known source of the rites to undo the bonding, they're now on the run from?

W h o o p s

Hilarity Ensues, Most of It Very Dark, as they try to open the box, outmaneuver the others to end up with the piece, and not to kill each other in the meantime (which none of them would have issues with if not for the bond, don’t get me wrong).