#relationship discourse

like suddenly every bad ex, every argument, every person who didn’t meet your emotional expectations is a “narcissist” and every unpleasant interaction is “abuse”

not everything is a clinical condition. not everything is abuse. sometimes someone is just selfish. sometimes they’re immature. sometimes the relationship was unhealthy on both sides. that doesn’t make it a diagnosable personality disorder or a specialized category of abuse

and honestly, reducing everything to “narcissistic abuse” kind of flattens what actual abuse looks like. it turns a serious pattern of manipulation and control into a buzzword you can slap onto any situation where you felt hurt

you’re allowed to say “that relationship sucked” without needing to medicalize it. you’re allowed to leave people who treat you poorly without turning them into a diagnosis

Hey!

I might be overreaching here, but honestly? Power dynamics are baked into human life. America loves to yell, “Relationships should be equal!!” but in practice, every relationship has a push‑and‑pull relationship of some sort. Someone takes the lead on X, and someone yields on Y. That’s not inherently bad; it’s just how people function.

That’s also why so many of these romances work. They mimic the relationships we know and love. They’re not just about “love”; they’re also about how power shifts get challenged or get reaffirmed between two people. That tension makes the story richer.

Where it gets tricky is when people slap BDSM labels onto what’s really just cultural hierarchy or soft D/s vibes. Once you use those terms, you’re anchoring it in a community with its own history, ethics, true rules, and expectations.

Now, zooming out: Asian societies run on hierarchy. It’s not just “romance flavor,” it’s the operating system. Hierarchy provides order, efficiency, and a sense of stability. But it also means roles aren’t always negotiated; they’re assumed. That’s why it can feel both comforting (needs are met without awkward conversations) and suffocating (individual needs get buried).

Compare that to the U.S., where the cultural script is “everyone’s equal; even kids can call out adults.” That sounds great in theory, but it also breeds a society where no one wants to take crap from anyone, leading to a society full of violence and little respect. Meanwhile, Asian cultures prize harmony, but individuals sometimes combust under the weight of unspoken expectations.

People fundamentally don’t understand that a boundary is kind of like an agreement. Almost like a little contract. If someone sets a certain boundary & you don’t like/agree with that boundary or you don’t think you can adhere to it, you are free to leave! But if you stay & you accept that boundary, there is an expectation that you follow through with adhering to that boundary. And no, you’re not being forced (as long as you’re not in an abusive relationship); you agreed to it.

Yes, there is nuance to this conversation when someone sets a boundary when you’ve already been in a relationship with them & it’s less hard to just up and leave. That can cross into the territory of being controlling, depending on the context. But in the early stages or when you’re just dating? You are completely free to walk away if you don’t like someone’s boundaries or you don’t like their expectations of what a relationship should look like. You owe each other nothing at that point except communication.

If someone you’re dating/talking to doesn’t like p0rn & doesn’t want you watching it if the two of you end up in a relationship, and you don’t like that boundary, you don’t have to be in that relationship! There is no need for you to belittle their boundary just because you don’t agree because I can promise you that there are people who agree with them. Let them go find those people & you can find the people who agree with you.

If you are hurt by the person you’re dating liking people’s sexy Instagram pics & you communicate this respectfully to them & they think it’s silly and unreasonable, either of you are free to leave. Your values clearly don’t align, and that’s not likely to change or get better when it comes to bigger and more important issues.

You can think people’s boundaries are stupid or unreasonable, but that’s NOT A PERSON YOU SHOULD BE IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH. I don’t know why people are acting like they’re personally victimized by someone having a boundary they don’t like.

Again, there is nuance when it comes to abusive dynamics. But your partner calmly telling you that something is making them uncomfortable & they’d feel more comfortable if you stopped doing it is not controlling or abusive. It’s them attempting to communicate with you. If you don’t think you can stop doing whatever it is that they want, then you need to honestly tell them that so that both of you can assess what to do about the relationship. Either you reach some kind of a compromise or you go your separate ways. But no one has been controlled or abused in that situation.

Relationships are about compatibility. That’s what they’re built on. If you & your partner share wildly different values & wildly different ideas of what a relationship looks like (whether that be a monogamous relationship or a polyamorous one), then you probably shouldn’t be together.

It’s really not that goddamn complicated. If your partner thinks going to strip clubs is cheating & you think it’s not, you probably shouldn’t be in a relationship with each other because you likely have way different ideas of what a monogamous relationship should look like. That doesn’t make either of you wrong or bad, it just makes you incompatible.

i think i know what you mean and i both agree and disagree with you there. it’s definitely the case that in a lot of romance literature/television/film/whatever, there are a lot of weird and iffy dynamics that are normalized and even romanticized.

and... i get it, art deals with a lot of things and i’m not here to police what can and can’t be covered by it. but like--if an element’s there, you have to face the fact that the element’s there, right? you can’t put something in your story and proceed to tell it as if they never existed.

so definitely there is a part of it with the writers not being very critical about (especially but not exclusively hetero) romantic relationships, how they’re sold to us as a culture, and how other people reacted to them in the past. 

my issue with this specific instance in rwby is that... B-Y’s romantic build-up is just so much edgier than their straight counterparts (re/nora and ar/kos--being ships that involve major characters). re/nora and ar/kos have their flaws that stem from what m+k take for granted about relationships (ar/kos especially... no i will not ever let them live down the “the main purpose a woman has is to be romantically fulfilled” garbage) but BY is so much nastier for no reason.

it’s a wlw ship that revolves around an abusive man (adam) to the point that said abusive man’s dialogue, for six seasons, was the main thing that cements the ship as canon. a wlw ship, apparently, cannot exist on its own without being tied to a toxic straight one (tauradonna). make of that what you will. the characters involved have such huge beefs with each other and such heavy dynamics that are just handwaved away as Typical Romance Tropes because... if you’re in love with a girl, apparently, you’re going to suffer for it, tough shit. that’s just the way the world works.

people compare it to renora a lot but that just... doesn’t... work? because there’s so much more baggage in BY’s relationship. BY shares a lot of the basic beats but the devil is in the details: renora would not be approached in the same if ren reminded nora of a man in her past that emotionally abused her and nora thought that ren abandoned her just like her hypothetical father did only to latch onto him when he comes back by coincidence and either nora or ren blamed the other for the destruction of their village for a year and they were coded interracial with one member doing the equivalent of luring the other with fried chicken and they had only spent one year with each other and one of them didn’t really understand the other’s disability... it’s like... why is so much of their relationship so negative when the straight ships, while not Purely Good and Wholesome, don’t have nearly as much baggage?

to me there’s ... a really clear disparity in how they’re written that can’t just be attributed to m+k taking straight romance tropes for granted--or maybe it can just be explained by m+k overcompensating by inserting all these weird tropes. i think that in their effort to be “subtle” about the Gay Stuff(TM), they haphazardly utilized parallels without putting some thought as to the big picture they painted--they just didn’t think any of it through... which is the whole problem with rwby’s writing, really. if you want to... think about... what you’re watching, it doesn’t work.