Rat's Nest

DecembHyur 2023 Day XIII: Trust

FT. @allyennah | @icehearts | @ahollowgrave | @sealrock | @escherstrange-ffxiv | @soulroot | @primamchorus

Redemption and redeeming yourself has nothing to do with forgiveness, especially from the victims of said abuse. The kids today saying “miss me with that” and building campaigns against redemption arcs not just because they don’t like them (because that would be a perfectly valid personal taste), but because they consider them inherently abusive, are completely ignoring the point and how damaging that idea is in real life*.

*once again with feeling: if it were about fictional tastes we wouldn’t be discussing this. 

If someone wants to write the victim forgiving the abuser, then that’s a perfectly valid choice from the writer; there’s closure in that too. And no matter what society says to you, abuse survivor X, shouldn’t legitimize you from depriving abuse survivor Y of their personal coping and their personal way of moving on. And if someone wants to write the victim as never forgiving the abuser but the abuser still gets redemption, then that’s okay as well. And if someone wants to write the victim as never forgiving the abuser and the abuser is never redeemed, never changes, that’s another –guess it– perfectly valid narrative choice. It’s fiction. 

But in real life, when you conflate forgiveness with redeeming oneself and refuse to allow the latter because of the former, all you’re doing is wanting for the abuser to keep on being an abuser. 

A part of this goes hand-in-hand with anti ideology. 

I have seen - far too often - people’s mistakes being dredged up from the past, to the extent that callouts often include posts before people have changed groups or altered their behaviours, and these callouts can be used weeks or months or years into the future. In real-life, I think a case for this would be James Gunn and his tweets from over a decade ago being used against him. 

If we allow people to be redeemed, or to change, it goes beyond just potentially forgiving them (or feeling we are expected to forgive them), but often requires a change of a black-and-white mentality … no longer is the abuser the bogeyman in the closet, but a complex and three-dimensional being capable of both great feats of evil and great acts of goodness. Where do you place someone like that on a scale? How do you react to someone like that?

If someone is seen as evil and inhuman, abuse and harassment become “justified” in one’s mindset … you ‘deserve’ to be suicide-baited, as you ship a ‘paedophillic’ ship, and the abuser ‘deserves’ to be hated, as they caused you irrevocable harm and caused you great trauma. They cease to be something human, but a mere embodiment of the ‘evil’ you detest. 

I would hazard a guess that this changes a bit from the ask to antis, as antis are looking for reasons to be angry and justify expressions of their anger, but in the case of the ask -? It may be more complex. It sounds like they are unable to forgive - (which is justified and understandable) - but feels an outside pressure to forgive, which is creating resentment, potentially from a lack of closure, and rather than deal with these complex emotions, it’s easier to simplify. 

If the abuser is an irredeemable monster, I can continue to hate him and insult him and compartmentalise his existence … I know it’s all his fault, it’s innate, and that none of this stems from any further or complicated issues.

If the abuser can be redeemed -?

Well, do I forgive him or not? Why did he abuse? How do I know he won’t abuse again? How long must he be punished? Is he punished enough? How do I reconcile my anger with the fact he is happy? Is it right for him to be happy after he made me suffer? Why am I still suffering? If he is over it, should I be over it? Can you get ‘over’ it? Does he care he hurt me? If I’m angry, I’m still suffering, and is that his fault or my fault or no one’s fault? What purpose does my anger serve? Would revenge make it go away? Would that be right if he’s changed?

It opens a whole can of worms. 

A lack of redemption makes for black-and-white mentality. A monster is a monster and cannot be anything other than a monster … no need for the victim to ask hard questions or reconsider events, because it’s simplified and neat and tidy, and throwing in redemption complicates them. Depending on where you are in recovery, it may even be impossible to process or comprehend. 

Maybe some people need for people to be irredeemable …