A General Fanfiction Trend
Jul. 25th, 2020 02:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitY'all.
Abusive parents are not Marvel villains. They don't torture their children for the hell of it. They have a reason that makes sense to them-- whether it's some form of "you embarrassed me in public" or drug use or difficulty controlling their own emotions. They're not going to go out of their way to play elaborate torture-games just for the sake of playing elaborate torture-games. (If nothing else they probably do not have the spoons to set up elaborate torture games and maintain them over a protracted period of time.) They will generally purport to love their victims at least some of the time. There will be periods of time where they *aren't* acting awful and seem like they're caring.
There is this trend in fanfic of depicting abusive parents as people who are just 24/7 looking to torture their children in dramatic, elaborate ways involving the sort of extreme physical abuse that schoolteachers would *notice*, and I find it intensely frustrating. Not only is it inaccurate, but it misses all the stuff that's actually *interesting* about writing abused characters, namely the complex feelings and interplay.
Abusive parents are not Marvel villains. They don't torture their children for the hell of it. They have a reason that makes sense to them-- whether it's some form of "you embarrassed me in public" or drug use or difficulty controlling their own emotions. They're not going to go out of their way to play elaborate torture-games just for the sake of playing elaborate torture-games. (If nothing else they probably do not have the spoons to set up elaborate torture games and maintain them over a protracted period of time.) They will generally purport to love their victims at least some of the time. There will be periods of time where they *aren't* acting awful and seem like they're caring.
There is this trend in fanfic of depicting abusive parents as people who are just 24/7 looking to torture their children in dramatic, elaborate ways involving the sort of extreme physical abuse that schoolteachers would *notice*, and I find it intensely frustrating. Not only is it inaccurate, but it misses all the stuff that's actually *interesting* about writing abused characters, namely the complex feelings and interplay.
