I know there are many Star Wars ships and everyone defends their fav ship until it officially sinks. All I ask you all is to read this glorious work and admire that fact it has great writing and works well to portray the characters to fit the story. Not to mention despite it being one of the less popular ships this is a great work and to my joy it’s not a modern au. (Sorry people but I hate modern aus…)
But now I ask that you help me hunt down the writer and beg them to continue this fic! Please for my ever growing love of Star Wars help me convince the writer to continue this amazing thing I’ve discovered!
1. What the fuck
2. Why the fuck did you put this in the finnrey tag? Do you like baiting people into looking at rapefic?
Here’s the tags for good measure. And Pokemon? You piece of shit, that’s a kids franchise even more so than Star Wars. you’re straight up exposing minors to rape fic and not even so much as giving them a warning?
You’re a vile excuse for a human being and I hope you have a miserable life.
They’re straight up trying to trigger people. I’m going to wait for reylos to call this gross and vile behavior out since they always claim to care so much about the safety or rape and abuse survivors, though I won’t hold me breath while doing so.
Pokemon?! Holy shit. Also #marvel, #cats, #dogs, and #harry potter, all tags frequented by minors. Go deep-throat a cactus, OP.
And you’re right Mara, you can’t hold your breath that long. You’ll asphyxiate…😨
@lj-writes, it’s a beautiful thing that you get your undies in a bunch about fiction but you’re willing to wish serious injury on a live person. Perhaps reconsider some of your ethical choices.
Wow, some rando time out of their day to @ me and say they don’t care about minors being baited into reading rape stories but do care about the online harasser’s poor widdle feelings.
On Thursday, Tina Brown confirmed to reporters that she had been approached to produce a redemption series, in which men outed by the #MeToo movement could attempt to rebuild their reputations.
According to gossip website Page Six, “Tina said she’d just been emailed about co-hosting a new show with Charlie Rose, in which they’d interview Louis C.K., Matt Lauer and others caught up in the #MeToo sexual harassment scandals.”
In a piece published on Women’s Agenda this week, writer Kristine Ziwica warns against the inevitable festival of comeback toursplanned by men recently disgraced by revelations from the #MeToo movement. From Louis C.K. to Matt Lauer and even Harvey Weinstein, it appears the wheels are already in motion to smoothly transition these men back into public life. After all, they only have all of human history from which to pick countless other examples of men and their reputations achieving full rehabilitation no matter what their crime.
An article in The Hollywood Reporter recently invited comedy club owners to speculate on (not if, but) when Louis C.K. will be able to return to the stage. In November last year, C.K. was finally forced to admit that long standing rumours of his sexual misconduct were true and that he had indulged in numerous acts of impropriety that included masturbating in front of (female) colleagues without their permission. Louis Faranda, executive producer at Caroline’s, said he would give C.K. a platform “tomorrow”, but predicts he’ll be back within a year, “making fun of his mistakes”. Comedian Sean Patton has a suggestion for how he can best do this: “He should do an hour special that breaks down why it was wrong and how he’s made amends.”
Isn’t it great to know that years of abuse and denial can be so easily overturned by a few well chosen words and the willingness of a disgraced person to “heal” publicly?
It depressed me to read C.K. fellow colleagues (most of them men) unconsciously collaborating to restore their friend’s former glory, but it certainly didn’t surprise me. As much as our society might like to claim it opposes men’s violence and misogyny, the reality is that the collective is at best largely indifferent to it and, at worst, angry that these things can be used to “tarnish” a man’s reputation.
Think of Brendan Fevola. In 2006, Fevola took a non-consensual shower photograph of then-lover Lara Bingle (who was 19 years old at the time) and sent it to his friends and teammates. The existence of the photograph came to light in 2010, when sources said the photo had spent the previous four years being shared across mobile phones in the football world. If Fevola suffered any damage to his reputation, it was short lived. A rehabilitative stint on Channel Ten’s I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! led to Fevola being employed as a presenter on Fox FM, where his contract was recently extended for another two years.
When I raise my concerns about the ease with which male celebrities recover from allegations or even convictions for abuse, I’m often met with a strange kind of territorial anger. Is he never allowed to work again?! people ask. How long does he have to suffer for his one mistake?!
Both questions, while easily answered, raise further questions of their own. First, of course men accused or convicted of sexual or physical assault should be allowed to earn a living. But why should that living automatically be in the same financially and socially lucrative fields they worked in before they made the choice to exert violence and power over another person? Why should this work include endorsement deals, celebrity platforms and influence? No-one deserves these things, especially not people who’ve actively caused harm to others.
Second, sexual assault and/or physical violence are not arbitrary “mistakes”. They’re choices that have wide-reaching consequences for their victims. Framing them as simple mistakes is how the behaviour of men in particular is massaged and excused to limit any negative impact they have on their lives.
Fame should not be used to insulate men from the consequences of their actions. And men accused of such misconduct shouldn’t be considered absolved of the gravity of their crimes just because they’ve spent a bit of time in the naughty corner.
As a society, we act as if one of the worst things we can do is ostracise men even when they’ve violated another human being. But if we want the legacy of #MeToo and the testimonies of victims of male violence to actually mean something, we have to be firmer in our treatment of the people who’ve inflicted this pain and suffering on them. If we stopped allowing men to get away with anything they like, maybe some of them would stop doing anything they wanted.
When our fetishization of redemption bleeds over into reality…
Throughout the seven seasons of Game of Thrones, audiences are shown a variety of gruesome sequences of violence and gore. Most of these are so fantastical that no audience members are likely to experience them in real life: being burned to death by a dragon, giving birth to a shadow monster, or having one’s head explode after a giant presses really hard on one’s eyeballs.
We feel sympathy or horror or discomfort watching these sequences played out in high definition on HBO in large part due to the wild unlikelihood that any of this could ever happen to us. Yet, the sexual assault that pervades the lives of the show’s female characters is not so far removed from the experiences of viewers.
According to recent statistics, roughly one in five women will suffer some sort of sexual assault. If it hasn’t happened to you, you almost certainly know someone to whom it has happened. This is not a new problem; people have been raped throughout all of human history, most often women victimized by men. George R.R. Martin has explained his frequent use of rape in his books as hewing to the vague concept of “historical accuracy” — women were assaulted throughout human history, so to exclude this reality from his books (and, by association, the TV show) would be to present an artificial reality, or so the logic goes. Of course, Game of Thrones is not a costume drama in the traditional sense. The events in the series never happened in human history (see above re: dragons), and to defend its use of rape on the basis of historical accuracy is to disregard, well, actual history.
Martin explained in a 2014 blog post that he wanted to make the world of Westeros as historically accurate as possible in order to make the more fantastic elements feel more grounded. The HBO adaptation of his work, created and run by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, has not only included every incident of rape Martin wrote in his books, but has in fact added new female characters to sexually degrade and added new instances of sexual violence against characters who weren’t treated in this way in the books.
A 2017 study out of Trinity University found that 90% of teenagers interviewed felt that the sexual violence in Game of Thrones is historically accurate, despite also recognizing that the events of the show are fictitious. Something about the series—perhaps Martin’s goal of truly grounding the world—just feels true to viewers. The sense that women were both prized and brutalized is a pervasive narrative in much historical and fantasy fiction. This sense that women used to exist simply to bear children and die is a small piece of an overarching belief of how things used to be, which feeds into current right-wing panic about wanting to make things great again.
That’s not to say that Martin, or Benioff and Weiss, are working altruistically in order to illuminate the struggle of women in Medieval England. What they’ve done is more a way to include sex and bare breasts on a show that’s mostly about a political crisis. Sometimes the rapes help inspire male characters to reach moral epiphanies; sometimes the female characters don’t seem to realize they’ve been brutalized; all of these scenes remind us, and the characters, that in this world women—even rich women, even royal women—are not respected.
Certainly, sexual attitudes have shifted over the past several hundred years, but how much difference is there between a rape scene on Game of Thrones versus Law and Order: Special Victims Unit? The particular objectification and glorification of female sexual powerlessness is—far from historical—particular to our current era and culture.
None of that means that rape wasn’t at least as prevalent in the Medieval period as it is now, but it likely did not occur in such a pervasive, malevolent manner against every woman and girl the way it does to the characters on Game of Thrones. The women on the series, as often Queens and high-born ladies as peasants, seem to accept this as a fact of life in this brutal land. In actual Medieval history, rapists could be prosecuted—not that they were convicted with any more regularity than in the 21st century, but taking an attacker to court was an option, particularly for women with the money to afford a lengthy trial. Of course, nearly half of the women who brought charges up against men were themselves later charged for slandering the names of their attackers—plus ça change.
Martin stated to the New York Times in 2014 that “rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day.” Know what else was? Dysentery, a gruesome intestinal infection that tended spread among soldiers on campaign as well as anyone who lived in a place where their water may become affected by human waste. Afflicted men would spread the disease around due to lack of hygiene, such as relieving themselves on the ground around the tents in which they slept, or from drinking contaminated water. Dysentery, along with other war-time scourges like cholera and plague, don’t show up nearly as often to offer “historical accuracy” to fictional narratives.
Childbirth was also a grisly, unhygienic experience in which both mother and child would often die—far from the hazy, romanticized flashback last season of Jon Snow’s (Kit Harrington) mother dying through a sepia-toned flashback in a Rapunzel-like tower. Blood infections, rotten teeth, bent limbs from broken bones poorly set—all historically accurate, but not as titillating as yet another scene of a nude sex worker being brutalized by this season’s villain.
Or, if the showrunners don’t feel like investing in a budget of prop diarrhea, they could always leave things to nature, i.e. showing any of the show’s frequently nude female characters to be in possession of visible body hair. For a show known for its willingness to go the distance to offer increasingly graphic scenes of violence and rape to be squeamish against these sorts of plotlines highlights the reason underlying all of this. Diarrhea and sepsis are too gross, too upsetting, too distasteful to air on HBO on a Sunday night. Sexual assault, apparently, is OK.
The War of the Roses, a nearly 40-year struggle for power that Martin has explained was a main inspiration for his work, was also the source inspiration for Philippa Gregory’s novels, The White Queen and The White Princess. As books, each included a rape scene that found their titular heroines assaulted by the men who they would later love. In adapting the books for television, producers Emma Frost and Gina Cronk respected both real history and the source material—and, crucially, the impact of these scenes on a 21st century audience.
In Gregory’s The White Princess, Lizzie (Jodie Comer) is raped by her husband, Henry (Jacob Collins-Levy), whose mother has ordered him to do so. In the show, Lizzie calls him out for his motivation, challenging him to take her by force, which makes him step back. When the couple does have sex, it is on her terms. History tells us that Lizzie gave birth to a baby just eight months after marrying Henry; the novel presumed it must have been due to rape, but the adaptation found another way to work within the historical facts. The TV versions of Lizzie and Henry share the names and overall life experiences of four real-life nobles. Yet, despite a stronger bonafide to claim historical accuracy, the series instead reimagined the sequences to prove the same storytelling point without depicting actual assault.
Any piece of media shows as much about the time and culture of its creation as it does about the world it invents. Martin, in his books, and David Benoiff and Daniel Weiss, in the TV series, are able to create a world full of magic, dragons, powerful and complex characters, and epic storytelling. They are either incapable, or unwilling, to imagine a world where women are respected, rather than having rape as the status quo.
The sexual assault in both the books and the show are sometimes important parts of the storytelling, which begs the question: Why tell this story so many times? Why not imagine a world flavoured like Medieval Europe, but in which women are treated as people? Why not, when adapting a book to film or television, question the author’s use of rape and subvert or exclude these scenes—or keep them off-screen? Martin provided a blueprint that the Game of Thrones showrunners have expanded upon, not only including every scene of sexual violence from the books but adding their own, or gruesome twists to those that already existed.
Just saw the extended version of The Handmaiden and it was worth every single minute. It wasn’t always easy to watch, as per @jewishcomeradebot’s warning, particularly when the story moved to Hideko’s viewpoint. But it was a beautifully crafted story with a happy ending and I loved it.
Spoilers abound from this point onward. TW sexual abuse, suicide
Sook-Hee and Hideko’s first night together was both heartrendingly moving and hilariously funny–funny, in large part, because they had to rely on the paper figure (in so many ways) of Count Fujiwara to initiate sex at all. Of course, the humor works only because of a darker underlying truth; that women are so socialized to see themselves as objects of pleasure and not agents in their own pleasure, that these women had to invoke the male gaze and male pleasure in order to fulfill their own desire for each other.
Having her sexuality subsumed by the male gaze was especially and brutally true for Hideko, of course, who was groomed and abused from childhood to perform the fantasy of men against her will. As Fujiwara points out jocularly to Kouzuki, but with deadly seriousness, she was so well trained she had no desire of her own left. Isn’t her treatment just a grotesquely amplified version of how women are “trained” under patriarchy, though?
This is one reason Hideko’s masturbating before Fujiwara on their “first night” shows how she has changed by claiming her own feelings and desire with Sook-Hee. Rather than perform Fujiwara’s fantasy for him as she had before, she invites him to be a spectator of her own sexual pleasure instead. Hideko’s flashing the knife at Fujiwara before she gets into bed has several layers of meaning. Korean audiences would recognize the symbolism immediately, because highborn Korean women traditionally carried silver-decorated knives to kill themselves with in the event of threatened rape. Much like the act of refusing sex with him, the knife was symbolic of her fidelity to Sook-Hee–though that symbolism would have been lost on Fujiwara and likely on Hideko herself, who was not a Korean woman. She and Fujiwara would have intended and received it as a threat to him if he tried anything. And, of course, it was a continuation of the ruse on Fujiwara, that Sook-Hee was still their unknowing mark.
There’s another level of the masturbation scene that really gets to me: In addition to being a power move on Hideko’s part, it was also an act of intimacy toward him. It was revealing in a way the sex shows she was forced to perform for him and the other guests never could be, because as abusive as those performances were she also revealed nothing of herself in them. As Fujiwara himself commented, she was trained to the point of being dead inside. By refusing to do his desire but instead showing him her own, she had revealed herself more fully to him than she ever had before–as a person with her own will and her own pleasure that had nothing to do with him. If he had realized what it meant and taken the gesture as offered, if he had accepted her as an equal human being and not an object for possession, then his story could have ended very differently.
On that note, I’ll discuss the tragedy of “Count Fujiwara” in the next reblog.
The tragedy of “Count Fujiwara,” of course, begins with the fact that both words are lies. I couldn’t find any source on this character’s actual name, and I suspect that’s the point. The lie has consumed the man so thoroughly that nothing is left of the original identity except the shame of his origin.
I suspect that the man who became Fujiwara, the illegitimate son of a Jeju Island servant and shaman, had no name. At best it would have been something demeaning like “dog turd.” I don’t know if I can even convey to non-Koreans the crushing lowliness of Fujiwara’s background. His father was a servant, which meant pretty much functionally a slave or at best a destitute manual laborer. His mother was a shaman, which carried some spiritual power but also meant she was despised as spiritually unclean and sexually loose living outside the bounds of patriarchy.
And his parents weren’t just lowlives, they were lowlives from Jeju Island. To the extent people outside of Korea know about the place they think of it as a tourist hotspot, but traditionally it meant poor farmland, crushing poverty, and a distinctive culture that was systematically marginalized and destroyed. Jeju Islanders were crushed underfoot by the mainlanders, and the Japanese happily carried on the exploitation; due to the geographical proximity, Jeju Islanders were taken away en masse to be forced laborers in Japan and elsewhere during the Pacific War. The brutality didn’t end with liberation from Japanese occupation, either. It was the Korean military and right-wing militias sanctioned by them who slaughtered and tortured civilian islanders from 1947 (two years after liberation) to 1954 (after the Korean War) while the U.S. military government looked the other way.
That’s the kind of place Jeju Island occupied in Korean history. That’s the context–endless poverty, marginalization, exploitation, and violence. Fujiwara reinvented himself from the ground up, wiping away that boy who was dirt or turd, the lowest of the low.
(It’s worth noting that the gold mine Kouzuki got in exchange for selling out his country was in Hamkyung Province, which is on the opposite end as Jeju Island–in the far north to the Island’s far south. Hamkyung is another poor and heavily exploited area, and has suffered badly under North Korean rule as well. The cruelty of Japanese occupation reached across the whole of Korea, in other words, and continues in the hands of the Korean elite both North and South.)
I hope this background places Kouzuki’s torture of Fujiwara in perspective as well. Here was a Korean collaborator of Japanese rule who had made his fortune off the explotation of his countrymen, mutilating and torturing a man from one of the worst-affected areas. Much like Kouzuki’s favored transport of riding on a traditional Korean A-frame carried on a Korean servant’s back, the torture scene was a microcosm of that oppression.
The genius of The Handmaiden, of course, and what makes Park an incisive commentator instead of a dull macho nationalist, is that Fujiwara is a villain. The movie resists the extremely easy exit of making Fujiwara the noble sufferer and Kouzuki his diabolic tormentor. Nope, actually, they are ideological twins. Fujiwara is a misogynist and rapist who approached Hideko with the promise of freedom only to try and lock her in another cage, who used Sook-Hee’s trust to not only deprive her of her freedom but kill her in captivity. His attempted violations might not be as outlandish as Kouzuki’s, but are just as horrific.
Fujiwara, then, is the marginalized man who, in the face of exploitation and brutalization, chooses to exploit and brutalize women in turn for his own gain. You see him in just about any community that is targeted by discrimination.
Fujiwara’s real tragedy is that he was actually halfway there to true liberation. When he told Hideko he was no Japanese nobleman but the son of a Jeju Island servant, that was a mirror image of Hideko masturbating in front of him on their marriage night. They both revealed their most vulnerable selves, their deepest secrets to each other and that could have been the basis of a powerful alliance. They could have set Sook-Hee free and plotted Kouzuki’s downfall together. He could have had Hideko’s friendship and respect, something he would have valued if he had seen her as a person in her own right.
Instead Fujiwara chose to become Kouzuki. Rather than challenge the oppressive structures of racism and sexism he wanted to climb it to the top. He didn’t hate the fact that Koreans were discriminated against; he hated the fact that he was Korean, one despised even by other Koreans. He didn’t hate the fact that Hideko was Kouzuki’s prisoner; he wanted to make her his own prisoner.
Still, he was tantalizingly close to being an actual liberator. He was the one who gave Hideko the opium as the ultimate out should Kouzuki get his hands on her. The fact that she ended up using it against Fujiwara instead, of course, showed how he had taken Kouzuki’s place as her would-be abuser.
It’s telling that Fujiwara had prepared the same exit for himself as he had for Hideko, and it’s also telling how limited his imagination was, as was hers: For both of them the plan of last resort was self-destruction. The structures of brutality were so ironbound, so absolute, that it was easier to destroy themselves than the system. Sook-Hee was the only one who had the imagination to smash the structure itself in destroying the books that were the instruments of Hideko’s abuse, Sook-Hee who was the life her mother had stolen from the iron grip of death, who was the victory that great thief had smiled over.
It’s fitting that Fujiwara killed Kouzuki, then, and doubly fitting that he killed himself in the process. A victim of the occupation destroyed his oppressor, but death struck them both because symbolically they were the same by this point, both of them racist, misogynistic abusers.
It is in this context that Fujiwara’s last line is both comical and deeply sad. “At least I got to keep my dick.” He had nothing else at this point, no future, no freedom, and only a few more moments to live, but at least he was still a man in his own eyes. As long as he had that he had something to hold onto.
The tragedy of Fujiwara is that he chose to hold onto the domination his idea of manhood symbolized to him rather than taking Hideko’s and Sook-Hee’s hands in friendship. But then again I suspect that, to him, standing in solidarity with women really would have felt like losing his dick.
men don’t abuse women because they haven’t learned how to cry+show emotions in a healthy way; they abuse women because since birth, through parenting and media and the overall surrounding culture they are taught that women are subhuman, made to exist in the control of men. men exercise this control through violence, with their entitlement translating into epidemic levels of rape and domestic violence.
simply telling men it’s ok to cry wont help women; an abuser can both cry and abuse you know!! society protecting women’s rights and showing zero tolerance towards rape and violence against women will help, and that’s what we should be focusing on instead of engaging with mra types who have no empathy for anyone but themselves
I don’t mean to impose a personal favour on you guys, but I really would like to ask that everyone who follows me reblog this.
I don’t think I made it very clear but last month I was sexually assaulted by someone who I thought was my friend (I don’t want to talk about it don’t ask), and it’s… really fucked with my head.
Had I known this a month ago I would have been able to get away.
So, essentially, I’m really pleading with you to reblog this so everyone who follows you doesn’t get stuck in the same position I was with no way out.
I mean again I don’t want the point of this to be my sob story or whatever but if you could reblog this it would seriously mean a lot
“You’d be surprised”, said Xaldien, who just lost four followers and received a lovely “men can’t be raped” anon shortly after reblogging this the first time.
Yowch, disgusting.
If I don’t reblog this, assume I’m dead.
Always reblog this
Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist. Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.
Alabama Republican Jim Zeigler, using the Bible to defend Senate candidate Roy Moore’s alleged sexual assaults on teenagers in the past.
There are people in Alabama who are literally defending a pedophile and his pedophelia.
L.J.'s Obsessions 