Hooly Void - Tumblr Posts
For a series where the slavery started off as kind of a joke, and moreover a series that's been largely aimed at children since its revival, I sincerely believed that actually whipping a character on-screen would be too grim for AvA. I never thought they'd go there.
Like I pondered the possibility that it'd happen, conceptually, to the character. But I never thought the show would actually depict it.
There are only so many contexts a whip can be relevant in; they have connotations. When the whip is turned against a person in distress, the atmosphere becomes blatantly cruel. There's no way to sugarcoat it, there's no blurry lines. Whips bring suffering. Their mere presence agitates, let alone the actual pain they inflict.
It's a level of dehumanization that's so much more easily and instantly identifiable as terrible than some other stuff that has been done in the series, or even to this character.
And it's especially deplorable that it was done to this character, given Chosen's history.
We don't actually know if he's been whipped in the past, he might not have been, but. Whether he was or not, the implications regarding power dynamic that are inherent in the presence of a whip are unmistakable. He understands, on some level, what is happening and what it means, even if his understanding doesn't approach from the same direction that Victim's does, or that the viewer's does. The scene pauses for him to react, after the whip is cracked. He sees significance in its presence.
There really aren't many ways to interpret a fearful person being mercilessly attacked with a whip. Especially if he's got a halter around his neck allowing his attacker to control his ability to distance himself from the harassment, which carries its own implications.
I see merit in the idea that Victim was trying to tame Chosen like a wild beast, and I'm willing to believe that that's the understanding which Chosen or Victim or both have of the situation. But as a viewer I cannot completely separate what's happening on-screen from the banal idea of a slave being punished. Horrific, contemptible, violating, disparaging, unjust, inhumane abuse.
And it's happening to Chosen, who already threw off the shackles of his own slavery years ago. And it's happening under the hands of Victim, emulating the actions of his own abuser...who happens to have been Chosen's abuser as well.
We only saw the beginning and the end of Chosen's enslavement; we don't know what all he suffered while oppressed by the animator. We don't know what Victim knows, of what Chosen has suffered.
Tools have never been used to restrain a character by the neck before, in this series. Strangulation is always done by hand, to win a fight, never to prevent them from leaving it.
Whips haven't appeared at all before now, in this series, much less been used against the characters. And then, of all the characters they could've picked, they pick the one with a history of slavery, a concept that shares a heavy correlation with whips.
It's messed up. It's so much more messed up than I thought the series would be willing to go.