Revenge Fantasy - Tumblr Posts

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

Been scrolling through fanfiction, as one does in their spare time, and I've noticed an interesting trend when you get outside characters to punish the 'morally repugnant'. Could be historical, could be the dead, could be a character from another fandom. But it never fits with their crimes.

And I'm not talking about people punishing a genocidal dictator or a rapist or someone who is canonically evil in the original source material, I'm speaking of people who were negligent but still on the side of good. People who are flawed, yes, and those flaws sometimes endanger those around them, but ultimately do the right thing.

And some writers go way over the top that they justify monstrous crimes for 'trusting one person too much' or 'not listening to something frankly outrageous' or 'not fighting hard enough against a person in power'.

I want to clarify, no hate to the writers. Rage fantasies are entirely okay and can be beneficial. I'm not saying that type of content doesn't have a place.

But it's a trend I've noticed, and it's really annoying when I'm trying to find a critique of a character and then read this and see the author's notes where they're all "Yeah, I was going to have them raped/stripped of something intrinsic/tortured/etc., but the other characters need them to not be until they can find an adequate replacement'

Like, good god, we get it. You don't like this character. That doesn't mean your logic isn't disturbing.

I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but I just find it mildly discomforting. It just gets extreme, ya know? And the actual monsters in canon and in the fanfic, get at most a "then this amazing avenger of justice killed them" in the first couple of lines. And it's, disappointing, I guess. It boils complex characters and situations and relationships into "this ones bad and this ones good"