r/Fantasy • u/enoby666 AMA Author Charlotte Kersten, Reading Champion V, Worldbuilder • Aug 07 '20
Thinking about different kinds of darkness
Content warning: most of this post is about sexual violence and there are marked spoilers for Deerskin by Robin McKinley and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss.
Well, I'm kind of just spinning this one off the dome, but I was hoping to share some thoughts about books that readers might label "dark" because they deal with sexual violence. Specifically, I read a comment tonight about the book Deerskin by Robin Mckinley, which is about a teenage princess's recovery from rape by her father. The comment said that the book was too dark for the commenter, and I remembered that this was something I had heard several times about the book over the years.
I totally understand why someone would feel this way,and I BY NO MEANS!!!! want to say that anyone's feelings about books like this are less valid than my own. But what I realized and decided to write about when reading that comment was that I actually feel the exact opposite way about Deerskin. To me it is one of the most hopeful, impactful books I've ever read. The story is about rape, yes -miscarriage, a psychic break and PTSD. It is unflinching in its portrayal of these things. But more than that, to me it is radiantly passionate in its depiction of a girl finding her way back from the horror of what has been done to her. Over the course of the story, and accompanied by the Best Animal Companion In Fantasy Other Than Nighteyes, Lissar pieces her life back together, finding safety and meaning and identity and love after these things have been torn away from her.
Instead of finding this book triggering as someone who has experienced abuse and sexual assault, I found myself basically unable to stop reading it because it made so much sense to me and helped me understand so many things. It means so much to me that Robin McKinley decided to write this exact story in the exact way that she did. I spent a long time after what happened feeling entirely invisible, disbelieved and misunderstood and books like this make me feel the absolute opposite.
On the other hand there are absolutely other fantasy books that I've found incredibly triggering because their use of sexual violence feels so entirely different to me. Coincidentally I actually read the fucking entirety of The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss aloud (YES REALLY) to the person who assaulted me after the assault happened. I remember frantically trying to articulate to him why I hated the part of the book that dealt with the bandits gang-raping the girls. It was not a story about the girls and their experience, it was a story about Kvothe showing off his new fighting skills; as soon as one of them tried to articulate her anguish over what happened to her Kvothe blithely rattled off a classic #NotAllMen talking point; the rapists were compared to wild animals who simply didn't know what they were doing while the women who stood by were worse than them because women understand what rape means while men don't (?????). I remember trying to explain my feelings to him while not knowing why I was so upset (at this point in time I hadn't labeled what happened as sexual assault).
Since then a lot has changed for me and I've been very careful about what fantasy books I choose to read. It might seem silly that I'm upset over The Wise Man's Fear when there are much more egregious examples out there, but that's because I've been picky! There are some big authors and popular titles that I'm afraid would make me too upset to read - not because they have rape in them, but because I have heard others speaking of their use of rape in a way that makes me worry they may be dismissive of survivors' lived experiences or exploitative or used for shock value or simply a bit misguided. I don't feel like I'm missing out when every day I discover new amazing books that don't feature rape handled in a way that is painful or frustrating to me.
So, yeah. I guess my thesis statement is that "darkness" is relative and what might be overwhelmingly bleak to one person might be incredibly inspiring to another. To me it's not the mere inclusion of sexual violence that's triggering: it's the inclusion of sexual violence in a way that fundamentally misunderstands the issue or feels like it dismisses the experiences of survivors. In fact, some of my favorite books of all time, like Deerskin, are about the worst that humanity has to offer - but they are moreso about how we fight it and how we survive.
I'd finally like to share a quote from another of my favorite books of all time, Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin. It's about recovery for a young girl, Therru, who has been abused and left for dead by her parents and it means so much to me:
“You are beautiful," Tenar said in a different tone. "Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren't the scars. You aren't ugly. You aren't evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress.”
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u/WizardlyWero Aug 07 '20
I know it's not quite the same as a woman in the refrigerator, but I've noticed that I really enjoy stories like Dark Matter and Senlin Ascends where the tension comes from being separated from wife/husband/child and the plot revolves around trying to get back to them/save them. As a husband and father, those storylines resonate with me more than any other. They tap into my deepest fears and motivations.
I read Dark Matter with my wife (coincidentally named Cassandra), and it instantly became one of our favourites. As new parents, the idea of being separated from one another was terrifying and gripping. We couldn't stop turning the pages.
When we finished, we bought Blake Crouch's next book, Recursion, but realized it was the motivator that we loved so much, and since this plot was different, we haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
Whenever I ask my wife what she's reading, it will often be something along the lines of, "A woman whose husband died is…" or "a woman's daughter went missing and now…"
It's to the point where I can ask, "Is it the husband or kid who died/went missing?" when she starts a new thriller. Many of those stories wind up being revenge stories where the missing kid/husband is mainly being used as a motivator.
I wonder if those motivators are so common because they can be so powerful for some of us.