A demon that writes messages on your mirror with blood but they’re useful messages. Like “remember you have yoga at 6 tonight”
“You need to leave him, Karen”.
I am so here for this
I just spit water all over my desk… this is amazing
Brenda turned, following her friend’s trembling finger.
“Oh, that’s just Rh’lygh.”
“Its…what?”
“Yeah, he’s been a total lifesaver this semester.”
The dark figure drew closer in a shroud of mist and extended a claw like hand that slowly wrapped around Brenda’s shoulder. She glanced at her forearm, upon which strange welts arose that arranged themselves into barely intelligible runes:
Remember you need to study for that biology exam.
“Thanks, I will Rh’lygh, but I’m meeting Brian first.”
Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight. Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!
Oh my god, this is beautiful.
A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.” Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup and refrains from doing it again. He hears the child’s pain; no glorious battle this, but one of fear and wretched survival.
He invites the child to sit with him, offers the choicest mead and instructs his men to bring a sword and shield, a bow and arrow, of the very best materials and appropriate size. “Here,” he says, “you will find no man who dares to harm you. But so you will know your own strength, and be happy all your days in Valhalla, I will teach you to use these weapons.”
The sad day comes when another child enters the hall. Odin does not slam his cup; he simply beams with pride as the first child approaches the newcomer, and holds out her bow and quiver, and says “nobody here will hurt you. Everyone will be so proud you did your best, and I’ll teach you to use these, so you always know how strong you are.”
————
A young man enters the hall. He hesitates when Odin asks his story, but at long last, it ekes out: skinheads after the Pride parade. His partner got into a building and called for help. The police took a little longer than perhaps they really needed to, and two of those selfsame skinheads are in the hospital now with broken bones that need setting, but six against one is no fair match. The fear in his face is obvious: here, among men large enough to break him in two, will he face an eternity of torment for the man he left behind?
Odin rumbles with anger. Curses the low worms who brought this man to his table, and regales him with tales of Loki so to show him his own welcome. “A day will come, my friend, when you seek to be reunited, and so you shall,” Odin tells him. “To request the aid of your comrades in battle is no shameful thing.”
———-
A woman in pink sits near the head of the table. She’s very nearly skin and bones, and has no hair. This will not last; health returns in Valhalla, and joy, and light, and merrymaking. But now her soul remembers the battle of her life, and it must heal.
Odin asks.
And asks again.
And the words pour out like poisoned water, things she couldn’t tell her husband or children. The pain of chemotherapy. The agony of a mastectomy, the pain still deeper of “we found a tumor in your lymph nodes. I’m so sorry.” And at last, the tortured question: what is left of her?
Odin raises his flagon high. “What is left of you, fair warrior queen, is a spirit bright as fire; a will as strong as any forged iron; a life as great as any sea. Your battle was hard-fought, and lost in the glory only such furor can bring, and now the pain and fight are behind you.“
In the months to come, she becomes a scop of the hall–no demotion, but simple choice. She tells the stories of the great healers, Agnes and Tanya, who fought alongside her and thousands of others, who turn from no battle in the belief that one day, one day, the war may be won; the warriors Jessie and Mabel and Jeri and Monique, still battling on; the queens and soldiers and great women of yore.
The day comes when she calls a familiar name, and another small, scarred woman, eyes sunken and dark, limbs frail, curly black hair shaved close to her head, looks up and sees her across the hall. Odin descends from his throne, a tall and foaming goblet in his hands, and stuns the hall entire into silence as he kneels before the newcomer and holds up the goblet between her small dark hands and bids her to drink.
“All-Father!” the feasting multitudes cry. “What brings great Odin, Spear-Shaker, Ancient One, Wand-Bearer, Teacher of Gods, to his knees for this lone waif?”
He waves them off with a hand.
“This woman, LaTeesha, Destroyer of Cancer, from whom the great tumors fly in fear, has fought that greatest battle,” he says, his voice rolling across the hall. “She has fought not another body, but her own; traded blows not with other limbs but with her own flesh; has allowed herself to be pierced with needles and scored with knives, taken poison into her very veins to defeat this enemy, and at long last it is time for her to put her weapons down. Do you think for a moment this fight is less glorious for being in silence, her deeds the less for having been aided by others who provided her weapons? She has a place in this great hall; indeed, the highest place.”
And the children perform feats of archery for the entertainment of all, and the women sing as the young man who still awaits his beloved plays a lute–which, after all, is not so different from the guitar he once used to break a man’s face in that great final fight.
Valhalla is a place of joy, of glory, of great feasting and merrymaking.
And it is a place for the soul and mind to heal.
THIS! This is the Hanged God who owns my loyalty, Old One-Eye who’s call I answer above all.
He is not one to turn the brave aside, asks no more than what one can give (Even if, at times, it doesn’t look that way.)
You’re in charge of assigning every child on Earth the monster under their bed. One child in particular has caused every monster assigned to him/her to quit. You decide to assign yourself.
Case: #273402 Status: Disastrous.
I stare at the file and realize I have no options, over the last 2 years every monster assigned to Charlotte Dower has quit, every last one. Her first monster; a giant goldfish-faced humanoid named Bubba, had been with her for four years, and then she wasn’t scared of him anymore. After that it was a string of different common, uncommon, and rare monsters… I even assigned a sentient sock monster to her. He came back crying! I look on my tablet, only one assignable monster left; myself. Field work has never been my cup of tea, but desperate times call for desperate measures. So at 8:03 pm, after Mrs. Gideon tucks in Charlotte and her little brother Daniel; I slither into the space beneath Charlotte’s bed. Across the room underneath Daniel’s crib is a rookie, Chico, a standard Creep kind of monster. I turn my attention to the bed above me, Charlotte is still awake but barely, I reach up over the bed and run an ice cold finger over her cheek, silence, so I do it again. “I’m not afraid of you monster!” She whispers, but her voice is shaking. I can see a small clock on the wall 8:14, a door somewhere in the house slams and there is an audible hitch of breath from above me. A few minutes go by I can hear Francis Gideon yelling at his wife. There are heavy footsteps on the stairs, and loud panting breaths, Charlotte scrambles off the bed and… She. CRAWLS. Under. The. Bed. With. Me. “Move. Over!” Charlotte hisses at me. I do. The door to the bedroom slams open and I smell the stench of human intoxicants before the man even steps inside. I know why Charlotte isn’t afraid of any of my monsters; she’s afraid of her own. Francis reaches a hand under the bed and I thrust my wrist into it, he starts to pull, I slither out. “What the…” I cut Francis’s next words off by unfolding to my full 12 foot height. Looming over the drunken man I caress my cold fingers down his face. “If you ever touch, scare, or harm my child again, I will find you, and I will do the same to you, for all eternity.” I promise to him. As Francis runs from the room he soils himself. I pull Charlotte from under the bed, tuck her back under her covers and kiss her forehead goodnight. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, sleep well darling.” Charlotte Dower is my child, I am the monster under her bed.
I’ve been a reading machine in the past eighteen days. In fact, I’ve read five novels, across five different genres. One was young adult literary, one was young adult genre, one was an adult literary, and two were adult contemporary fantasies.*
All five featured the main female character getting raped.
By the time I got to book number five, I was so weary, so emotionally drained, so angry. It took me quite awhile to calm down (even if the main character isn’t written as scarred by her experience, I sure as heck am) and parse the source of my rage.
I galloped over to Facebook and told the world how angry I was. I added that none of the male characters in these books had to undergo a sexually degrading experience in order to come of age or bulk up their character development or move the plot. Facebook replied with a host of suggestions for books with boys being raped in them, but that wasn’t really what I was after. I wasn’t really looking for equal-opportunity violation.
What I want is for there to be less gratuitous literary rape.
I’m not talking about books like Speak. I’m talking about novels where the rape scene could just as easily be any other sort of violent scene and it only becomes about sex because there’s a woman involved. If the genders were swapped, a rape scene wouldn’t have happened. The author would’ve come up with a different sort of scenario/ backstory/ defining moment for a male character. Really, this sort of rape is such a medieval, classical way to tell a story. Need to establish some stakes? Grab a secondary character and rape her. Possibly with a god or a mythological object if you have one handy.
And that starts to feel a lot less like realism and more like a malingering culture of women as victims. And it starts, especially when the author is male and the rape scene is graphic, to feel suspiciously like the goal is titillation. It starts to feel like the author believes the only interesting sort of GirlAngst is sexual abuse.
Yes. Having someone force themselves on us is pretty damn traumatic, folks. But guess what? Our personalities are formed by a whole host of experiences. Pretty much the same host of experiences that any man might encounter.
Now, on Facebook and Twitter, people said “but then you’d complain about rape and violence against women being under-represented in fiction.” First of all, no. I wouldn’t complain if there were no more gratuitous rape scenes. And second of all, the rape scenes I’m referring to are not scenes that are going to start dialog about rape. They’re scenes that enforce the woman’s role as Sidekick and Victim and Rescue Me! and I-Am-Only-The-Sum-Of-The-Places-On-My-Body-You-Can-Violate-Me.**
I want to know why this is an easy fall-back, rape. Some folks on Facebook said, “Because it’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”
Is it? Is rape then also the worst thing that can happen to a man? No? It’s different for women, you say? Why is it, then, that we as women should find having our sexual integrity robbed from us worse than torture and death? Is it because … I-Am-Only-The-Sum-Of-The-Places-On-My-Body-You-Can-Violate-Me?***
So what I’m saying is: yes, write about rape. I don’t believe in censoring fiction. But I do believe in writers knowing why they’re writing what they write. And if authors are writing a scene because they subconsciously believe that a woman’s sexual purity is the most important thing about her, they need to reconsider.
I can’t decide if a gratuitous rape scene offends me worse when it’s written by a man or a woman. One makes me angry because it feels like it’s selling rape culture. And the other makes me angry because I feel like women are buying it.
World, we need to talk.
*No, I’m not going to tell you what they were. A book that turns me off might be someone else’s favorite, so I try not to UNrecommend books. I prefer to just recommend the ones that I enjoy.
reblogging this ‘13 post because in ‘16 fiction looks the same
Only gonna say that at least during the Medieval era rapists were generally violently punished for raping, should they be convicted. That isn’t to say that the acquittal rate was any lower than it is today in such cases, particularly when juries were all male and the punishment for rape was hanging or being locked in a hanging cage so people could watch you slowly die. (1, 2)
I had this conversation with a friend last night after watching the first episode of new BBC crime drama The Missing.
There’s a moment where the girl who was kidnapped as a child and has returned as a young woman, reveals she was raped. The camera focuses on her father as he trembles with rage and grief and immediately leaves the room to go and punch a room in a bathroom. Because he’s the real victim, right.*
Crime drama is particularly bad for this (alongside ‘serious’ fantasy), but I’m so sick generally of rape being THE female narrative. It’s difficult to talk about the issue without sounding like I’m trying to downplay how traumatic rape is for its victims (who are of course, of both sexes and all ages). But the thing about considering it ‘the worst thing that can happen to a woman’ is that it’s saying it’s ‘the most important thing that can happen to a woman’.
Frankly, however sternly these dramas treat sexual assault, they are contributing to rape culture. They are reincofrcing the notion that women don’t amount to much more than potential rape victims.
And the idea that it’s aprt of ‘realism’ doesn’t hold water. A lot of things are real that don’t get portrayed much in fiction – going to the toilet, blinking, having a cold. If you think you can’t get through a single narrative without a female character getting raped or threatened with rape, you should check out Terry Pratchett. A man who wrote over 40 books set within a fiction world richly textured with psychological dark and light, and peopled with many and varied female characters without ever going there. Rape in stories is, 99 times out of a hundred, laziness. And thart is a terrible reason to include something so unpleasant in a book.
* This is the second series of The Missing, following an entirely new story. I didn’t watch the first (I won’t be watching any more of the second) but Wikipedia tells me it followed the disappearence of a 5 year old boy. I’d imagine the circumstances of the boy’s kidnap aren’t about sexual assualt. Little boys that go missing in crime fiction don’t suffer that fate with the certitude that litle girls do.
When I saw this I literally screamed in my head at the same time my hand flew to grab a hold of this magazine. Rejoice my fellow fanfic writers, we are valid, our writing is valid and we should be proud of being fanfic writers.
Enjoy this reading that I’m sure will inspire and motivate you to keep writing 😉💗
Steel Phoenix Studios 