- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
This kind of schmaltz really exemplifies what Lily wants. She doesn't want to write World of Warcraft fanfiction, she writes about how she and her waifu are in lesbians with each other.
AU fanfic where you re-interpret characters as being in 'real life' is hardly a new concept, but generally speaking the authors have some fun with reinterpreting everybody's crazy fantasy backstory into something sensible, and then still adhering (best they can, I know I'm talking about fanfiction) to the original characters. It says a lot that Lily is using her own OC as one of these 'real life' characters. She should've just written a vignette about herself and her hot girlfriend Syv...ia. Nas.
The part where the two are indistinguishable is, of course, the icing-- she doesn't even want to fuck Sylvanas, she wants to fuck a costume of Sylvanas that's being worn by a clone of herself. It's been brought up before but it bears repeating; Lily just wants to date somebody who is her but subservient.
Regarding the Anuin-as-Rapist thing... ugh.
I don't know Warcraft outside of what's been said in this thread. I'm not going to weigh in on characterization. The problem is that she's using rape as a dramatic point and it's disgusting.
Rape can be used effectively as a plot point (the movie Super features a distressing but thematically powerful rape scene near its climax) or as a way of informing a character (Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was raped when she was younger, but this doesn't define her identity) or even as a tragedy in a character's life (Alina -- not to be confused with Aliana -- from Pillars of the Earth is raped in the first third of the book, and it's terrible, but the book takes place over decades and her life goes on and it's never used to try and force sympathy again). It can be.
But 99 times out of 100 it's a cheap way of adding drama and making sure the audience knows how evil the villain is. Recursively, I've seen it used in fanfiction to say 'well, this character is evil, therefore he MUST also be a rapist'.
Alternatively, to impart artificial sympathy for the survivor. It's used so often as a dark twist in female character backstories because it's cheap and easy and horrific and makes you feel sad. In this case it looks like it's being set up to both make sure Andiun is definitely evil you guys, make Anevay vulnerable and sympathetic, and make Sylvanas a badass who will get revenge and then turn into a hurt-comfort moment between her and Anevay. And it's so... insulting to people who have actually been assaulted, to just turn this horrific experience into fodder for your shitty World of Warcraft fanfic.
And like I said, actual, legitimate, good authors can rarely get away with it, because it's always treated as just a plot device for those above reasons. Even people with the best of intentions basically turn it into a revenge fanasy where the romantic interests reaction is more important than what actually happened to the survivor. And sometimes it's even worse (Margaret Atwood wrote a gang rape as part of the opener for MaddAddam and managed to turn it into a positive experience because the girls had cute babies. What the actual fuck, Atwood).
It's not that people hate you specifically, Lily. Almost anybody who just throws in rape for shock value is called out on it. Fanfiction writers, novelists, screenwriters-- it's a subject that very few people ever get right. You aren't being singled out, Lily. You're being warned.
