So this is a stupid post and I’m stupid for making it but I’m going to anyway.
Potentially triggering (discussion of parental abuse in fanfiction).
[TUMBLR I REALLY HATE HOW YOU MAKE PAGE BREAKS GO AWAY.]
I really, really wish people would find other characters to make abusive parents, instead of turning the caring parents we see in canon into massively abusive/neglectful/basically awful in every way assholes.
I mean, yes, everything is open to interpretation, but after a certain point it’s basically not the character anymore. And there are other characters available, and if you can’t find a suitable abuser then MAKE ONE UP. If you’re going to AU a character to death, just AU them out of the picture and replace them with a more likely candidate, why don’t you?
I just generally get annoyed when people make a big deal out of it being THIS PARTICULAR CHARACTER when they don’t even really share any actual traits with the canon character at all.
Or. Or maybe just make them REALISTICALLY have issues, instead of automatically making every single problem turn into a “they hit me/touched me/wouldn’t feed me” situation. Things can be legitimately very bad for a child without the parent actually being some kind of monster.
Not every parent turns into an abusive man-beast when their kid does something they vehemently disagree with. In plenty of situations, a caring parent may turn cold, or ignore the issue, or kick their kid out, or turn their attention to another child or person instead. All of those are pretty awful situations for the kid.
I promise you can have a good deal of angst without taking it all the way up to eleven every time. It’d actually be interesting to read a situation that feels that much more realistic for the character.
(And for the record, I’m not saying that in real life, in real situations, parents who appear loving on the outside are never abusive. I’m saying that when you get inside their home and inside the kid’s head in a fictional story and they only think about how their parents are OVERLY loving or OVERLY attentive, that’s probably not the case.)
/stupid pointless ranting
