Oh please please make the bad guy an original character then? :D *puppy dog eyes* Then you can be straightforward about the fact that Ryan has been enslaved and raped and it's horrible, and not be trying to dance around excuses for it.
Oh right, awesome. Yep, k, so on the trajectory I was talking about in the comment I just wrote, the broken stage, the violence, the breaking and the initial submission and then the slow change, the disappearance of who he was and his weaknesses, his rebirth as this proudly self-loathing, faithless, bitter but strong, so strong person all happens in these other places, and then it's that person, that strong, stunning, breathtakingly furious, intense person who is picked up as sort of omg yes by the cabaret and its high-class/expensive but super-shady brothel.
On cringeworthiness - slavefic turns into cringe when rape becomes eroticised. It's pretty much as simple as that. There are other bits and pieces, but 90% of the time it's one spin or another on that. When we forgive the bad guy, when we turn a relationship involving slavery and rape into a ship, when it's hot that -insert anything to do with rape/forced submission- those are the big places where slavefic slips. There are loads of reasons it happens, but it happens a *lot*, which means it can be really easy to slip into sideways. You just have to keep it in mind. I will always sound like a pretentious asshat talking about this, but it's just one of those things I feel really strongly about (it's the reason I first started writing about and researching slavefic years ago).
no subject
Oh right, awesome. Yep, k, so on the trajectory I was talking about in the comment I just wrote, the broken stage, the violence, the breaking and the initial submission and then the slow change, the disappearance of who he was and his weaknesses, his rebirth as this proudly self-loathing, faithless, bitter but strong, so strong person all happens in these other places, and then it's that person, that strong, stunning, breathtakingly furious, intense person who is picked up as sort of omg yes by the cabaret and its high-class/expensive but super-shady brothel.
On cringeworthiness - slavefic turns into cringe when rape becomes eroticised. It's pretty much as simple as that. There are other bits and pieces, but 90% of the time it's one spin or another on that. When we forgive the bad guy, when we turn a relationship involving slavery and rape into a ship, when it's hot that -insert anything to do with rape/forced submission- those are the big places where slavefic slips. There are loads of reasons it happens, but it happens a *lot*, which means it can be really easy to slip into sideways. You just have to keep it in mind. I will always sound like a pretentious asshat talking about this, but it's just one of those things I feel really strongly about (it's the reason I first started writing about and researching slavefic years ago).