[snip]
None of this is true. No one is talking about it because none of it is true.
This is certainly a movie about learning to understand and love your parents, and there are a lot of people who don’t need or want to hear that message, many of whom have lived through abuse or neglect. But this is an intentionally terrible misreading of Brave that conflates emotional abuse with a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Elinor just isn’t an abusive parent, and this just isn’t what happens in the film.
It looks like the OP has already responded to concerns and has decided that further responses are off the table, so this is for… everyone else, I guess? In order:
WOW OKAY, I could not even get past the first bit of this response because of this: “Hurting your child is wrong, but it’s not like she tosses her across the fucking room.”
NO
DON’T EVER DO THAT
DO NOT EVER SAY “DOING [ABUSIVE THING] IS WRONG, BUT IT’S NOT LIKE THEY [DID SOMETHING HYPERBOLICALLY MORE VIOLENT]”
DON’T
THAT MAKES YOU AN ABUSE APOLOGIST
I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS MOVIE AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ANYMORE WHETHER MERIDA’S PARENTS ARE “”“TRULY”“” ABUSIVE (FUN FACT: IF AN ABUSE SURVIVOR IS TRIGGERED BY POTENTIALLY ABUSIVE DYNAMIC IN FICTION, YOUR REFUTATIONS OF THEIR INTERPRETATION DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER MORE THAN THEIR DESIRE FOR OTHER ABUSE SURVIVORS TO BE WARNED ABOUT IT.) BECAUSE JUST THAT SENTENCE, THAT SENTENCE ALONE, OUT OF THE CONTEXT OF ANY OF THIS, SCREAMS ABUSE APOLOGETICS.
THAT IS NOT OKAY!!!
I’m really, profoundly sorry for the hurtful implications of what I said. That is not what I meant, but we all know how much that’s worth. Physical abuse is physical abuse—period. Being hurt by your parents is wrong, and while there are different cultural norms towards child discipline that apply in different situations, none of them apply here. Hurting your kid is wrong full stop.
The end of that sentence was meant as a factual criticism of the original post, but tacked onto the other half of the sentence it was fucked up.
However, the original post not only didn’t give enough accurate information to inform other abuse survivors whether or not the original movie would trigger them (and included a lot of other information that implied it would trigger them in ways that are not … present, like, just straight up, factually, not in the movie), it also wasn’t a trigger warning. If anyone goes and sees the movie because they read the original post and then they read my refutation (including the paragraph on top explaining that this movie is probably NOT for people who would be triggered by movies about learning to ~~love your parents~~) and then they’re triggered anyway, obviously I’ve done something horrifyingly wrong! Doesn’t look like that’s happened, though?? I would never ever say that the OP is wrong to be triggered or that she should shut up and not tell other people that this movie could be triggering for survivors of abuse. Of course she should pass on that information!! But that’s not what she did. She’s making a post that claims that the makers of the movie are abusers who wrote this movie to apologize for abuse, and then providing hugely inaccurate information about the plot and contents as an explanation for that claim. It certainly doesn’t work as an argument for why the writers of Brave were “explicitly promoting abuse culture”, but it also doesn’t work as a trigger warning because it doesn’t contain accurate information to allow people to decide whether or not they would be triggered by it. Whichever one of us was more accurate, though, I don’t have the ability to delete the original post! I’m not even getting as widely reblogged as the OP did (which is right and proper—most people haven’t seen the film yet and are erring on the side of caution). People can still read both posts and make up their own mind whether or not the content in the film will fuck them up. Part of my hope was that, with accurate information, they would be better able to make that decision.
But you are right that I have never experienced abuse. So here’s a frankly better rebuttal by someone who has.
(Source: xinashouse)
