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attackfishDear Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino,
I have never written to a celebrity, or writer, or anyone involved in making the media I know and love so very much before. It always felt too presumptuous. I hope as you read this, you can understand why I chose to write this when I never have before. I know that entitled, pushy, or angry fans, sometimes even scary fans, try to contact you on a regular basis, and that this is most likely one of the reasons it is so hard to get into contact with you both. The only way I was able to find to contact you personally was through Facebook, and for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with shame or an unwillingness to own what I am writing here, I do not want my birth name and offline identity attached to this. That is why I have decided to post this letter here, to my blog, in the hopes that someone who reads this will be able to boost the signal, and that possibly it might reach your ears.
I was abused. I was almost ten when it started, and when, after a year, I tried to get away, my abuser stalked me for three more years until I was a month away from my fourteenth birthday. This is a fairly common story, as I’m sure you know. What’s a little less common is that my abuser was another little girl just under a year younger than I was. We were in the same grade, because I was born in the fall, right after the age cutoff for our elementary school, and she was born in the summer, just before. We were “friends” because we had transferred to the same new school at the same time, and because our mothers were friends. I had been badly bullied at my previous school because of a severe genetic illness, and I had very low self esteem. Between this, and the fact that many adults in our small town, and most of the other kids in school saw my illness, an immune disease with neurological effects including memory problems, as reason to believe that I was “crazy” and untrustworthy, I was the perfect victim.
For years, I, like many abuse victims, hated myself for being weak, for being stupid, for being a thousand other things, but mostly for being a little girl who didn't deserve to go through that. I believed these things while she abused me, while she stalked me, and after my family had moved two big western states away from her and she was unable to find a way to get ahold of me. I suffered anxiety and depression, and found it extremely difficult to make friends, because what if this new friend was just like her? I woke up sweating and shaking, seeing her face in my dreams. I fought, cried, and shook every time someone touched me on the insides of my arms, because all of a sudden, I was right back there with her. Eventually, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Even years later, as an adult, it is hard for me to tell this story, not only because of the memories it brings to the surface, but also because of the looks on people’s faces and stifled snickering I get when I tell them that a little girl abused me and hurt me so badly that I developed PTSD. And I understand where they’re coming from. I look at little girls the same age now and wonder, “How can you be a threat to anybody?”
This is why Avatar: the Last Airbender meant to very much to me in ways I don’t think I can even begin to describe. For the very first time, I saw a fourteen year old girl, and then in flashbacks, an eight year old girl, portrayed as an abuser, portrayed as dangerous, as frightening, and as real and credible an abuser as any other. And she had victims, who weren’t portrayed as weak, or stupid, or wrong for being her victims, who were smart, and strong, and capable, and that it wasn’t their fault that they were her victims. For the very first time, I saw on screen an abuser and her victims who looked like my abuser and me.
From the moment Azula coerced and threatened Ty Lee into coming with her without a word spoken, I saw an abusive relationship like my own portrayed with such realism and sensitivity. You got it. Somebody out there got it. You showed how Azula controlled her victims, how not every moment with an abuser was active abuse, but how that could change in a heartbeat. You showed how two abuse victims could bond both because of and in spite of the abuse to become true friends. You showed just how terrifying being with an abuser is, and just how terrifying it is to leave. And when you showed Mai and Ty Lee standing up to Azula at the Boiling Rock, it healed something inside of me I didn’t even realize was still broken. By showing their defiance of her, and their breaking her control as a triumph and a Good Thing, you helped me acknowledge and overcome my own feelings of cowardliness and worthlessness for having run from my own abuser.
Avatar: the Last Airbender had abuse victims who weren’t objects of pity. These were abuse victims, victims of an abuser who looked like mine, in which I could see myself. I could see myself in Zuko because of my feelings of anger and shame, and the way I believed my abuser’s lies, even when I knew she was lying. I could see myself in Ty Lee in the way I covered up everything I felt with a smile and constantly flattered and obeyed my abuser to keep her happy. I could see myself in Mai because I wasn’t free until I learned to look at the world and at myself and say this is what I love more than I fear my abuser. I see myself in all of them because they are more than their victimhood and that they have lives and selves outside of what Azula, Ozai, or anyone else did to them.
I will forever be grateful for the fact that that you chose to make abuse a central theme in Avatar: the Last Airbender, and that you made the hard choice to portray it with such authenticity and compassion, that you chose to portray abusers who didn’t look like the stereotype, who had the power to hurt, no matter how unexpected. There are many many things like that in Avatar: the Last Airbender, reasons it has touched people’s lives, and given them something no other show has. This is the reason for me. And I cannot thank both of you enough.
However, it is this very thing that has made watching the first four episodes of The Legend of Korra Book Two so very painful for me. I’m not even sure you realize quite how abusive the Bolin and Eska relationship is, and seeing it portrayed as a joke feels like a slap in the face after Avatar: the Last Airbender. Abuse is never funny, and acting as if it is hurts real people.
We have come far enough as a society that if you were to portray the same relationship, with a boy Eska and a girl Bolin, no one would be laughing. When this Eska tells his girlfriend that he likes it when she grovels, when he chooses what clothes she will wear, when he isolates, terrifies, and controls her, when he collars her and tries to force her into marriage, when he violently retaliates with potentially deadly force when she tries to leave him, no one would be laughing.
The only reason it can be funny to so many people with boy Bolin and girl Eska is because of some really toxic sexist assumptions we make as a society. Since you fought so hard to have a female lead in The Legend of Korra, and have striven in both Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra to have many diverse and believable, capable female characters, I know that sexism in your show matters a lot to you, and that you understand the importance of gender equality and negative attitudes about gender in the media, especially for children. The sexist assumptions that this rests on are that female abusers are somehow less of a threat, less dangerous, inherently less real as abusers then male abusers, and that men and boys are somehow less worthy as victims, because as men, they should have been stronger. Victimhood in our society is heavily coded as feminine, so to make a man or boy a victim is to make him like a woman or girl. Since that’s still seen as lesser, that makes the male victim lesser. Combine that with the other toxic assumptions about victimhood our society has, like victims being weak, which remember, also has gender connotations in our culture, and male victims can be mocked instead of sympathized with. The systems that make us see an abusive woman as less of a real abuser are more complicated, but at it’s core, it’s the idea that women lack the ability to hurt, that it takes strength and power to hurt, and that women don’t have strength and power.
These are sadly ideas and assumptions that real victims face in the real world. Boys and men abused by women and girls, men abused by other men, women abused by other women, or in my case, girls abused by other girls, face a double dose of victim blaming and denial, though female victims of men are themselves treated badly enough. It was ideas like these that got into my head, and kept me from identifying my own experiences as abuse until I was an adult, that kept me feeling like I was weak and wrong to “let” my abuser affect me like this. These attitudes do damage.
There is a truism that media is a mirror by which we see ourselves. It’s incredibly painful to look into that mirror and not be able to see yourself reflected back, and it is also incredibly painful to look into that mirror and see yourself reflected back only as a figure of mockery, as the butt of a joke. Men and boys abused by women and girls do not deserve to see themselves as the butt of your joke. They deserve the same experience I had watching Avatar: the Last Airbender and seeing myself in Azula’s struggling, courageous victims.
I know that The Legend of Korra is your show, not mine, and I cannot ask you to rewrite it for my pleasure. I also know that since you are already working on recording Book Four, even if you do read this and take it to heart, likely nothing I say to you will ever affect your decisions for The Legend of Korra, since most of them have already been made. But I also know that you will make other shows in the future, and I hope that you consider these words and the ideas I have attempted to convey, and that maybe, in the future, I will see the kinds of portrayals of abuse that I know you are capable of instead of more like Bolin and Eska.
Sincerely,
Attackfish
I have never written to a celebrity, or writer, or anyone involved in making the media I know and love so very much before. It always felt too presumptuous. I hope as you read this, you can understand why I chose to write this when I never have before. I know that entitled, pushy, or angry fans, sometimes even scary fans, try to contact you on a regular basis, and that this is most likely one of the reasons it is so hard to get into contact with you both. The only way I was able to find to contact you personally was through Facebook, and for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with shame or an unwillingness to own what I am writing here, I do not want my birth name and offline identity attached to this. That is why I have decided to post this letter here, to my blog, in the hopes that someone who reads this will be able to boost the signal, and that possibly it might reach your ears.
I was abused. I was almost ten when it started, and when, after a year, I tried to get away, my abuser stalked me for three more years until I was a month away from my fourteenth birthday. This is a fairly common story, as I’m sure you know. What’s a little less common is that my abuser was another little girl just under a year younger than I was. We were in the same grade, because I was born in the fall, right after the age cutoff for our elementary school, and she was born in the summer, just before. We were “friends” because we had transferred to the same new school at the same time, and because our mothers were friends. I had been badly bullied at my previous school because of a severe genetic illness, and I had very low self esteem. Between this, and the fact that many adults in our small town, and most of the other kids in school saw my illness, an immune disease with neurological effects including memory problems, as reason to believe that I was “crazy” and untrustworthy, I was the perfect victim.
For years, I, like many abuse victims, hated myself for being weak, for being stupid, for being a thousand other things, but mostly for being a little girl who didn't deserve to go through that. I believed these things while she abused me, while she stalked me, and after my family had moved two big western states away from her and she was unable to find a way to get ahold of me. I suffered anxiety and depression, and found it extremely difficult to make friends, because what if this new friend was just like her? I woke up sweating and shaking, seeing her face in my dreams. I fought, cried, and shook every time someone touched me on the insides of my arms, because all of a sudden, I was right back there with her. Eventually, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Even years later, as an adult, it is hard for me to tell this story, not only because of the memories it brings to the surface, but also because of the looks on people’s faces and stifled snickering I get when I tell them that a little girl abused me and hurt me so badly that I developed PTSD. And I understand where they’re coming from. I look at little girls the same age now and wonder, “How can you be a threat to anybody?”
This is why Avatar: the Last Airbender meant to very much to me in ways I don’t think I can even begin to describe. For the very first time, I saw a fourteen year old girl, and then in flashbacks, an eight year old girl, portrayed as an abuser, portrayed as dangerous, as frightening, and as real and credible an abuser as any other. And she had victims, who weren’t portrayed as weak, or stupid, or wrong for being her victims, who were smart, and strong, and capable, and that it wasn’t their fault that they were her victims. For the very first time, I saw on screen an abuser and her victims who looked like my abuser and me.
From the moment Azula coerced and threatened Ty Lee into coming with her without a word spoken, I saw an abusive relationship like my own portrayed with such realism and sensitivity. You got it. Somebody out there got it. You showed how Azula controlled her victims, how not every moment with an abuser was active abuse, but how that could change in a heartbeat. You showed how two abuse victims could bond both because of and in spite of the abuse to become true friends. You showed just how terrifying being with an abuser is, and just how terrifying it is to leave. And when you showed Mai and Ty Lee standing up to Azula at the Boiling Rock, it healed something inside of me I didn’t even realize was still broken. By showing their defiance of her, and their breaking her control as a triumph and a Good Thing, you helped me acknowledge and overcome my own feelings of cowardliness and worthlessness for having run from my own abuser.
Avatar: the Last Airbender had abuse victims who weren’t objects of pity. These were abuse victims, victims of an abuser who looked like mine, in which I could see myself. I could see myself in Zuko because of my feelings of anger and shame, and the way I believed my abuser’s lies, even when I knew she was lying. I could see myself in Ty Lee in the way I covered up everything I felt with a smile and constantly flattered and obeyed my abuser to keep her happy. I could see myself in Mai because I wasn’t free until I learned to look at the world and at myself and say this is what I love more than I fear my abuser. I see myself in all of them because they are more than their victimhood and that they have lives and selves outside of what Azula, Ozai, or anyone else did to them.
I will forever be grateful for the fact that that you chose to make abuse a central theme in Avatar: the Last Airbender, and that you made the hard choice to portray it with such authenticity and compassion, that you chose to portray abusers who didn’t look like the stereotype, who had the power to hurt, no matter how unexpected. There are many many things like that in Avatar: the Last Airbender, reasons it has touched people’s lives, and given them something no other show has. This is the reason for me. And I cannot thank both of you enough.
However, it is this very thing that has made watching the first four episodes of The Legend of Korra Book Two so very painful for me. I’m not even sure you realize quite how abusive the Bolin and Eska relationship is, and seeing it portrayed as a joke feels like a slap in the face after Avatar: the Last Airbender. Abuse is never funny, and acting as if it is hurts real people.
We have come far enough as a society that if you were to portray the same relationship, with a boy Eska and a girl Bolin, no one would be laughing. When this Eska tells his girlfriend that he likes it when she grovels, when he chooses what clothes she will wear, when he isolates, terrifies, and controls her, when he collars her and tries to force her into marriage, when he violently retaliates with potentially deadly force when she tries to leave him, no one would be laughing.
The only reason it can be funny to so many people with boy Bolin and girl Eska is because of some really toxic sexist assumptions we make as a society. Since you fought so hard to have a female lead in The Legend of Korra, and have striven in both Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra to have many diverse and believable, capable female characters, I know that sexism in your show matters a lot to you, and that you understand the importance of gender equality and negative attitudes about gender in the media, especially for children. The sexist assumptions that this rests on are that female abusers are somehow less of a threat, less dangerous, inherently less real as abusers then male abusers, and that men and boys are somehow less worthy as victims, because as men, they should have been stronger. Victimhood in our society is heavily coded as feminine, so to make a man or boy a victim is to make him like a woman or girl. Since that’s still seen as lesser, that makes the male victim lesser. Combine that with the other toxic assumptions about victimhood our society has, like victims being weak, which remember, also has gender connotations in our culture, and male victims can be mocked instead of sympathized with. The systems that make us see an abusive woman as less of a real abuser are more complicated, but at it’s core, it’s the idea that women lack the ability to hurt, that it takes strength and power to hurt, and that women don’t have strength and power.
These are sadly ideas and assumptions that real victims face in the real world. Boys and men abused by women and girls, men abused by other men, women abused by other women, or in my case, girls abused by other girls, face a double dose of victim blaming and denial, though female victims of men are themselves treated badly enough. It was ideas like these that got into my head, and kept me from identifying my own experiences as abuse until I was an adult, that kept me feeling like I was weak and wrong to “let” my abuser affect me like this. These attitudes do damage.
There is a truism that media is a mirror by which we see ourselves. It’s incredibly painful to look into that mirror and not be able to see yourself reflected back, and it is also incredibly painful to look into that mirror and see yourself reflected back only as a figure of mockery, as the butt of a joke. Men and boys abused by women and girls do not deserve to see themselves as the butt of your joke. They deserve the same experience I had watching Avatar: the Last Airbender and seeing myself in Azula’s struggling, courageous victims.
I know that The Legend of Korra is your show, not mine, and I cannot ask you to rewrite it for my pleasure. I also know that since you are already working on recording Book Four, even if you do read this and take it to heart, likely nothing I say to you will ever affect your decisions for The Legend of Korra, since most of them have already been made. But I also know that you will make other shows in the future, and I hope that you consider these words and the ideas I have attempted to convey, and that maybe, in the future, I will see the kinds of portrayals of abuse that I know you are capable of instead of more like Bolin and Eska.
Sincerely,
Attackfish
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Date: 2013-10-06 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-06 06:16 pm (UTC)