Trigger warning: rape culture
The TV: After all that Felicia has achieved for herself in the last three seasons- as a professional and as a person- we felt that reducing her to nothing more than a victim of rape was totally unacceptable.
Steph (furious): Reduce? Nothing more than a-?
(She stands up) WAITRESS!
Waitress: Huh? What’s wrong?
Steph: Can you turn that idiotic plastic thing off? Or change the channel?
Waitress: Sorry, miss. The regulars watch Entertainment Jackal every day. Can’t do it.
Steph (slamming down her money, jerking her thumb): C’mon, Tim, let’s go somewhere else.
So can I talk about my love for this page? It’s a clear demonstration of rape culture and how it affects and triggers people. Steph is unabashedly, unashamedly furious to hear the media casually dehumanize rape victims, and she fucking makes a scene about it. She will not sit here and listen to this shit, she will call it out. It’s clear that this sort of subtle language hurts her and triggers her, and she won’t stand for it.
IDK, I guess this sort of thing is why Steph is important to me and distinctive from the bevy of blondes and I would never say she has a generic personality. She is deeply, deeply connected to abuse and she is well aware how much of it is due to her class, her gender, her background and she internalizes it deeply- but she also really fights against it, and her entire life story is refusing to let abuse or the culture she lives in dehumanize her. She calls out rape culture. She’s loud and she’s angry and she’s fighting for all the people beside her are buried under this shit, because she knows she’s not the only one and she’s determined to protect people so they don’t have to go through it because she knows exactly how it feels. She’ll never give in.
Stephanie Brown means a lot to me the end.
This page is a huge part of why her later treatment made me furious enough to start Girl-Wonder.org — how DARE dc comics take this voice and kill her via three months of extremely sexualised and horrifying torture? How fucking dare they?
okay but so we’re all aware that this is a dig at the writers of felicity specifically thought right
because i just
it makes me
so
happy
OH YES I forgot to mention that
Yeah there’s actually a really good interview with Jon Lewis about this issue and he admits that this page was in response to the statements made by the writers of Felicity because they really pissed him off.
It’s here:
Like I said, trying to be true to this specific situation with these specific people, and not “make a statement” about an issue. However, there are a couple things I did put in there for purely rhetorical purposes. I felt I needed to point out the depressingly high percentage of women and girls who have experienced something like this, that it is unfortunately not a rare phenomenon.
Also, sometime early this year I read a bit in the entertainment section of the newspaper about how the season finale of that show “Felicity” had been scrapped, because it had Felicity being sexually assaulted. The producers asked for a totally new episode, and released a press statement saying, “we felt that after all this character has achieved for herself professionally and personally, to reduce her to nothing more than a victim of rape would be totally unacceptable.”
I found that sentiment so utterly disgusting, this idea that rape strips a woman of her personhood and negates all her achievements. It stuck in my craw. Months later, when I wrote Robin # 111, I just had to put it in. There’s a scene where Steph and Tim are in a diner, and there’s a TV on in the background showing the equivalent of Entertainment Tonight, and there’s a newsbit where that press release is read almost verbatim. Obviously, that’s something that is in the story only because as the author I wanted to ridicule and revile it. But otherwise I tried hard to just tell the story, be inside the characters
And the commentary just gets better.
