Thank You, Silence.

kyrax2:

adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

sharpestrose:

adventuresofcomicbookgirl:

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?

fucking word.

I’ll never stop being angry about it. Never.

Yes.

“War Games” is one of the most panned arcs of “Robin”, and rightfully so.  It’s also another case of DC Editorial forcing creators to make a story they hated.  

From the Bleeding Cool transcription (video and original article here):

It was one of the most depressing weeks of my life, because we basically spent the whole week in this horrible office planning how to kill this poor teenage girl who I really liked, I thought she was a great character and she was one of the few friends that my character had, and I tell you the whole thing about her being Robin, was simply a trick.

The whole way through it was planned purely as a trick to play on the readers, that we would fool them into thinking that the big event was that Stephanie Brown would become Robin but we knew all along it was a temporary thing, and she was then going to die at the end of this crossover story.

It was really seedy, and I think about two days into it, I basically said look, I don’t want… because they planned this big long torture scene, I said I don’t want to really have anything to do with that. And there was another scene which was… I was Pilate, I was Pontius Pilate, I don’t want any of that in Batgirl, in effect what I did is I wrote my comic out of the key events in the story, cos I said I didn’t want to have anything to do with the big shoot out at the high school scene, so it was a really strange experience, for me that was the most depressing…

So when there was that big online debate about Stephanie Brown’s death I felt kind of really pleased and vindicated, and the other person who I think was probably happy about that but I don’t think she’s ever said so in interviews was Devin Grayson who was writing Nightwing at the time… she raised several issues during this meeting, she was one of the other writers in the meeting who said how come we’re always killing off the girls, and also how come we’re killing off the ethnic characters,[Karen mentions Orpheus], there was a lot of debate in that meeting, well ultimately it all came down to this is what we’re going to do. The editors I was working with were nice people,…[INTERRUPTION] no they weren’t all white, they weren’t all straight…[Karen asks if they were all men] yes, they were all men, but the writers weren’t all men, but I think the thing is the industry is much more diverse and much more liberal and much more politically liberal than the comics necessarily imply, but there are these kind of commercial expectations on where the stories are going to go and we do get these directives from the head editorial office, the tone of the whole industry has dug itself into a hole, and it means that really decent people who would love to be good stories end up writing these whole…

It reminds me strongly of something else I reblogged recently about the importance of having different perspectives in video game development.  One has to wonder: if DC had more women on its staff, or perhaps if it had more women with *power* on its staff, or even if it just listened to the women it has, perhaps it wouldn’t be so incredibly (and often unintentionally) horrible and offensive.  The same goes for minorities (yes, I’m thinking of Africa being “Ruled by Apes” on that map).