I call this a non-review because I made it less than five minutes before the gratuitous and immediately poorly handled rape as backstory to make a female character badass in the episode “Sonny’s Edge” made me turn it the fuck off.

Seriously.

I’d heard some mediocre to good things, and also some bad reviews.  My favorite being this one from Inverse.  But I was willing to give it a shot. I have some problematic faves as a woman who likes hentai.  But I just could not with this one.

So once again for the cheap seats, do not use rape as a backstory for your female characters unless you can handle it well and sensitively.

If you have to ask if you can do that, the answer is probably no.  And I don’t care which gender you are, even rape survivors can handle it poorly.  But when it comes to dudes writing essentially porn, my expectations drop to fucking zero.

Yup, it’s a super sweary post!

Let’s go over all the reasons why this sucks and you should not default to this lazy ass trope and cliche.

If you think the only thing that could make a woman a badass is having been raped, go fuck yourself.

Women can have as many motivations as men do, from having lost a loved one (see the fridging of Steve Trevor for a a nice switch up from the hundreds, thousands of fridged women), to greed, to wanting to prove themselves, to just being a generally good or good-hearted person.  Relying on rape as the sole reason a woman could decide to kick ass and chew bubblegum is lazy, gross and objectifying.  In part because it is yet another way to link a woman’s value to her body and what men think about it/have done to it.

Yeah, I hate this a lot.

So I think I lasted about 3 minutes, maybe five before I decided I could not even with this show.  And having seen this, my hopes that they have treated anything else in this series with anything resembling tact or sensitivity have fallen to nil.

I don’t want to hear about how if I just get past that, or “Well, that episode was bad, but…”  I just don’t care.  If you dig it, go you.  Have a great time watching it, just recognize that it is problematic as fuck, and act accordingly when recommending it to people.

KTHNXBYE.

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