@olgathehandmaid
Please never ever lose your narration. Human voices in media are going to be so hard to find in the future, and I really really love yours for your videos.
@kylawhite2140
“everyone loves a beautiful dead girl” is something i heard and it haunts me to this day
@drbright6608
"The perfect victim is one you create for yourself, for never could you empathize more than with your own creation."
@steel8231
I'm not sure if the Victorians were more or less generally aware of this, but a body taking an unnaturally long time to decay is one of the formalized requirements to become a Saint in the Catholic Church. So the girl's body being pristine a month later is possibly even less subtle of a sign of her purity to the intended audience.
@lindseyb2777
The musical Ride The Cyclone explores this trope in an interesting way. The show is about six high schoolers who die in a rollercoaster accident and, while in limbo, are granted the opportunity to bring only one of them back to life. None of them are perfect, and the show makes a point to contrast how they’ve been deified as “six saints” by the town after their deaths with the flawed individuals they were in life…except for one. One of them, going by the name of Jane Doe, is an amnesiac whose identity was a mystery due to her decapitation in the accident. Nobody knows what kind of a person she was, even her. In limbo, the focus on her purity, fragility, and idealized image is represented by her head being replaced with that of a literal porcelain doll. Jane is The Perfect Victim because she’s a complete blank slate, but she hates it. She longs more than anything to have been a real, complete person with flaws and actual character traits beyond “suffers and looks pretty”. In the end, the group decides to send her back— not because she’s Perfect, but so she can have the chance to be imperfect and lead an actual, real life.
@BrightFire54
I always read Tomie as the never ending cycle of abuser, turned victim, turned abuser. I don’t think Victimhood can ever be the core aspect of a person.
@jodieg6318
I would add that often survivors have to be precived as a perfect victim before their tramua is taken seriously or given empathy by others.
@LordSlag
Why does art make victimhood beautiful? Because the endurance of sacrifice is often the only balm that victims get, for there is little Justice.
@Dekubud
I sincerely think the "perfect victim" is a trope that is only advantageous to abusers: it encourages victims to simply accept abuse and to see it as something that cleanses their sins. It also means that a victim is a normal human being or who fights back is easy to villainize. This is especially troubling since people who grow up as victims always develop problematic behaviour to cope with their abnormal environment. Those problematic behaviours can be destructive towards others, but more often than not, they are very much self-destructive.
@mareczek00713
The worst thing about Tomie is that it's hinted she was a perfectly normal girl that just gotten a crush on her teacher that killed her and it was at that moment that something possessed her. As I was reading it strongly appeared to me that there was some strive for normalcy with something malicious taking her over the more she suffers, with said malicious thing weirdly making people around her obsessed and violent. Kinda feels to me that she's not a succubbus as much as she's possessed by one.
@akiraohalloran
This is so important. Media depections of a "perfect victim" influences how people view victims in real life. I've seen a lot of people tell SA survivors (myself included) to forgive their abusers, or to try and empathize with them. Shaming us for the very valid anger we feel. Forgiveness is not something anyone is owed, it is a choice. And survivors have every right to not forgive their abusers. We have every right to be angry at them.
@JellyWaltzov
"...she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me." A perfect victim is one that is seen with selfish eyes, not perceiving them as their own person with their own inner world, emotions, and desires. The poem Annabel Lee was very correctly used by Nabokov in his novel Lolita, where the protagonist associates Lolita with it. In his eyes, Lolita exists to be his love interest, while in reality he is an adult man who kidnaps and SA's an orphaned 12-year-old girl.
@Daemonworks
The Perfect Victim is a /deep/ pit of weirdness. There's so very much going on in the artistic depiction of victims and suffering... but then you look at real life, how we treat those who have been harmed, deprived or who otherwise suffer. How some victims get more media attention than others, all the many subtypes of victim blaming, or folks who's social status makes them below sympathy. There's just /so very much/ to unpack.
@kahume
I wonder if part of wanting to be a beautiful perfect victim is the fact that people believe you that your pain is real because people can observe it
@kirbbu5868
A good quote I've read that stuck with me that applies. "Even if we cant empathize, shouldn't we at least try?"
@NoorMohammed-or6vg
I feel like A Good Girl's Guide to Murder touches on this wonderfully. At first the dead girl is this ethereal perfect human who can do no wrong and by the end we learn so much about her.
@servicedogdoula4393
There was a time that I was into “whump” writing, which almost seems parallel to this. I think a little-discussed aspect of the psyche behind some of those that are into this sort of thing is how it functions as a coping mechanism (at least, that’s what it was for me.) It’s the idea of putting a character that’s specifically made to suffer in this way into a bad situation - either to see them live in spite of the trauma and heal, or just to see the hardship be someone else’s and worse than ours in a morbid sort of Hope. See it break them, and feel, in a way, that the pain was recognized. For me, it was either, “if they can survive something so much worse than what I’m going through, I can undoubtedly survive,” or it was “this sucked, and it left them broken, and I acknowledge that - it’s easier to feel over someone else’s pain than my own.” Especially because I didn’t feel like what I was going through was bad enough to complain or write about. So I wrote about something else - something worse - something that was enough. Because I could safely mourn over that, and it’d serve as a substitute. Maybe that’s not the general rule, but I always find it interesting to look at things like Perfect Blue or the Victorian stories and wonder if that’s part of where the author’s head was. Just my two cents. Thanks for reading all this - have a cowboy. 🤠
@StreyX
The one thing to note about Mima's situation in Perfect Blue was that she was also secretly drugged through out the movie which made the hallucinations much more surreal to her. To add to her woe and confusion, she was still getting work(after leaving the idol group) and apparently still had fans that supported her because during the SA scene she was filming, one of the actors was a fan and even apologized to her.
@fluffycloud3529
"When it seems to benefit you and doesn't hurt to look at, empathy is easy." Oh my, I feel the beginnings of an essay rumbling in my brain, inspired by this sentence.
@TheTaleFoundry