AGNESTHEALIEN

Graphic Rape Scenes In Literature Comfort Me, Actually

2026-06-14T00:00:00Z

Graphic Rape Scenes In Literature Comfort Me, Actually

14 June 2026

tagged with.. media, essay, post by Agnes the Alien

Okay, let's get this out of the way first: yes, I am a rape survivor, because I know, based on the title, that that question was likely your first thought.

I am a rape survivor, but my story is a bit more complex; I'm also a survivor of child sex trafficking as well as a survivor of emotional abuse and physical abuse from peers. It feels so odd, by the way, listing these things about myself so casually. I've grown accustomed to it because what happened to me shaped my life so significantly it impacts every second of it, but in this context it feels almost like a job interview. Here you go, dear reader, here are my Rape Qualifications. You know, the trauma you're supposed to list when you write an article like this one. Here are all the reasons why I'm allowed to have this opinion, because surely this opinion in an Unraped individual would be Suspicious. But I'm just going to say it with my entire self, point blank and up front: Graphic rape scenes in literature are necessary. I'd go so far as to say they comfort me.

Literature is... it's a building block of a comfortable and holistic existence, in the sense that it is inescapable unless you're actively trying to life a miserable life; the television shows you watch are often based on books or have themes/concepts that originated in literature (see: "The Vampire Lestat", which I haven't watched but which discourse around inspired this article), the education you undertake requires engagement with literature even in its rudimentary forms, many common English idioms are said to originate in literatue (Shakespeare has a Wikipedia article dedicated to idioms attributed to his work that has so many entries they had to sort it with individual dropdowns for each starting letter). You Quite Simply Cannot Exist In Modern Society Without Interacting With Literature In Some Form, even if that form is abstracted or distant from literature in its purest form (i.e. reading a book). It's just not possible.

Literature and language are not just building blocks, either; they're also lush and visceral, with, when wielded appropriately, the ability to move, impact, and change. The right kind of story can reach into your essence and plant itself down, or soothe the ache that infects it, or lick its wounds clean, or deepen the wounds life caused. Literature is a neutral weapon, a vicious tool, a Mickey Mouse-style surprise tool that will help us later. It is a power, and it is powerful.

We see this all the time in people who will say things like, "This story saved my life!" or, "I relate to this character so much they helped me realize hidden aspects of myself!" or even "I love this character so much I want to protect them/fuck them/see them hurt!" And the same people who will write endless posts on how a story has impacted them for the better are often the ones claiming that rape doesn't need to be shown in media ever because it might make people uncomfortable. The same people who claim to appreciate art will demonize art that depicts rape in its most realistic sense, without ever considering why a book would choose to include such a scene. They understand that art can impact, and that art is moving, but it does not occur to them that, for example, a graphic rape scene could be included to elicit empathy for the victim, or to inform people about the realities of rape that are not often acknowledged (that it can come from family members, that a rapist doesn't have to be a specific gender, that rape isn't just penetration, etc)---or simply it could just be that the author feels it is important/necessary to include for the kind of story they're writing. There is also no consideration of the idea that the author may themselves be a victim who is recounting their own experiences in an attempt to cope with their pain, tell their story, reach others.. a myriad of reasons.

The lack of consideration of these aspects in discussion of media involving graphic rape is reflective of society's overall, inherent disregard of rape victims. The victim and the victim's feelings at large don't matter. The disgust does not come from sympathy for the victim character, just as disgust about rape in real life often doesn't come from sympathy for the victim; it comes from a focus on the rapist. It's either how could someone be so awful or who made them this way or this makes me personally uncomfortable to imagine happening to me-- or it's denial of the act and praising of the rapist. Similarly, with literature, the focus is almost always on demonizing the perpetrator, who, in these scenarios, is for some reason often interpreted to be the author.

The author must be secretly getting off on it, which is, of course, an inherent evil, even though a paper published in 2008 states 31-57% of women had erotic rape fantasies (W Critelli et al) and a paper from 2009 that studied female undergraduates stated that 67% of them had erotic rape fantasies (Bivona et al). The idea - at least from what I can tell - is that writing a rape scene where the rape is shown on "screen" as opposed to simply handwaved away just like we do to real rape = author must be a rape fetishist = author must be an actual rapist in real life (or support them). But these fantasies are common - how many of those women interviewed, do you think, are or support real life rape? How many do you think are horrified by the concept of real life rape?

Do you think that those female undergraduates are monsters? That they're going to go out and rape people on the streets at night for fun, or abuse people they know, or that they secretly want to rape someone but are just holding themselves back? Or are they a group of individuals who are particularly vulnerable to rape taking back the concept for themselves, fantasizing about situations in which they have power over the act and can fully control it, either as perpetrator or victim?

I am not an individual who fantasizes about rape; I find that graphic rape scenes in books bring me comfort. In a society where people are constantly trying to pretend rape away, seeing people confront the topic directly, brutally, and realistically is a breath of fresh air. And you know what? I find comfort in the fact that this makes people uncomfortable.

Rape is uncomfortable. It should make you feel that way. It should horrify and disgust and mangle, and the spark of that mangling should be at its core compassion, not simply hatred or fear. If a rape scene makes you uncomfortable because it's triggering, I understand. If it makes you uncomfortable because you just don't think it should be portrayed as the horrific act it is - that is where I invoke the Hold On A Sec.

Be uncomfortable. Look at what I had to go through. Look at how it mangled me into an amalgam of suffering! LOOK. DO NOT TURN AWAY. LOOK SO YOU UNDERSTAND.

Do you think you're capable of that?

People often say there's no real reason to have a rape scene, but was I raped for a reason, or did it just happen?

People dislike these scenes ultimately because it paints a picture that they don't want to look at, and I'm sorry, but it's time to grow up and open your eyes. You don't want to be faced with the fact that by saying graphic rape scenes have no place in literature anywhere, you are in essence pretending rape away, and therefore silencing and isolating victims from their own experiences. I get it. No one wants to be told that.

But you have to look.

Fandom Sucks Now, and Other Laments

2026-03-14T00:00:00Z

Fandom Sucks Now, and Other Laments

14 March 2026

tagged with.. personal, fandom, post by Agnes the Alien

Content warnings: child sex trafficking/PTSD.

You know, these days, I am getting sort of tired.

I don’t really know how else to describe it, so we’ll just go with the simplicity of I’m really just kind of tired. And the worst, most unsightly aspect of it all is this: I don’t really know what I’m tired of.

I can give you a list of reasons without hesitation:

I spend my entire time in fandom, because fandom is my passion. I run a fanfiction archive with ~360 users and around 500 different fandoms. Fandom is, quite literally, what I have dedicated my life to for the past fifteen years. And fandom, apparently, fucking hates me. Yeah, so it turns out that if you’re different from what is considered Normal and Acceptable in any way, you deserve to die and are subhuman, according to others. This widespread harassment is reminiscent of my days being beaten up and nearly murdered as a child at my Waldorf elementary school—unfathomable, needless cruelty fueled by a hatred of anything they don’t want to understand. So what if I like to cope by writing dark fanfiction? So what if I just fucking like dark fanfiction? What are you going to do about it? Stop me?

But unfortunately, there are actual repercussions for openly liking dark content. People can and will try to ruin your life, your source of income, your relationships, your safety. And I’m a sensitive alien, okay! I’m a goddamn child trafficking survivor and to be called a pedophile over fictional aliens shatters my soul in ways no one can even begin to comprehend unless they’re in the same situation.

I shouldn’t say that, probably. I shouldn’t let people know about that weakness. It’s like a KICK ME sign taped to my back, a big red arrow pointing right to my Achilles heel. Come and cut me. But I am in a human body in this life, and so I am human. And as a human thing, the comparison still will never leave me. It haunts, vivisects. I know who I am, and I cannot control how others perceive me, and I cannot handle being seen as a being of the same depravity of the people who hurt me. I just can’t.

I think this is a valid reason to be tired. It is still only one facet of the crystal.

I do so much for fandom. What does fandom do for me? It brought me my beloved. My amazing friends. But what else? What lately?

I just do nothing. I have nothing to do all day. Oh, sure, I have tons to do, actually. I have ideas and I have projects and I have embroidery supplies and music software and cute little $5 kits from the store where you knit an ugly ass ladybug. I simply never have the wherewithal to actually do any of them. Is it the fatigue and pain I am constantly in? Am I just depressed and unmotivated because everything seems worthless? Is my psychosis acting up again? Do I need to have my meds adjusted, is what my family will say, if I tell them I’m struggling with motivation, so of course I don’t tell them.

I can’t ever get the spark going. Like a wind-up toy that just gets tighter and tigher until it snaps, never moving forward. And I have no goddamn idea why.

I’m tired of being so tired.

My family is aging and ill and my mother will not go to the doctor because she is scared. She’s sixty one, her thyroid is dead, she needs to be on medication for it (hypocritical of me perhaps, since my thyroid is also dead and I don’t take my synthroid, but I’m going to start!!!), but she refuses to get a perscription. I’m terrified about what will happen when her body can’t take it anymore.

My nana has anxiety worse than mine. It’s so bad she stays up multiple nights having intrusive thoughts. She refuses to take any sort of medication for this or bring it up to her doctor. I’m terrified about what will happen when she gets too terrified.

I’m tired of being so scared.

Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole I-have-dissociative-identity-disorder-and-CPTSD thing. I’ve been having flashbacks almost every day lately. I’m tired of feeling broken. I’m tired of letting it break me, but I just don’t know how to stop thinking about it, writing about it, recreating it in fiction, thinking about it, throwing up about it, obsessing over it, thinking about it. I’m obsessed with it all, the pain that I went through and the siphoning of my innocence and the portioning of my body and so on. It’s all I ever think about. When will it stop? When will I stop feeling it?

Torturing fictional characters in the same way makes it feel better for a little while. Like a band-aid over an autopsy incison.

I guess maybe I’m just tired of all of it. Of this frozen life I’m living. I keep thinking something needs to change, and I keep trying to make small changes to my daily routine, you know, build new habits, start a schedule, but it’s all futile, I fall out of everything eventually. I really need to start preparing for my future, because I guess I’m going to have one? And preparing for my future is not sitting here writing toxic yuri fanfiction all day, as fun as it is. I don’t know. I keep clawing at the walls of my brain, trying to find a solution.

I see a lot of my friends taking steps back from fandom these days. A lot of them are also creatives, and they’re choosing to focus more on original works instead. I find that option more and more appealing with each cruel post I see pass my Tumblr dashboard. I can’t decide if I really want to step back from fandom, or if I only feel a need to do so because still being so deeply entrenched in fandom when everyone else I know has moved on makes me feel a little self-conscious, and I feel like I have to follow suit or I will be left behind. But I suspect that while my insecurities are probably a factor, it has more to do with the harassment I’ve been facing over being a Nahla/Caleb(/Anisha) shipper, and the terrible things people have said about me because of it.

I don’t want to enjoy things in fear. I have my own personal archive using the AO3 software now; I rarely post to AO3 outside of exchanges. I keep my fics locked down to my friends and people I trust not to judge me. And… I’m someone who loves attention! I kind of need it to survive, clinically. But I just struggle to stay sane when horrible accusation after horrible accusation is thrown at me, and all I’m trying to do is enjoy myself in peace. I don’t want to have to hide or water myself down to be accepted, but unfortunately that is the reality of the world. We’re all paranoid, we’re all pointing fingers and pointing fingers and gnawing off fingers, we’re all cruel. I just can’t take it anymore.

The issue is that I run that aforementioned somewhat-popular fanfiction archive. And I enjoy running this archive! I want to do so much more with it! And the people I have met through it are absolutely wonderful. I don’t want to step back from Sunset and I don’t see myself doing so in the future. At the same time, though, I think Sunset and Dreamwidth and my tiny little Discord server will be the extent of my fandom participation for a while.

I want to focus on my original works and build a real career in writing. I want to make video games and finish my novella I’ve been working on for a year now that is still only at 4,400 words and I want to make music and I want to learn how to hand quilt and I want to have more things in my life than just television and fictional characters, but it’s kind of hard for me to focus on anything besides them. Or – it has been in the past. Maybe I’m finally so disillusioned with fandom that I’ll be able to focus on something else for a change. I don’t know.

I don’t really know how to talk to people outside of fandom, and in all honesty, I don’t know a lot about myself outside of it just in general. I don’t have much of an identity beyond that, at least in my own perception of myself, and that’s… well, obviously unhealthy. I want to go back to school and go to writer’s groups in the city and I want a life worth living. I want to make websites that aren’t AO3-based or shoddy things I threw together based on outdated Rails guides; I want to actually know what I’m doing with web development, because it’s something I find very fun and rewarding.

I just so desperately want things to change, but I don’t know how to change them. The only thing I can think of for now is that I must focus on building a life for myself that isn’t attached to a fictional character. It’s long overdue.

(Nus Braka Voice) How's that for a trauma loop?

2026-03-01T00:00:00Z

(Nus Braka Voice) How's that for a trauma loop?

01 March 2026

tagged with.. personal, post by Agnes the Alien

Content warning: childhood sexual abuse & trafficking.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my creativity. I don’t do a lot of original work – Ice Dancer was my first poem in… way too long, maybe a YEAR? – I’ve only been focusing on fanworks. I do have ideas for original works! Many, in fact! But every time I sit down to write, there’s a block. I don’t really know why.

Maybe it’s that I feel like my original writing is futile.

I’ve been published before. But because I was suicidal for so long and genuinely didn’t plan on being alive for it to matter, I never really learned how to separate my fandom persona from my professional writing self. And that was a bad idea. When I started to finally heal – around the time I started using dark fiction to cope with past trauma – I realized that the people I surrounded myself with would try to ruin my career and life if they could tie me to that pen name. So I had to rebuild, and none of my previously published works could be tied to my current pen name. I had to remake everything – my author site, my itch.io, etc. Some of my favorite creations can no longer be tied to me because of this, including a piece of interactive art that means… well… just about everything to me. I had about 2k followers on those accounts; now I barely have 200. It all just feels utterly useless.

I also feel like a lot of my original work is just horribly repetitive these days. I use the same metaphors and the same pains and the same words and the same events, over and over and over again.

I’m stuck. And not just creatively.

I’m chained to these things. I’m living a time loop where I’m forced to re-experience them over and over again every day of my pitiful damn existence. I’m being buried alive and when I suffocate I’ll wake up in a television show but for me I really have run out of time!!! Or at least it feels that way. I try not to let fiction write my story for me but it is a little bit easier that way.

Even my fanworks, honestly, to a lesser extent. I find myself hyperfixated on portrayals of childhood sexual abuse in fiction, and finding ways to project my experiences with it onto characters who haven’t explicitly been through it but also have backstories that would realistically involve it. Take Caleb Mir from Star Trek: SFA for example; he’s been on his own, on the run, and in and out of prison since age six. You don’t escape that unmolested.

I find myself projecting onto him deeply. I find myself getting unhealthily attached to him. I think about this stuff way way too much. I see myself in him, even if I shouldn’t, even if my life has been paradise compared to his. Thinking about characters having the same pain I have, and overcoming it, gives me some illusion of hope’s tangibility. Illusion, delusion? I don’t know. It just makes me feel like healing can be in reach for me if I try really hard enough – like maybe if I squint really hard and believe and click my heels together I can imagine up a portal into a world where I’m not in this much agony.

I love SFA because it’s the first time I’ve seen a show with a cast of characters that I feel like would genuinely accept me as a person if they knew me. I relate to SAM so deeply; to see her accepted by everyone – loved by everyone – makes me soar. Caleb comforts fat anxious cadets (even if I have beef with Pickford now.) People are given space to deal with their traumas, given empathy. I’ve never wanted to live in a show more than this (except maybe Doom Patrol, for ficto reasons.)

But as I go deeper and deeper into escapism here, I find myself just ouroborosing my trauma. Like I just keep throwing it up and then eating the vomit and then throwing it back up and eating it again and so on and so forth, like my dog did when my dad died. The projection helps me cope, but it also keeps me trapped there, in a way.

And then I wonder if there is a key to release the trap anywhere when you’re a trafficking survivor, or if it’s sort of like how sometimes when people get shot they have to leave bullet fragments in the body because it’s too dangerous to try and remove them. You know? Like, maybe it’s just something you have to carry inside of you as you try to move forward, because going back through it would just make things worse. Maybe coping with fiction is as far as I’m going to get.

I am in therapy. I see two therapists! I do ketamine therapy twice a week. I literally have appointments 4/5 days a week. Yet here I remain, just barely hanging on, handcuffed to the pole.

Sometimes I find myself getting confused. I forget that Star Trek technology – and Star Trek peace – isn’t real. I forget that it isn’t that easy. I forget that the peace in Star Trek is just as precarious and blood-soaked as it would be in real life. But it’s easier to live somewhere I feel accepted than live in this universe where the only hobby I’m truly capable of having is retraumatizing myself.

I want to write about something else now.