Closure commentary, part 3

[eowyn_315]

Okay, I think this will be my last post, so it's kind of a jumble of all the things that didn't fit the themes of the first two.

Comments

[eowyn_315]

Yeah, woobie!Xander sounds an awful lot like woobie!Spike. :-P

Nothing better than reading your favorite character getting tortured/raped/abused.

I can't say I really agree with that one. I've never actually understood the appeal - I would think that if someone is your favorite character, you wouldn't want to see them tortured. But it's obviously a popular genre, so to each his own, I guess...

[eowyn_315]

Hmm. I am all about the angst, so I can understand wanting to be emotionally invested in the story, and I definitely know the appeal of a story that makes you cry, but I prefer the pain to be emotional. Seeing (or reading about) someone getting tortured and raped has an ick factor that makes me cringe rather than cry.

Also, I generally have more respect for writers who go for the emotional rather than the physical torture, because having written both myself, I think it's a lot harder to write good emotional suffering.

[eowyn_315]

See, I think that's the problem I was trying to get at, both in my original post and in my last comment - rape is emotional, but it's rarely written that way. Or if it is, it goes overboard - I've never read a Xander rape fic, but when it happens to Spike, it's not about the Spike we know dealing with those issues... it's usually a character who is so broken and demoralized, he's no longer recognizable as Spike. And I don't want to read that; I want to read about the character I love