*waves from beneath the piles of papers*

[pellucid]

I have survived the teaching part of my first semester of full-time professoring. There's still the grading part and various odds and ends that people generally file under the category of "service" (or "the stuff that's part of the job that no one really remembers to tell you about, like going to meetings and doing paperwork and writing letters of

Comments

[pellucid]

The thing about the rape is that it falls under the greater category of her taking away pretty much everyone's agency in all ways. She's essentially forced Graham to have sex with her, yes, but hasn't she also forced all of these people into lives not of their choosing, including in terms of sexual partners (think of David and Kathleen--or is it Katherine?--for instance: also some dubious consent stuff going on there, I think). And I'm not sure how to explain it, but at least at this point in the show, making her actions with Graham part of this wider pattern actually makes me less bothered by the specifically sexual part of the removal of agency than I might otherwise have been. Because yes, it's absolutely not okay, but neither is it being treated as such: this is why she's the evil queen, after all. Whereas I fear that the same acts in a different context (ie, a character who doesn't generally exert this particular kind of evil power but is forcing someone to have sex with her against his will) would be much more likely to be handwaved in the context of TV's general tolerance for this sort of thing. In this context, though, it feels more serious but also part of the bigger thing that's going on: everyone's agency being taken away in all its forms.