SNIP some more…
It’s another Billusional tactic to try make Bill looking slightly better. Not working.
I think that IF this what she wants to say on this (CH), so it’s pretty FUCKED UP.
She is a survival of rape!
But i keep on: she put some of her experience on Sookie from a rape survival with guilt. Also, Sookie don’t get over it. She never talked about it. This experience shows she doesn’t forget what happened, she suppressed it, guilt herself. I am not being a bitch, just rational and in base with my OWN personal experience. I may be wrong, of course.
You are not wrong. Sookie has definitely internalized the rape. Just as she earlier internalized the molestation. It’s a coping technique and it’s very, very understandable. Rape is awful, traumatizing, dehumanizing. Who wants to think about it? And if a victim lives in the culture that tends to blame them for what happened to them? Doubly so.
You are right about Sookie not having dealt with any of it. And, to a degree, it explains why she would let Bill hang around. Sort of “if I act like nothing happened, maybe it didn’t.”
But the argument cannot be that this is okay with the readers. What I (and Exit, and many others) find so troublesome isn’t Sookie’s denial. The denial is natural and understandable. The troublesome thing is the implication that we are also supposed to “get past it,” move on, as if nothing had happened. To be fair, I don’t know if that’s the author’s intent. But Bill has been given a path that practically screams “redemption,” and what is that supposed to tell us? Sookie already accepts him. He saved her life. He’s forgiven …
The only way this is any kind of a redemption is if he had died in the process. Which he didn’t.
Again, for all I know, there’s some kind of a huge confrontation coming down in the last book. Something where Sookie lays it into him. But I am not holding my breath. I would have let it go without Sookie ever processing what happened to her verbally. She tends not to do that. With anything. But I cannot be okay with Bill being accepted into her life in any capacity, let alone as a naked hidey-hole buddy. Or a Dr. Phil with fangs. That’s too macabre and nausea-inducing for words.
I agree with you completely about the travesty of how Bill’s rape has been handled so far, and I also agree with you about the whiff of rape culture bullshit there is in it, but I have to say that for me, the characterisation in the books doesn’t have anything like enough attention to Bill to give him a path that screams anything — not even redemption. For most of the books, Bill is a loose end and his reappearances in the story feels like an afterthought. I also really hated the “naked tickle fight” in the last book — mostly because it just felt shallow and was played for laughs, when it completely wasn’t funny.
All that said, I’m not sure I agree that a rapist can never be redeemed — narratively — except by death. Rape is a terrible, dehumanising crime, but I do believe that a narrative in which a rapist sees the depth of his depravity, is forced to see his crime for what it is, and who is genuinely repentant and somehow rehabilitated in our eyes and the eyes of his victim is POSSIBLE. The problem in the SVMs, though, is that at no point has it been indicated that the crime is taken seriously enough by ANYONE (or even noticed, really, by anyone but Eric) and there has been no serious attempt to redeem Bill, so it feels very, very wrong for Sookie to hang out with him while so much horrifying, unfinished business lays between them. That Bill has defended her, and sacrificed himself for her since then doesn’t feel like enough, because she’s never called him on the crime, and he’s never apologised. There is simply too little acknowledgement of the fact that he raped her.
I have to wonder if it’s part of the plan, because that is something that has been carried over into True Blood, where, similarly, Bill’s crimes seem to have been swept under the rug and Sookie’s forgiveness combined with Bill’s conspicuous lack of an apology feels so wrong, except as a means of her emotionally distancing herself from him. I mean, I don’t hate it as much as some, because I want Sookie to distance herself from Bill, but I don’t at all think she should forgive him or that he deserves forgiveness, and I don’t think I’m meant to.
I can see all of this forgetfulness about Bill’s evil as part of the plan in True Blood, and don’t think for a minute that Alan Ball and co. are rape apologists who have forgotten Bill’s crimes. I fully expect them to be re-addressed at some point or for Bill to descend further into clear evil, or if he is given a redemptive path, he will seal it with death. However, for me, the problem with how it’s all handled in the books, is that I don’t feel like there is evidence of a clear plan for Bill throughout them, and for that reason, any redemption he earns at this point will feel like too little, too late — unless he dies with his apology on his lips after some true acts of self-sacrificing heroism, and even then, I won’t really care — there just hasn’t been enough investment in the character.
Reblogging again because of what URFG said - I also hated the naked tickle fight in the last book and it gave me the impression that something really wrong was going on in the writing department, I mean, having Sookie in a semi-sexualized context with Bill?? (the fact that she wasn’t the slightest turned on by his naked body isn’t enough, for me, to consider it non-sexual). Anyway, URFG expressed better than me my perplexities.. It’s almost like the rape NEVER happened. I don’t know, it’s perfectly understandable that Sookie is in denial, but… imho there should be something, in the narrative, that points out this denial. Instead, the rape is never mentioned, neither by Sookie, nor by Bill or anyone else for that matter.
It looks like the worst thing that Bill did to Sookie was cheating on her and not telling her about his mission. And while I can partially understand why Sookie wants to forgive him for that, I cannot understand how she can forgive him for the rape, not because it’s impossible tout-court but because, to forgive something, you have at least to acknowledge it happened and the other person needs to feel remorse and neither of this happened in the SVM.
Anyway. As for TB Bill, I’m not sure if AB & co. are *really* portraying him as a rapist. There’s the rape of Lorena, of course, and way before that, there is the graveyard sex scene, which is, imo, borderline. I think AB is avoiding to portray Bill as a rapist in an unquestionable manner because that would be completely irredeemable. But his sexuality is decidedly violent and he has been on the edge of rape many times. This puts him in a grey area in which you can’t really pin down on him any fault, but you know something is wrong with him nonetheless. It’s subtler than it is in SVM.
(Fonte: sunsetshark)
