I really want to get the most important part of this out of the way right off because other people can read this, victims of abuse can read this, and I said I would block anyone who defended the abuse and I would rather not block you so please do not again use my blog as a platform to defend abuse, but here it categorically is (if anyone is reading this who has survived this, I am so, so sorry): what Porthos did is straight-up abuse and it is not defensible. Like, politely and all, but I honestly don't care that you don't *want* to read it as abusive. It is.
Casually google gaslighting, because I hardly know how to pick an article to post there's so much written on it, but it is *sanity* destroying. It is a profoundly psychologically damaging thing to do to a person, it rewrites how the entire rest of a life can be lived, and it is literally there on screen *literally* exactly what Porthos does. He makes it so Aramis cannot understand reality outside of Porthos' given interpretation of reality, and Aramis will spend the rest of his days trapped inside that lie. You don't need to think that what you're doing is abuse to be an abuser; most abusers would probably say that *they* would never do that. It's irrelevant that you're going through some stuff when you choose to do that to a person; you still did that to a person, and I am not contributing to the global lie that what the victim goes through matters so much less than what 'drove' their poor, poor abuser into choosing to do it to them. That episode, what Porthos does, recasts every interaction those two characters previously had, because that episode is not the red flag that Porthos might abuse, that episode is Porthos abusing, and suddenly everything leading up to it showed us all the red flags.
Porthos is an abuser. I will say that over and over again to make up for how happy we are to ignore it: Porthos is an abuser. If someone reading this has been through a similar relationship, Jesus, I'm sorry. I hope you're safe now. You didn't deserve it. Literally, and I'm using 'literally' in the traditional sense - it is a logical impossibility that it could be the case - you *could not* have done something to deserve it, because nothing a person does can make them deserve *that*.
It's on a completely different level to their normal casual shittiness to each other, it's not a comparable act, it is *way* over a line, it is a different kind of act. It's not 'I was dealing with some shit, I snapped'. It's 'I purposefully psychologically harmed you for personal gain'. Don't let abusers off lightly by saying that they had excusable reason for what they did because no-one could have excusable reason for doing that. We all get angry and do things we shouldn't. We don't gaslight. And I am very tired of hearing that he's not an abuser because he's nice/interesting/troubled/funny/difficult/charismatic/powerful/famous ('They let you do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy.'). Nothing else about Porthos can change the fact that what he did was abusive, and that he chose to abuse says something very fundamental about who he is as a person.
Right, on the rest of it. So, obvously when I found out that Porthos later got involved with a pregnant woman, I felt like I'd been ice-punched in the stomach the nausea hit so hard: that man should not be allowed anywhere *near* a child, oh god. The problem with the Alice situation is that I don't get from the episode that she knew what was happening; she's much more innocent than Aramis' worldly widows, thinks of herself as very dull, and is so excited when the handsome soldier is interested in her. The acting is admittedly poor in that episode - the characters had no chemistry, which made reading their interactions hard - but like, literally the very best you can say about it is that it's ambiguous, and ambiguous consent isn't consent. Also, the storyteller's version of Occam's razor: given how deceitful and manipulative Porthos is in the rest of the episode, it just makes sense to view his treatment of her under that light. Porthos treats people as marks (we first meet him as a liar and a cheat). Once he'd got what he wanted from her - money, a bit of fun, to get to feel good about himself for a while, to consider another life through - he could move on to the next mark, which unfortunately seems to repeatedly be Aramis -_- (I haven't read the books in twenty years, btw, so my memories are fuzzy; my overwhelming memory of Porthos is the last scene I ever read, which had me crying so hard I literally couldn't see the page, put the book down, and could never bring myself to go back and finish or reread it. But if he's a manipulative abusive fuck in the books as well, hell, at least the writers had precedent.)
I'm interested to know how many fics deal with the reality of who Porthos is as opposed to the weird invented fanon saint Porthos (who is kind and generous and loyal, three qualities he possesses literally the opposite of in canon; he's cruel and greedy and selfish), but I'm not interested in reading them; unfortunately Porthos used up all my sympathy ages ago and I just don't care about that character anymore. Richelieu is interestingly, complicatedly awful and character pieces on his thought processes are very interesting; Porthos' motivations are no longer very interesting to me, he's just selfish and that's boring. The problem is that by the time I gave up on watching S3 he had literally no positive character traits left - that he wasn't a coward was one of the last things I could in conscience grant him, before Bonnaire came back - and what I eventually felt for him was just contempt, which is almost impossible to come back from, it's a relationship killer, and I don't know if I can or *should* even attempt to change my view on him now. I don't read Porthos-centric fic. Hard to care when you think they're contemptible ^^;
That we don't want to deal with Porthos as he is actually presented to us on screen really feels like saying that he's allowed to treat people the way he does, and he's not. I'm not going to present an abuser as a hero. I feel queasy from feeling complicit in it all. To refuse to deal with that part of who he is is to pretend that what he did doesn't matter, and it profoundly matters. I'm really relieved to be able to get away from that lie, that he's a good person and what he does to other people doesn't matter. Someone who treats other people like that isn't a good person. What the hell does being a 'good person' mean, otherwise?
Oy. On the wips - which come slowly - there's a Beauty and the Beast retelling I've been enjoying a lot, because casting Aramis and Athos in that story is just *amusing* to me, and I like wintry imagery. There are a couple of fics dealing with Aramis and prostitution, because he has such an interesting relationship with it; one canon-era fic where he chooses a different career path on arriving in Paris (Athos-centric, mostly, and morose) and one modern 'fake relationship' trope brought on by binging too much Scandal ("This is *terrible*." *clicks next episode, clicks next episode*) because it's a cliche I haven't tried yet. There's also a mpreg I couldn't not write, I'm sorry, where no-one became a soldier; Athos stayed in his house and drank himself miserable, Aramis was sent off to Paris to be married off, Porthos remained a criminal, until they all eventually do meet. I am like, *fighting* the bunny for another fucking mpreg why is this my life where it's not Anne Athos first marries, it's *Aramis*, because writing an Atho who has never been through all of that shit just utterly enthralls me, who he could have been. But I really don't want to be the girl who writes mpregs ;_;
The only Porthos-centric fic I think I'd like to read is the one where he realises that what he's done to Aramis is utterly appalling and the guilt means enough to him to make him be a better person. Given who he is in canon though, I'd be surprised if that could ever come out IC anyway ^^;
no subject
Casually google gaslighting, because I hardly know how to pick an article to post there's so much written on it, but it is *sanity* destroying. It is a profoundly psychologically damaging thing to do to a person, it rewrites how the entire rest of a life can be lived, and it is literally there on screen *literally* exactly what Porthos does. He makes it so Aramis cannot understand reality outside of Porthos' given interpretation of reality, and Aramis will spend the rest of his days trapped inside that lie. You don't need to think that what you're doing is abuse to be an abuser; most abusers would probably say that *they* would never do that. It's irrelevant that you're going through some stuff when you choose to do that to a person; you still did that to a person, and I am not contributing to the global lie that what the victim goes through matters so much less than what 'drove' their poor, poor abuser into choosing to do it to them. That episode, what Porthos does, recasts every interaction those two characters previously had, because that episode is not the red flag that Porthos might abuse, that episode is Porthos abusing, and suddenly everything leading up to it showed us all the red flags.
Porthos is an abuser. I will say that over and over again to make up for how happy we are to ignore it: Porthos is an abuser. If someone reading this has been through a similar relationship, Jesus, I'm sorry. I hope you're safe now. You didn't deserve it. Literally, and I'm using 'literally' in the traditional sense - it is a logical impossibility that it could be the case - you *could not* have done something to deserve it, because nothing a person does can make them deserve *that*.
It's on a completely different level to their normal casual shittiness to each other, it's not a comparable act, it is *way* over a line, it is a different kind of act. It's not 'I was dealing with some shit, I snapped'. It's 'I purposefully psychologically harmed you for personal gain'. Don't let abusers off lightly by saying that they had excusable reason for what they did because no-one could have excusable reason for doing that. We all get angry and do things we shouldn't. We don't gaslight. And I am very tired of hearing that he's not an abuser because he's nice/interesting/troubled/funny/difficult/charismatic/powerful/famous ('They let you do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy.'). Nothing else about Porthos can change the fact that what he did was abusive, and that he chose to abuse says something very fundamental about who he is as a person.
Right, on the rest of it. So, obvously when I found out that Porthos later got involved with a pregnant woman, I felt like I'd been ice-punched in the stomach the nausea hit so hard: that man should not be allowed anywhere *near* a child, oh god. The problem with the Alice situation is that I don't get from the episode that she knew what was happening; she's much more innocent than Aramis' worldly widows, thinks of herself as very dull, and is so excited when the handsome soldier is interested in her. The acting is admittedly poor in that episode - the characters had no chemistry, which made reading their interactions hard - but like, literally the very best you can say about it is that it's ambiguous, and ambiguous consent isn't consent. Also, the storyteller's version of Occam's razor: given how deceitful and manipulative Porthos is in the rest of the episode, it just makes sense to view his treatment of her under that light. Porthos treats people as marks (we first meet him as a liar and a cheat). Once he'd got what he wanted from her - money, a bit of fun, to get to feel good about himself for a while, to consider another life through - he could move on to the next mark, which unfortunately seems to repeatedly be Aramis -_- (I haven't read the books in twenty years, btw, so my memories are fuzzy; my overwhelming memory of Porthos is the last scene I ever read, which had me crying so hard I literally couldn't see the page, put the book down, and could never bring myself to go back and finish or reread it. But if he's a manipulative abusive fuck in the books as well, hell, at least the writers had precedent.)
I'm interested to know how many fics deal with the reality of who Porthos is as opposed to the weird invented fanon saint Porthos (who is kind and generous and loyal, three qualities he possesses literally the opposite of in canon; he's cruel and greedy and selfish), but I'm not interested in reading them; unfortunately Porthos used up all my sympathy ages ago and I just don't care about that character anymore. Richelieu is interestingly, complicatedly awful and character pieces on his thought processes are very interesting; Porthos' motivations are no longer very interesting to me, he's just selfish and that's boring. The problem is that by the time I gave up on watching S3 he had literally no positive character traits left - that he wasn't a coward was one of the last things I could in conscience grant him, before Bonnaire came back - and what I eventually felt for him was just contempt, which is almost impossible to come back from, it's a relationship killer, and I don't know if I can or *should* even attempt to change my view on him now. I don't read Porthos-centric fic. Hard to care when you think they're contemptible ^^;
That we don't want to deal with Porthos as he is actually presented to us on screen really feels like saying that he's allowed to treat people the way he does, and he's not. I'm not going to present an abuser as a hero. I feel queasy from feeling complicit in it all. To refuse to deal with that part of who he is is to pretend that what he did doesn't matter, and it profoundly matters. I'm really relieved to be able to get away from that lie, that he's a good person and what he does to other people doesn't matter. Someone who treats other people like that isn't a good person. What the hell does being a 'good person' mean, otherwise?
Oy. On the wips - which come slowly - there's a Beauty and the Beast retelling I've been enjoying a lot, because casting Aramis and Athos in that story is just *amusing* to me, and I like wintry imagery. There are a couple of fics dealing with Aramis and prostitution, because he has such an interesting relationship with it; one canon-era fic where he chooses a different career path on arriving in Paris (Athos-centric, mostly, and morose) and one modern 'fake relationship' trope brought on by binging too much Scandal ("This is *terrible*." *clicks next episode, clicks next episode*) because it's a cliche I haven't tried yet. There's also a mpreg I couldn't not write, I'm sorry, where no-one became a soldier; Athos stayed in his house and drank himself miserable, Aramis was sent off to Paris to be married off, Porthos remained a criminal, until they all eventually do meet. I am like, *fighting* the bunny for another fucking mpreg why is this my life where it's not Anne Athos first marries, it's *Aramis*, because writing an Atho who has never been through all of that shit just utterly enthralls me, who he could have been. But I really don't want to be the girl who writes mpregs ;_;
The only Porthos-centric fic I think I'd like to read is the one where he realises that what he's done to Aramis is utterly appalling and the guilt means enough to him to make him be a better person. Given who he is in canon though, I'd be surprised if that could ever come out IC anyway ^^;