"It can't rain all the time"

pragmatichominid:

turtletotem:

pragmatichominid:

turtletotem:

pragmatichominid:

turtletotem:

Yes, Raven, you HAD better hide because as insane as it seems now, you lived in a world where it barely made the news for a black man to be mutilated and set on fire for the crime of looking at a white woman. That’s a black man, a human being under the law with the right to vote and everything, whose race happens to be in the minority. Admittedly, you’re in England, not the Southern U.S., but all the same, what the heck do you think would happen to a scaly blue girl who can shapeshift? I figure it’s a toss-up between ‘burned at the stake as a demon’ or ‘squirreled away in a government lab, never again to see daylight through non-sedated eyes.’

Charles made a lot of mistakes, sweetheart, many of them with you. But hiding your true appearance from the public eye was not freaking one of them.

I think you’re misreading Raven emotions, though.

She’s not angry with Charles because HE’S told her that it’s not safe for her to be herself in public. 

That it would be dangerous - even potentially deadly - to appear in her own skin in public is something that Raven understands perfectly, much better in fact than Charles does. That the world is horribly dangerous for anyone who’s different is something that she’ll have understood for her earliest days - we’re talking about a character who was living alone on the streets, because (if you take X3 as canon) her family tried to kill her. 

So she’s angry at the world, because the viciousness and the pettiness and fear of the people in the world have forced her into hiding. And in a large part she’s simply venting about all that to Charles here. You can tell from his reaction that she does this a lot, to the point that he’s used to it. 

To the extent that she’s angry at Charles himself, it’s not because she’s saying to him, “I’m angry because you won’t let me be blue,” because obviously she KNOWS why she can’t wear her own skin. She’s saying, “I’m angry with you because you aren’t as angry as I am about the fact that I can’t be blue.”

It’s all very related to when she tells him, “I thought it was going to be you and mean against the world, but no matter how bad the world gets, you still want to be a part of it.” 

She is angry at the world, but I think she’s angry at Charles, too, as a sort of… enforcer of that world. And it’s not logical but that’s adolescence for you. Raven is a teenager angry at her parents for not letting her go to the concert on the other side of the country that she knows is a bad idea and never expected them to let her go to, but she’s angry anyway and she’s going to punish them for it. I don’t know exactly how old Raven is supposed to be (there’s enough confusion about how old Charles is supposed to be) but her attitude is very adolescent, with all the potential and all the problems that that brings. She knows she has to hide. She knows Charles is protecting her. She also knows that she shouldn’t have to hide, and that Charles doesn’t fully understand that. So all of that anger gets vented onto Charles. Because he knows he doesn’t deserve all of it, and doesn’t understand that he does deserve some of it, he brushes it off, and probably thinks he’s doing her a favor thereby, letting her vent without making an argument out of it.

#can this marriage be saved

#apparently not :(

Yes, angry at Charles as an enforcer of the world – or at least, the world’s norms.

I agree that she’s behaving in a way that’s adolescent, but I don’t think that’s a surprising or terrible thing. It’s growing pains, and it’s a bit obnoxious and not exactly fair, but it’s not uncommon for young people who are trying to find someway to challenge an unjust world to turn their frustrations against parents or siblings, especially if that person seems inclined to conform to that world.

I don’t think the concert analogy is exactly right, though, because this is all much more serious than that. What Raven said to Charles here has a lot in common with what Queer POC/Lesbians/Transfolks, etc. often accuse gay white males of doing, which is wanting to be integrated into systems of racial/economic/gender oppression, rather than actively trying to dismantle these systems of oppression. (As a Marxist, I’ve got a lot of problems with the Queer Cultural prospective, but I won’t blab on about that). 

(And er, I hope I don’t sound combative. This is fun to me and I’m just working those thoughts through.)

(Oh, no, not combative at all, I love having discussions like this!)

I didn’t mean to trivialize Raven’s issues with the concert analogy, that was just the first thing that came to mind in terms of an adolescent getting angry at an authority figure even though they know they’re right. They’re angry at the situation and that splashes onto, as we said, the enforcer, the person saying “this is the way things are” even though they didn’t make things that way.

There’s one thing about Raven’s life with Charles that I don’t remember ever seeing addressed anywhere. Why isn’t she going to school? Why is she ‘studying waitressing’? Goodness knows it can’t be for the money. I don’t see any reason for Charles to prevent her from going to school, a classroom isn’t any more likely to cause a slip-up than the stress of a waitressing job. Wanting to make her own way, after living on not-really-my-family’s-money for so long? Wanting to be “in the real world” after being cocooned in wealth, rather than take up residence in the ivory tower with Charles? It’s not just any girl in the 60s who would have the opportunity to go to college, and I’d be very interested to know what her reasoning was.

(Cool. Glad we understand each other).

My headcanon re: Raven’s education - 

I don’t think she would have had an easy time during her K-12 education. She says to Kelley in X1 that “People like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child.” In FC, Erik seems to imply that it takes “half [your] concentration” to maintain a “normal” appearance, and she doesn’t disagree. 

So you’ve got a situation where she’s really, really scared of exposure, of slipping up in public and ending up in danger, and (as many GLBT kids know) that’s not conductive toward academic success. On top of the fear of screwing up and being found out, she’s also focusing a huge amount of her attention on maintaining her appearance. The result of all this means that it’s pretty safe to say that her grades were pretty shitty, that she was miserable (as well as terrified) the entire time she was behind a desk, and she probably came out of school pretty convinced she was stupid. 

That would preclude an interest in college (quick - someone tell Raven that college is NOTHING like highschool!) and anyway, it wasn’t IMPOSSIBLE for women to get into school at this time, but I don’t think open enrollment was common anywhere at the time (assuming she went to school in the UK, I understand that you still need decent grades/have attended the right programs to get into most universities) so if the grades weren’t there she wouldn’t be going. 

But anyway, I don’t feel like there was enough direction in her life for her to what to go to college. 

(Yes, I’m just going to keep reblogging this conversation because it’s fun.)

….you think she’s a virgin too then? I never imagined her as such, but that would take some concentration as well.

(I have way too much of an obsession with fictional character’s sex lives)