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Whoo, nelly, and then I found this little gem in New Moon:
Umm, NO? This is going down the path of the reasoning that leads people to stay in abusive relationships, or be persuaded to kill in the names of gods. Love is not about surrendering all of your boundaries and common sense and self, in fact it's about the responsibility to call people on their shit sometimes, and respecting yourself enough to walk away if it has to come to it. I will grant the writer that this is accurate to the mindset of a character of this age, but so far I still don't see the narrative presenting this outlook as an issue rather than a statement of fact, which is... uh, yeah.
I'm wondering if it's coloring my reading of this text that I happen to know that the author is of a declared religious persuasion, regardless even of the details of it; I can see where certain assumptions that the narrative seems to be making might be grounded in a particular experience of acculturation that states the rules of the world are A, B, and C, and then goes the further step of believing that therefore A, B, and C are how the world works, rather than one system (among possibilities) postulated as an explanation. There's an... unexaminedness to the underpinnings of this narrative that's really kind of mind-blowing to someone raised to question any framework presented as a given. And one of the assumptions that this work is making is that Daddy Knows Best, metaphorically: hey, you weren't gonna be using that free will for anything anyway...
Seeing Jacob like that -- innocent and vulnerable in sleep -- had stolen all my revulsion, dissolved all my anger. I still couldn't turn a blind eye to what was happening, like Billy seemed to, but I couldn't condemn Jacob for it either. Love didn't work that way, I decided. Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore. Jacob was my friend whether he killed people or not. And I didn't know what I was going to do about that. [emphasis mine]
Umm, NO? This is going down the path of the reasoning that leads people to stay in abusive relationships, or be persuaded to kill in the names of gods. Love is not about surrendering all of your boundaries and common sense and self, in fact it's about the responsibility to call people on their shit sometimes, and respecting yourself enough to walk away if it has to come to it. I will grant the writer that this is accurate to the mindset of a character of this age, but so far I still don't see the narrative presenting this outlook as an issue rather than a statement of fact, which is... uh, yeah.
I'm wondering if it's coloring my reading of this text that I happen to know that the author is of a declared religious persuasion, regardless even of the details of it; I can see where certain assumptions that the narrative seems to be making might be grounded in a particular experience of acculturation that states the rules of the world are A, B, and C, and then goes the further step of believing that therefore A, B, and C are how the world works, rather than one system (among possibilities) postulated as an explanation. There's an... unexaminedness to the underpinnings of this narrative that's really kind of mind-blowing to someone raised to question any framework presented as a given. And one of the assumptions that this work is making is that Daddy Knows Best, metaphorically: hey, you weren't gonna be using that free will for anything anyway...
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