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shes_awesome2014-11-11 01:05 am
hagar_972) wrote in shes_awesome2014-11-11 01:05 am
Entry tags:
[FIC] Haven: Who Fights with Monsters, M, gen, by Hagar
Title: Who Fights with Monsters
Author: Hagar
Length: 19.7k words
Characters: Jordan McKee, Eleanor Carr, Dwight Hendrickson, Lizzie Hendrickson, Original Characters
Rating: M
Content Advisory: mentions of sexual violence, male-on-female; suicide, teen female; hate crime and social violence; physical violence and vigilantism, female-on-male; higher-res advisory available in notes of the linked fic, and you can always ask me for extra details.
Summary: In summer 2004, Jordan brought a Troubled girl home to Haven. In summer 2005, she buried her.
Link: Who Fights with Monsters
Notes. The premise of the show Haven deals with people who have supernatural abilities called the Troubles. As the name suggests, the Troubles are always going to fuck you up and they're often deadly. The potential to manifest a Trouble is 100% hereditary (anyone descended from a Troubled person has the potential, no matter how many generations into the future) but Troubles only manifest in response to the appropriate emotional trigger. Some Troubles will manifest in response to any significant stress, some need something more specific; some will manifest in either males or females, and some are sex-specific. In a town called Haven, Maine, the Troubles are dormant for something like 25 out of each 27 years, allowing Troubled people to spend most of their life there in peace. An organization called the Guard acts to bring Troubled people to Haven and to protect them in Haven - because even in Haven the Troubled are an oppressed minority. That said the Guard are no less zealots than the Church members who would murder Troubled people en masse, and they're quick to turn fear to hatred.
Jordan McKee causes excruciating pain to anyone who touches her. Her Trouble manifested after she was raped by her then-boyfriend. Jordan is a member of the Guard; women are a minority in the Guard's active members as depicted in the show, and there's definite sexist elements to the ways she's employed and used by the Guard. Canon doesn't treat Jordan well, to say the least.
That's all you need to know about the show for this fic, as it goes six years pre-canon. The above also provides a lot of the contextual warning: women survivors of sexual abuse in a men-dominated paramilitary organization. The sexual is not the only way women can be victimized for being women in (param)military organizations. There's three characters with PTSD in this story, and the two who aren't Jordan acquired it in their military service: one of those is a man (Dwight) and the other is a woman (Maya). There is nothing sexual about what had happened to Maya, and yet her story is fundamentally feminized and hers is a woman's trauma which very much echoes Jordan's. I genuinely doubt that readers who don't arrive already sensitized to Maya's background will identify her as victim and not just as perpetrator. That those women are embedded in military or military-like structures makes the whole thing messier, because violence works in multiple ways, and legitimate reasons are turned to hate and terrorism.
Author: Hagar
Length: 19.7k words
Characters: Jordan McKee, Eleanor Carr, Dwight Hendrickson, Lizzie Hendrickson, Original Characters
Rating: M
Content Advisory: mentions of sexual violence, male-on-female; suicide, teen female; hate crime and social violence; physical violence and vigilantism, female-on-male; higher-res advisory available in notes of the linked fic, and you can always ask me for extra details.
Summary: In summer 2004, Jordan brought a Troubled girl home to Haven. In summer 2005, she buried her.
Link: Who Fights with Monsters
Notes. The premise of the show Haven deals with people who have supernatural abilities called the Troubles. As the name suggests, the Troubles are always going to fuck you up and they're often deadly. The potential to manifest a Trouble is 100% hereditary (anyone descended from a Troubled person has the potential, no matter how many generations into the future) but Troubles only manifest in response to the appropriate emotional trigger. Some Troubles will manifest in response to any significant stress, some need something more specific; some will manifest in either males or females, and some are sex-specific. In a town called Haven, Maine, the Troubles are dormant for something like 25 out of each 27 years, allowing Troubled people to spend most of their life there in peace. An organization called the Guard acts to bring Troubled people to Haven and to protect them in Haven - because even in Haven the Troubled are an oppressed minority. That said the Guard are no less zealots than the Church members who would murder Troubled people en masse, and they're quick to turn fear to hatred.
Jordan McKee causes excruciating pain to anyone who touches her. Her Trouble manifested after she was raped by her then-boyfriend. Jordan is a member of the Guard; women are a minority in the Guard's active members as depicted in the show, and there's definite sexist elements to the ways she's employed and used by the Guard. Canon doesn't treat Jordan well, to say the least.
That's all you need to know about the show for this fic, as it goes six years pre-canon. The above also provides a lot of the contextual warning: women survivors of sexual abuse in a men-dominated paramilitary organization. The sexual is not the only way women can be victimized for being women in (param)military organizations. There's three characters with PTSD in this story, and the two who aren't Jordan acquired it in their military service: one of those is a man (Dwight) and the other is a woman (Maya). There is nothing sexual about what had happened to Maya, and yet her story is fundamentally feminized and hers is a woman's trauma which very much echoes Jordan's. I genuinely doubt that readers who don't arrive already sensitized to Maya's background will identify her as victim and not just as perpetrator. That those women are embedded in military or military-like structures makes the whole thing messier, because violence works in multiple ways, and legitimate reasons are turned to hate and terrorism.