I’m reading The Saint of Steel

[feotakahari]

This is the most I’ve ever understood guess culture, and it’s so damn depressing.

There’s this thing I sometimes hear about how if you’re a man, you can’t really get consent from a woman, even if she says she consents, because men are terrifying and she could just be saying yes so you won’t hurt her. You could say you’re not going to hurt her, of course, but you could be lying, and she could say she believes you, but she could be lying, because if you think she doesn’t believe you won’t hurt her, you might get mad and hurt her. Even non-sexual interactions across assumed genders feel like stepping on broken glass, and as someone who’s frankly too large to be permitted to be female, this kind of shit makes me want to go hide in the woods.

The Saint of Steel comes back to this gender dynamic over and over, but more to the point, it expands it to same-sex interactions. So for instance, if you try to comfort someone who clearly needs help, you can create a situation where they feel obligated to comfort you instead and ignore their own problem, and they won’t even tell you to fuck off because something something power dynamic, so it’s better to just leave them alone and not try to help. The Saint’s former followers are emotionally crippled killing machines who seem to have Overburdened playing as their permanent theme song, but they’re the characters who get to interact with each other as functional human beings, because at least they can punch each other and get it over with.