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“You endure and endure, and for what? As long as you keep appeasing them, keep letting them get their way, why would they ever get better? Violence gets them everything they want. And then what is there in the end but death?”
How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey.
People love to ogle pretty girls, but they love to hate them even more. There’s no one the masses are more obsessed with railing at than the women who dare to stray from the docile ideal of wives and mothers. Too vain, people like my father curse at those women. Too self-obsessed. Too devious, getting everything they want by draining men dry.
“You’re the miracle I’ve been waiting for all this time, going into these battles, praying that something would be different. I can’t bear the thought of losing you.”
Female starlets have usually not been allowed to be presented as brazenly as I’ve been. In media, they’re the brightly smiling dream girls, loving wives, or caring mothers of the male protagonists. They’re there to be his reward for defeating the villain, to comfort him when he’s lost, or to motivate him by being killed.
If there’s an aggressive female, she has to be among the antagonists. Not even the main antagonist, but the villain’s own source of support and comfort, who fawns over his twisted intelligence and is always willing to die for his cause.
“The entitled assholes of the world are sustained by girls who forgive too easily. And there’s nothing I’d like to rid the world of more than entitled assholes.
monstrous parts inside you, but that’s okay. I have them too. No matter what anyone says, I’m
“Do you know how karma really works, Shimin?” I snarl. “It’s not something that can be prayed into existence or counted on to fall from the sky. It has to be hand-delivered. A certain senior strategist has made us suffer very much. I’m saying we make him suffer too. So badly that he’ll tell us the truth to beg us to stop.”
My heart stutters, drawing my chest tight. But I’m at peace with this. Instead of a betrayal of any form, it feels like a completion. My killer boy, my sweet boy. The final line in this triangular formation we’ve been dancing in, making us stronger than ever.
This is unconventional, yet another implicit rule we’re breaking, but you know what? It works for us. And I think the three of us are done with letting this world tell us what’s okay and what isn’t.
