Fanfiction spends more time with trauma than many other forms of media, but it still neglects some types of trauma and often misses the bigger patterns.
Fanfic's media-wide representation issues mean certain types of trauma are overlooked.
Note: If you click on the titles to read the work, please heed the tags for traumatic and sexual content to make an informed decision about whether you want to read it or not.
Female Sexual Assault
Fanfiction does address sexual assault more head-on and with greater frequency than a lot of other media. However, the stories told about it are very different from the normal discourse around this type of trauma, because fanfiction spends the most time on male characters.
This can be both a positive and negative thing.
POSITIVES
The biggest upside to writing men dealing with sexual assault is that it breaks down gendered assumptions about who can hurt and be hurt in certain ways.
“Come on Einstein, let’s conduct a little experiment of our own!”
- Skip Wescott
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There are a lot of stories about Peter Parker (Spider-Man) being assaulted varying times and ways by an older boy/man named Skip Wescott, inspired by an old Spider-Man comic written in 1984 as a sort of PSA about child predators.
Example fics: The Third Option by Uncertainty_Principle and Pictures by deancasdracohar.
The most popular relationships in fanfiction have typically been m/m relationships. This, and the general culture of fandom, leads to a lot of stories featuring different narratives about queer relationships and individuals.
For a number of reasons, there is a reluctance to show LGBTQ+ relationships as anything other than sunshine and rainbows. Reasons for not addressing intersectional issues described by Kimberlé Crenshaw in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” include a blindness to seeing them outside of their “normal” contexts and willfully ignoring issues in marginalized spaces to not cast minorities in a bad light.
However, abuse can and does happen in those relationships and that is important to recognize.
Fanfiction showing men as survivors of sexual assault in LGBTQ+ contexts or otherwise helps shake dominant narratives across the board and raises awareness of sexual assault as a trauma that could happen to anyone.
** For statistics and analysis of abuse in LGBTQ+ relationships and how that interacts with gendered assumptions and with the legal system, see Queer (In)Justice by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock
NEGATIVES
On the flip side, women are much more likely to experience sexual assault in real life, and fanfic can often ignore that. Across the board, fanfic focuses more on male characters and their trauma, which results in the stories of women being de-emphasized and the representation of sexual assault in fanfic being nowhere accurate to real-life statistics.
Tag: Kilgrave is his own warning​
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One of the few sections of MCU fanfic that seriously addresses female sexual assault is fanfic about Jessica Jones. In canon, she was forced to be in a relationship with a man with mind-control powers. Fics about Jessica often examine how bad being in a “relationship” like that could be, and her canonical PTSD afterwards.
Example fics: AKA Seventy Seven Days by orphan_account
However, Jessica is an outlier. In the bigger pattern, female sexual assault is often treated as something to be expected or an unfortunate footnote in their story. In contrast, male sexual assault is often portrayed as a particularly horrific and shocking violation.
This makes sense when you consider that the rough criteria for whether something is traumatic or not whether it disrupts a person’s normal life and sense of safety.
Historically, healthy, well-off, white men defined what is traumatic. (Craps, 2015) I’m extrapolating here, but from that perspective and at earlier times in history, sexual assault was a “normal” threat for women and thereby hypothetically caused less trauma for them. However, for men in that category, being assaulted sexually would have been a terrible betrayal of expectations.
Even now, sexual assault is cast as something that just women deal with, so it could disrupt a man’s sense of safety more severely and be more traumatizing hypothetically speaking.
However, even if women are more aware of the threat of sexual assault in a vague way and thereby less shocked by it, that doesn’t make it less terrible to experience and to have the illusion of safety shattered.
There are fics that give female sexual assault the space it needs, but those are less common than those that sideline it in order to focus more on the main male characters’ trauma.
Trauma Experienced by Marginalized Groups
In addition to a lack of time spent with female characters, fanfiction doesn’t spend much time with characters who belong to marginalized groups.
A rich source of personal trauma that fanfiction has yet to mine very thoroughly is the “impact of everyday racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism and other forms of structural oppression.” (Craps, 2015) Some of these are covered better than others, but very little of fanfiction digs in and really examines the impact the long term experience of these -isms can have on a person’s mental health.
“Traumatization can result insidiously from cumulative microaggressions: each one is too small to be a traumatic stressor but together they can build to create an immense traumatic impact.”
- Stef Craps, "The Empire of Trauma"
Additionally, there’s the trauma of watching your communities and individuals like you continually suffering and/or being hurt or killed.
RACE
Again, a large reason racial trauma isn’t often addressed is the canon fanfiction is based on.
The MCU has more characters of color than some other fandoms, but they are virtually all secondary characters or from the isolated futuristic wonderland of Wakanda.
Race is also pretty much the one thing people aren’t comfortable with changing about a character.
**Orientation, experience of domestic violence and general backstory all get changed frequently. Disability and gender get changed less often but do still change frequently enough to be explored.
Fanfics will acknowledge racism and microaggressions, but it is usually in a passing comment. For example, a fic will note that they sent Steve Rogers (Captain America) to deal with the police at an incident rather than Sam Wilson (Falcon).
Even fics where a POC character is a main focus of the work don’t usually dive into race issues, instead choosing to focus on Sam’s war trauma for example, or immediate interpersonal relationships.
**It’d be cool to get some more Sam-centric fics after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier comes out, but we’ll have to see what fanfiction decides to focus on.
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With fanfiction, fantasy racism is also a topic.
In the MCU this is usually about Loki. Lots of fics address the fact that Loki is actually Jötnar, not Asgardian like he was raised to believe. The Jötnar are considered monsters by most other races, so Loki often deals with internalized racism in addition to racism from others.
"I intimated at this earlier when I spoke about the Jötunn race, although this is true of master sorcerers too. I possess a, as it were, magical core that is intertwined with my very soul. I do not merely wield magic… I am magic. Of course, most living things in the universe have some degree of magic twined with their soul, but with the Jötnar, it is much more than that. They are biologically magic; it's the one thing those monsters have going for them."
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The disdain for his own race wasn't lost on Coulson, though he saved his questions on the matter for another time.
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To Guard the Light by Amaya_Ramiel
It kinda says something about how unwilling we are to really address racial trauma when fantasy racism gets more space than the effects of the real-life racism that more people from canon could be dealing with.
LGBTQ+
The one marginalized group whose stories get told in a fairly comprehensive way is the LGBTQ+ community.
Fanfiction explores the trauma of being on the receiving end of hate for your orientation, as well as internalized homophobia/biphobia/transphobia and the trauma of being part of a community that is attacked and marginalized.
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Example fic: Falling from a Pedestal to Land on Even Ground by Ralkana
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** There are one thousand MCU fics with the “internalized homophobia” tag as of December 2020.
Especially for MCU characters from earlier-than-modern times (Captain America, the Winter Soldier, Peggy Carter, etc.), fanfiction can show people having to work through internalized homophobia/biphobia etc. or the trauma of living in a time period when being anything other than straight and gender-conforming was life-threatening. (Even more than it still is anyway.)
Example fics: Beignet De La Terre by Glacial_guillotine and Get with the Times (series) by ThePeak
There isn’t an abundance of representation for trans people and other gender identities or marginalized sexual identities like aromanticism, but there are good fics that give space to those identity’s struggles. There’s more good representation in fanfic for marginalized gender and sexual identities than in other forms of mass media for sure.
Example fics:
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War, Children by Nonymos - In an alternate universe where they aren’t superheroes, Steve Rogers is trans and homeless. Probably the most comprehensive handling of the intersection of trauma and minority I’ve read. (This is also an excellent Recovery fic for a modern-day veteran Bucky Barnes.)
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Aces Trumps Kings by miniongrin - Imagine playboy Tony Stark (Iron Man) as an asexual person who only had sex becuase of social expectations and because he didn’t know asexuality was a possibility.
ABILITY
Like the trauma experienced by LGBTQ+ people, the effects of ableism get a little more space than other traumas experienced by minorities.
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Disability representation isn’t very comprehensive and some of the narratives connecting disability and trauma aren’t great, but it’s there at least.
The MCU is somewhat better than other fandoms with disability representation since at least there are canon disabled characters to work with.
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Examples: Clint Barton (Hawkeye) is hard of hearing or deaf, Matt Murdock (Daredevil) is blind, pre-Captain America Steve Rogers had a plethora of chronic health issues
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** visit Chronically Ill Steve Rogers and Pre-Serum Steve’s Medical Forms if you want to go down a really interesting rabbit hole about 1930’s medicine, eugenics, and disability
Still, I’ve never read a fic that goes very far beyond “ableist people suck and kinda makes me feel bad about myself once in a while” and dig into how it intersects with traumas like homelessness or get into more complicated narratives about disability.
Combining fanfic’s representation issues with its intense focus on individuals, it also overlooks many of the larger stories to be told about trauma.
The stories that fanfic typically tells are about individuals or relationships between a small group of people, so stories about communities and systems get neglected. That's a large part of why most fanfiction doesn't link traumas like homelessness, sexual assault, and racism back to structural social issues.
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** See slide 6 from Therapy Narrative for more
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In addition to that, there are some bigger picture types of trauma that fanfic doesn’t touch at all.
These aren’t really discussed outside of academia, so this is another example of fanfiction reflecting popular understanding.
Historical Trauma
Briefly, for people who don’t know what historical trauma is, here’s a run-down.
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The original trauma occurred in the past, to a person’s ancestors
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That trauma usually affected an entire group or culture
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The effects of that trauma hypothetically pass down from generation to generation, through mechanisms like epigenetics, problems caused by the disruption of family and culture, the trauma of growing up with traumatized parents, pain from the idea that your people were hurt so badly in the past, etc.
Some examples of groups that may experience historical trauma are the descendants of Holocaust survivors, modern-day Native Americans, and the Black community.
Historical trauma is a big thing in academic circles. There is also an ongoing conversation about how much of the present-day suffering of people in minority groups is because of historical trauma or ongoing structural violence. Interesting stuff.
** Source: “Rethinking Historical Trauma” by Laurence Kirmayer et al.
Since fanfiction is missing a lot of representation of marginalized groups and isn’t big on systems, clearly this isn’t something that fanfic tackles.