by Marcuse » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:43 pm
Having seen a lot of people's responses to this, both here and on Discord, I think I've gotten more of a handle on what I think about it.
The first thing I figured was that I am fucking broken in this case, because more or less, I'm Robert if you take away the stupid decisions to drive the plot, sexual aggression and the "whore" line at the end. So I'm really super biased to be sympathetic to the Robert character, and it predisposes me to dislike the Margot character.
I can see where the author has tried to write sections detailing how Margot is altering her opinions and feelings in order to accommodate Robert's, and how that leads her into a situation she really didn't want to be in. However, when her true feelings toward Robert appear to be contempt, what she's actually doing is creating the conditions to break his heart. She's described as pretending to like him, pretending to find him interesting and attractive until the time comes where she doesn't want to any more and all her dislike and lack of attraction comes out and it's to the point where she can't hide it from him. The whole process is deceptive, and while it's definitely understandable that she feels under pressure to act a certain way and to please the guy she's with even though she probably shouldn't, it still amounts to lying to someone else about your intentions and feelings until it becomes inconvenient and then the alteration in her attitude is both harmful and painful. That's why she feels guilty about breaking up with him and feels like ghosting him would be wrong: she's acted in a way that leads him to reach an incorrect conclusion and then she's too ashamed to honestly disabuse him of it. She has, to an extent, used him to suit her own ego and her own gratification, and the turning point in the story is when she knows she won't enjoy sex with him and suddenly the contempt is all she can think of. The story has Tamara cut the Gordian Knot by texting him something blunt, and people have said that she's a bitch, but really she's being honest with him even if what she said was unpleasant.
Robert is, from the off, portrayed as a large unkempt threatening figure. Their first interaction over the Red Vines places them in opposition: he likes something weird and she thinks it and says it. He says (jokingly?) that he's insulted the next time she sees him, but then that kind of judgemental tone is used again and again in the story by Robert as evidence that he's a nasty person. He's portrayed without evidence as a potential murderer and rapist, and he does nonsense things to justify the characterisation even where it wouldn't make sense to do so. The section where she's drunk and coming on to him is weird as hell because he refuses her and overrides her because she's drunk and says he'll take her home, but she then vaguely protests about her roommate and he just carries on with what the plot demands and takes her to his place and engages in sex with her. It's ridiculous, either have him refuse her and have that mean something, have him not refuse and be shitty, or have something happen to change his mind. You can't write a consistent character who acts in such a contradictory way in the space of minutes without it seeming like you're writing something to make a character look bad. The same is true of the "whore" line, it's thrown in at the last second to really cement his bad-person-ness and it feels cheap. If he'd actually done something really wrong other than being male and not perfect, then it would be more in character, but other than some comments and the aforementioned actions, he doesn't do much more than be clueless and a bit ignorant.
Lastly, Robert is roundly hated by Margot for any emotional sensitivity or expression. The story literally has Margot thinking she wishes she could ask him not to make a "feminine" noise because she finds it unattractive, but cannot. I'm sure this is supposed to be another example of poor Margot having to put up with evil Robert to the author, but to me it shows how as a male, Robert isn't allowed to be anything other than a male archetype, and any deviation from this is seen as weak, unattractive and worthy of ridicule (because she keeps laughing or wanting to laugh) or contempt (because she starts to dislike him).
This is supposed to be a piece about how women are ill served by the relationship game, but all it comes off to me like is an attempt to make a rather immoral female protagonist look better by comparison to a male character who is character assassinated in order to do so.