Originally Posted by autistichalsin
That's my thought as well. I don't like when people say that Halsin talking about his sexual assault should be removed entirely. That removes him as representation. And Halsin represents a very important, overlooked kind of sexual assault survivor- namely, the messy kind. The kind who downplays their trauma because they can't face it, who self-victim blames, who still enjoys sex- a LOT- the kind who is big and was abused by someone smaller, males who were abused by women... You get the idea. The kind of survivors who are heard less in real life because people have one idea in their mind of what a victim is "supposed" to be. Halsin is very important to me, for just this reason, and so I don't want to see his conversation removed. Like you said, I want things added. I want to be able to talk to him about it; to ask why he won't call it abuse, why he will show sympathy to others who have been abused (like Astarion) but not himself. I want to be able to validate his feelings and help him put a name to what happened to him, to remind him that just because he's big doesn't mean his feelings don't matter (something he says multiple times is a sore spot for him) and that his survivor guilt (both towards the Shadow Curse and towards the other murdered elf victims he noted he saw in the Underdark during his captivity) doesn't mean he has to be grateful to his captors. I want to help him through it all. frown

Sorry to come on the other side of this argument, and I do want to try and phrase things so that they don't come across as offensive, so please bear with me for a bit. Lets start off with good representation of messy SA survivors: Astarion. His writers actually researched and consulted and put in a lot of work to make his complicated, messy reactions be something authentic and real. I do not think Halsin is a depiction of a messy survivor. I think it's just fetishization. I don't think they intentionally wrote him as having a complicated relationship with his trauma. I may be a bit presumptuous, but I think the only reason they added that was for titillation and humor. For me, the entire way the scene was handled does not feel respectful at all. The representation feels practically like an accident that happened while someone was making a fetishy joke. It is for this reason that I do not consider Halsin to be good representation, and for this reason that I would much rather it be removed. I'm so tired of male victims being a joke. I think that the game already did a really good job with the representation of a messy victim with Astarion- and a male victim, at that!- and because of how the writing has been handled so far, I do not currently trust the writer of Halsin to put in the work to do it correctly. I'd love to see more representation like you describe, but I just don't have faith in it for this particular character in this particular game.

Again, I do apologize if this post comes off too strong. I tried to use a lot of "I feel" statements but if I've done a poor job at communicating this, let me know.

I have a separate thread specifically dedicated to this issue in the Feedback forum, if you're interested: Criticism for Halsin's Drow Backstory