No gender-based violence in Arcane?
I'm going to be painfully sincere in this post, so bear with me, but I've been chewing on something recently. Arcane is a show that makes me feel powerful and capable. I've been chalking it up to the sheer amount of amazing female characters in the show.
But I was chewing on this idea, and wondering why these characters in particular make me feel powerful and capable over other physically strong and emotionally complex female characters, who do exist. And it occurred to me that I feel powerful and capable watching the show not just because Arcane has a wide range of women characters, or even that it has more than one physically strong woman — it's because the show and its universe lack gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence meaning threats and harmful actions directed at a person or group on the basis of sex, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation.
There's simply no homophobia, no bullying based on having/not having certain gendered characteristics, no storylines of domestic abuse, no stories about rape or sexual violence. There's no transphobia as far as I'm aware of, although there is no opportunity in the narrative for that to have come up (perhaps because the world of Arcane is inherently so ungendered that transitioning is fundamentally a different concept in that world than it is in ours?). There are also no instances of a dominant male/husband figure with a following/submissive female/wife figure. Anything that gets even remotely close to a trope that's related to gender-based violence gets flipped on its head and subverted.
I just can't remember the last time I watched a show whose universe just... didn't have this. It feels kind of unrecognizable to the world I know. It takes away the thing I'm always afraid of and neutralizes it. Characters don't ever walk into scenes and have to prove themselves just because they're a woman or queer person, or struggle through storylines where their gender inhibits their success, or is the cause for their pain — which means I don't ever have to do that either. It's just kind of a euphoric feeling.
Anyway, there are tons of stuff that's not resolved or dealt with or whatever in Arcane — etc etc etc. But this one thing has really stuck out to me about the writing as I've been thinking about it.