Find your tribe in a Sea of Creativity
i’ll be honest, i don’t always like the way people talk about what happened to james. i feel like people let themselves be tricked by the supernatural element of the bracelet into thinking that this can’t possibly happen in real life, when the truth is that what happened to him after the bracelet was put on and everything he felt once it was over is indicative of real life experiences. sure, no one is ever gonna put a magical bracelet on your wrist that forces you to love them, but the bracelet is merely a metaphor for real feelings that real people experience when they’re in such a situation: feeling stuck and trapped, feeling like they’re forced to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. these are feelings james himself explicitly talks about multiple times in the text. he feels ashamed, he feels disgusted with himself, he feels weak for not getting out of it sooner, he feels sick at the thought of talking about what he experienced with anyone, including the people he feels safest with. these are all feelings drawn from the experiences of real life survivors. so whenever you’re tempted to make a joke about the bracelet, or to feel frustrated that he ‘wasn’t even the one to tell cordelia the truth about the bracelet’, or even to say that some other male character would have handled the situation better, please remember that this might be a sensitive topic for some people on your dash. james is fictional, so he’ll never be hurt by what you’re saying, but the people reading your posts are real.