Relationships: Kayla and Damian
I was going to talk about this as part of ch2, but upon further reflection, it should probably be its own thing.
This isn’t primarily going to be about changes. It’s more about criticizing the relationship these two characters are shown to have and how it’s treated by the narrative. Specifically, regarding the treatment of sexual harassment. (I do have a couple simple changes I’ll mention at the end, though.)
The first crucial thing to know is that what makes something sexual harassment isn’t the nature of the action itself, but how it affects the victim. It’s one thing that makes it difficult to recognize and stop, because everyone’s boundaries are different and can change over time. This is why talking about boundaries is important, as is respecting them once they’re made known.
Damian does sexually harass Kayla.
If you didn’t see that, I don’t blame you. I didn’t either until I’d given it a couple reads, because it was treated like silly flirting and not a potentially traumatizing thing to do to someone. Because of this, it sucks that I have to explain this in the first place, but apparently I do.
Really, you only need to know two things to get what’s going on here. First, that Kayla’s afraid of Damian. I’ve heard the argument that she’s being prejudiced here because she’s religious and he’s a demon, but… for one thing, the only source on Kayla being very devout is Damian himself, and he’s probably an unreliable source since he’s presumably only started going to ZPA that year (meaning they’ve only known each other for a few months at most) and given how scared she is of him, I can’t imagine they spent much time getting to know each other since then.
Also, she usually has impressive courage. She threatened a vampire with her fencing sword to save Zill and nearly got mauled, and fought a giant monster with the rest of her friends to protect Jack. But defending oneself from a creepy guy is a different kind of danger, and one that can ruin a woman’s life if when people take his side. It’s not unreasonable for someone to be more afraid of a harasser than a monster.
To put it another way, Kayla chooses the bear.
Not to mention that it’s probably not hard to guess that Zill’s at least part demon, based on his… everything. She’s not scared of demons, she’s dating one.
The second thing to know is that this has been going on for a while. In one panel, Damian complains about Kayla’s reaction, saying that she does this every time.
That is what makes this sexual harassment. If Damian’s flirting was something that he did once and made her uncomfortable, that’s an honest mistake. It’s probably how all this started, too. He wouldn’t have known where her boundaries were yet, and the obvious solution would be for him to apologize and then stop the behavior.
But instead he just… kept fucking doing it??? To the point that Kayla feels so threatened by him that she runs away when he talks to her?
Nope. Nuh uh. No way. That is NOT okay to do to someone. Now that they’re at the point where Kayla feels like she has to physically move away from him to feel safe when he gives her any attention, and because Damian knows that’s what her reaction will be to his actions, he’s only making her more afraid of him. And what’s more, having the knowledge of how his behavior affects her shows that he’s doing it on purpose.
There are many other examples of why Damian’s treatment of her are toxic as hell and on a personal level I absolutely hate him. And I’m honestly tired of all the people I’ve seen who don’t recognize his actions for something as damaging as they actually are. How he behaves toward her isn’t cute or wholesome or romantic, and her reaction isn’t funny.
He clearly wasn’t meant to be written this way. I think the audience is supposed to like him, but trying to make a character likable after they’ve committed SH is like trying to make a character sympathetic when they’ve done a hate crime.
The last thing I want to mention was actually the thing that originally made me dislike Damian. Admittedly, it took multiple readings to see his harassment problem, but this told me he had a severely disrespectful view of Kayla right out of the gate.
It’s this one line at the beginning of the 2nd chapter, when Damian is talking to Jack about his chances with Kayla. According to Damian: “Religious girls are just a challenge, but they always give in to temptation in the end.”
I hate this so much, it’s hard to decide which reason why to explain first. So let’s go through this sentence piece by piece.
“Religious girls…”
First of all, as I’ve explained, Damian probably isn’t the best source on this. Kayla being Christian is canon, but considering she’s dating a half-demon, I’d argue that she isn’t that strictly devout.
Secondly, grouping Kayla with all religious girls is generalization. Not a way you think of someone who’s uniquely special to you. Each girl is their own person, grouping a bunch of them together and labeling them with certain behaviors is at best rude and at worst misogynistic. “White girls like X” “Queer girls like Y” “Religious girls are like Z” See the pattern here?
Also, by not treating Kayla like an individual here, the connotation of this is that she’s replaceable. Like she’s the “religious girl” who happens to have his attention at the moment but he could find another just like her if he wanted.
“…are just a challenge…”
To start, there’s the dehumanization/objectification of referring to another person as a “challenge”. It also contributes to the implication of Kayla’s replaceability.
There’s also implications about how he formed this opinion. Taken in context with the full sentence, it suggests that Kayla isn’t the first religious girl that Damian has tried to seduce, meaning that when he says this, he’s comparing her to the rest of them.
If you know anything about women, you’ll know that comparing us to each other is kind of a faux pas.
“….but they always give in to temptation in the end.”
This is the worst part of all, starting with how it suggests that Damian has no intentions to stop treating Kayla the way he does. It speaks to his certainty that if he just keeps at it, she’ll change her mind about him.
That has the same logic as guys who keep sending women unsolicited photos, thinking that eventually one of them will see it and think: “I must have you now.”
(Yeah. Damian in his current form is a fedora guy.)
It also hints at Damian’s belief that Kayla should “give in to temptation,” that it’s only what’s right and best for her. Which is why I think it’s rich that Damian (accurately) calls Zill a show-off, implying that he acts arrogant, and then he himself behaves in the same way but with a touch of degradation mixed in.
This “I know better than you” attitude, especially toward someone he probably doesn’t know well yet, is incredibly entitled.
I could go on and on, and in fact, a lot of this analysis was pulled from a much longer essay I wrote a while back (I’m using it because it’s relevant here and it’s easier than rephrasing everything that’s the same points anyway). But there are a couple changes I’m planning to make that might just fix this mess.
The first thing to know, and you might be surprised to hear this, is that Damian still flirts with Kayla in the rewrite. It’s what the creator wanted to happen, because he has a crush on her, so it stays.
But! One crucial change is their history with each other. In the rewrite, Kayla and Damian are friends. Him realizing his crush on her was a recent development, and they had built a foundation of friendship through Jack before he decided to act on it.
This new context changes the dynamics of this situation. Having built a foundation of trust, Kayla’s boundaries are different than when they were near-strangers. She now knows that Damian’s harmless (in this rewrite he is relatively harmless, especially to her) and that his advances aren’t a potential threat to her safety.
In the rewrite, Kayla’s opinion here is that his flirting sways between an inside joke and a mild annoyance. He still gets on her nerves sometimes, but we all have flaws.
(If I were to go farther with this, I’d make them gal pals who share gossip and confide secrets in each other, but perhaps that’s the kind of thing their relationship could evolve into in the future. For now, it seems like too big a change)
A lot about their relationship will be affected by changes to Damian’s character, which I’ll put on his profile of changes.
