YMMV / The Color Purple

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• Awesome Moments: Although happening offscreen, Eleanor Jane, the mayor's daughter, calling out her parents for how they treated Sophia.
• Complete Monster: Alphonso, better known as "Pa", is Celie's stepfather. Having taken advantage of Celie's mother's mental deterioration to marry her, Alphonso savagely mistreats Celie, regularly beating her for real or imagined reasons. Worse still, he also regularly rapes her, resulting in two pregnancies by the time she is 14, with him simply selling the children. Tiring of Celie, Alphonso sells her in marriage to a widowed man, even citing the damage he's done to her as a selling point, before continuing to mistreat others as he will, even a new teenage wife later.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Not in a funny way, but the "All my life I had to fight..." quote from Sofia is one of the lines that people remember.
  • "Sofia" has become shorthand for a strong woman who stands up for herself in certain Black communities.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Pa is well beyond this at the beginning of the story, given how he has abused the sisters and used them as his own sex slaves. He forces himself on a series of other girls too, and dies a Karma Houdini. Fortunately he wasn't their real father.
  • Mister appears to cross this with his horrific and systematic abuse of Celie and his banishment of Nettie, but this turns out to be a subversion, as he does the right thing by her at the last moment by paying for her family to come back to her from Africa. In the novel, his change in attitude sticks, and Celie and Albert become friends.

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