Greetings!
DR. STRANGEMONKEY:
How would my frequent inclusion of rape in my campaigns serve as me making the trauma of rape into a "recreation"?
Well there are a couple of mitigating responses here.
The first is that there is a difference between referencing rape as an event that occurs in the world and referencing rape as a critical component of your character. If you reference rape as an evil to be avoided than that's distinct from referencing rape as a critical and foundational element to a character type.
The second is that you and what you do in your campaign aren't as important as WotC and what WotC does in its core rule books. The ethical implications are distinct. And that's not just a question of scope.
It's part of what I was trying to draw out in establishing the difference between an artist and a teacher. The relationship between rhetor and audience in those cases is very different. The artist is inviting the audience into his rhetoric. The teacher is giving students the means to further performance on the part of the students. The teacher has a greater obligation to make her material available to a wider range of audience members with a larger number of constraints.
You in your campaign are more equivalent to the artist. You don't have to have any players who have any traumatic associations with rape. If you do your ethical responsibility to those players falls more under the aegis of hospitality than it would under mentoring, guidance, or public good.
That said...
Thanks, my friends, for you commentary and input. I hope that my argument for including rape on a rather frequent basis is clearly understood.
Poor choice of words here, but I understand what you're arguing.
My campaigns are quite mature, very medieval, with of course lots of magic involved. The world the campaign is set in is a violent, brutal world of terrifying monsters and hordes of barbaric, savage humanoids--not to mention the vast hordes of dark, unwashed humanity that have been seduced by evil and darkness, and fully embraced the dark whisperings of evil--rape, slavery, murder, brutal torture, and the grinding despair and oppression of millions of human beings is an ongoing, daily reality for many in the campaign world. And the player characters are involved in dealing with these topics and aspects of reality on a frequent basis. It's something of an exaggeration, of course, but players in my campaign could almost easily ask, "Who isn't being seduced, enslaved, raped, brutally tortured, murdered, or otherwise somehow crushed by the evil boot of despair and oppression?"
Right, but see here you are turning the trauma of rape into recreation. Not just rape but many other evils and, indeed, evil itself. Your not starting with a Tolkien-esque initial setting of innocence and embattled nobility contrasted against the possibility of trauma, terror, and oppression. Rather you are starting with a setting that characterizes existence as one of brutalization and aggression, and you are exalting this depiction by calling mature or even medieval in order to heighten the sense that this depiction of social character is made in service to verisimilitude.
And verisimilitude is a pleasure. It helps your recreation achieve its aims. And recreation is clearly your aim as you are selling it here. I've seen your posts in other places and I know you also have an analytical, political, and even ethical bent to your campaigns, but talking about the issue of rape here in this post you finish off the paragraph with a lol emoticon.
Now, certainly, there are ways to use even the grimmest of topics for recreation and pleasure and have it not simply be ethically excusable but also be ethically bold and courageous. Nonetheless, here you are using rape and brutality as a means to establish a better form of recreation, and from the best of cases to the worst that's problematic.
And given the degree to which such a tactic is ethically difficult but not ethically dubious I can certainly say that on the face of things it's not horrible for you to use rape as a reference point in your campaign. It might still be awful or wicked, but that would be because of how you used it in the game not from how you included it in the world. And even there it's potentially controversial. There's plenty of criticism surrounding rape in art or recreation out there and not of all it is going to come down on the side of even this moderate a position.
Given that, though, and WotC's audience and the fact that WotC is more analagous to the teacher providing means than to the artist providing experience doesn't WotC deserve some credit for taking a higher clearer path from the outset?
I mean I don't want WotC to say "No Grimdark for you! Only puppies and sunshine for everyone!" but I do want WotC to say, "Listen, we want people to do what's right and fun for them, but we also know that we have to take this and its implications for our audience seriously and with consideration."
