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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4929099" data-attributes="member: 40961">pawsplay- its not that I think that rape shouldn't be in fiction.  Its that I think that rape shouldn't be written poorly in fiction.  Writing poorly is generally a bad idea.  Writing poorly about rape just makes it worse. Books aren't just recitations of fictional events.  You can't just say that, oh, you know, Cugel's a bad person so its unsurprising that he'd do this.  That may be the case, but its not a defense of whether the books themselves, and Cugel as a character, are well written books. An author often has an intention that underlies the story.  When an evil villain in a story does something evil, its not just a recital of events, its probably an attempt by the author to get you to buy into the imperative that he be thwarted.  A recitation of a series of amusing events isn't just a recital of some things that happen to be funny, its an effort by an author to make a reader feel amusement.  The events of the story represent an effort to communicate emotional states.  There are a million different ways this can go wrong, from bad writing, to culture shock between the author and reader, and more. Its on this level that I think many uses of rape in fiction fail, and fail utterly.  Rape carries with it a lot of emotional baggage.  If your story doesn't make use of that, or worse, if it makes use of it poorly, or even worse if your story is utterly incompatible with it, your story fails. Take the Jim Butcher novels I mentioned earlier.  They use rape as a plot element.  The author seems to want us to feel anger and dislike towards the rapists.  They're villains, and the gang rape of sympathetic characters is intended to make us hate them.  However, Butcher also makes use of a whole lot of fetish fuel.  Slave collars.  Aphrodisiacs as an element of rape.  A culture of sexual slavery.  Foot sexuality.  Now, he either intends to titilate, or he doesn't.  If he doesn't, then he really, really shouldn't have made use of all of that fetish imagery.  If he DOES intend to titilate, the he's attempting to simultaneously mix a message of abhorrence to the reader, AND a message of sexual titilation.  I do not think these work well together. The Cugel stories are similarly flawed, in my opinion, except worse.  The author intends to amuse.  I think that's pretty clearly the primary purpose of the Dying Earth saga- wry humor.  I do not think that he uses rape well in this context.  I think it would be very difficult to use rape well in this context.  If these stories were merely intended to be the recountings of the actions of a fictional, evil man, then that would be one thing.  But I do not think that's the intention of the author.  I do not think that is the overall effect of the books.   I think that the intention of the author, and the effect of the books, is to amuse.  And I think that Vance fails miserably in this regard when he chooses to mix in the rape of a crying girl who's just seen her family and lover slaughtered.  And her post-rape death isn't very humorous either.  The whole sequence isn't just unhumorous, its actually a black hole of anti humor that sucks the humor out of the rest of the story.</blockquote>

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