Rapefic Revisited

Finished reading: AD3

"No, not love she said
Don't you know that it's different for girls?
(Don't give me love)
No, not love she said
Don't you know that it's different for girls?
You're all the same"

--Joe Jackson

AD3 is not melodramatic, but it veers towards sensationalism. Perhaps what happens in AD3 is a trope of post-apocalyptic fic; I'm not familiar with the genre.

Daria and Jane, while attempting to drive back to civilization, run into a couple of good old boys who are determined to give Daria and Jane a good time...well, a good time for the good ol' boys anyway. Before very bad things can happen, a white knight in the form of a government agent manages to shoot the miscreants and come to the rescue of D & J.

However, Daria dopes out that this man is not what he claims to be and points it out. The white knight shows his true "black knight" colors and forces Daria and Jane to come with him. Without getting into details, Daria is about to become a non-virgin before Jane locates the man's gun, shoots him, and the two are on their way. (For actual details, you'll just have to read the story.)

I believe someone on the thread pointed out, "boy, civilization sure has gone under very quickly". How long has it been, a couple of days and already rape squads and perverts are roaming the land?

My hope is that society has temporarily reverted to anarchy -- not the anarchy of "do what you want", but the anarchy of "take what you please". This phase tends not to last very long, as superpredators arise to kill off the weaker of their fellow criminals. I hope Doggieboy's world-building exercise shows some thought.

What saved the above from leaning into melodrama -- the attempt at molestation is definitely sensational, there is a building of suspense, Jane's location of the gun moves the plot forward and almost depends on coincidence -- was that fact that after the black knight gets shot, we have no idea as to whether or not he is dead.

It doesn't really matter if he's dead or not. If he's not dead, and he shows up again, Daria and Jane can just take action when he arrives. A melodrama, however, would have Jane shoot him in the head to give the audience its satisfaction and confirm the melodramatic moral of "all rapists should die". AD3 at least confirms the uncertainty.

(* * *)

One of the problems of writing fan fiction with teenage girl protagonists is the lack of experience with being a teenage girl. To a good writer, this should not be an insurmountable obstacle. All sorts of fantasy fiction is written despite the fact the authors are not elves on the side.

However, one simply can't write teenage girls as teenage boys in drag. They have a different set of problems that aren't merely rooted in anatomy. One of those problems I suppose is the awareness that you're the "weaker sex" -- not weaker in the sense of being intellectually or spiritually inferior, but physically vulnerable. (I assume the writers of Kim Possible fanfic don't have this problem.)

Which leads to questions that many male writers can't answer from direct experience. They have to make hypotheses and pray that those hypotheses pass the acid test. Daria, for example, is about five-foot-one and has probably never exercised a day in her life. Furthermore, even though she might believe she's unattractive, she knows from hard experience that there's a subset of guys for whom that won't matter, and who furthermore would use violence to get what they wanted. That subset is kept at bay by law, and its true that rape is an act of violence and not of sex...but really, how much of the female consciousness is taken up by worries of rape?

My assumption -- and it might be a wrong one -- is that it's sort of like walking around as a target. In about 95 percent of cases, you can feel at ease but you know there are certain kinds of situations you don't want to get yourself into. You take precautions. Well-lit parking lots, etc. etc. with maybe some thought exercises such as "what do you do?" "Do you struggle to save your self-esteem or do you give in to save your life?"

How much do women think about this? How much of their present-moment consciousness is taken up by the fact? I would claim not much, but you do get daily reminders that bring you back to the topic momentarily.

There is a school of thought that says that men can't write about such matters -- not plausibly, anyway. My wife claims, for example, that men could never write what some fans would call a "rape fic", even if that work were to handle the topic with great seriousness and accuracy. Men are just not suited for such a subject. I refuse to argue about the matter, I just have a different opinion, that's all -- but I'm not about to write the next great rape fic in Daria fanfiction.

I was chatting with a friend about this the other night -- about physical vulnerability and the awareness it might play in the protagonists' minds. He concluded, "No wonder Jake is crazy. He has two teenage daughters to worry about."