Fair warning, the next two paragraphs are going to be discussing rape, both in the novel and talking about an experience I had with a rape victim. Don't read on if that'll bother you.
I have not led a sheltered life, I have known (as most women do)
actual real life rape victims. The scene as written is disgusting and horrible, in large part because it trivializes the rape. It's not a big deal, she's able to keep communicating over the computer radio link in real time, only complaining once that something "really hurt". She also has no problems at all afterward through the rest of the novel. No PTSD, no bouts of random crying, no becoming withdrawn, nothing. She was raped and it was No Big Deal in the world of the novel. Here in reality rape is a truly horrifying experience, most
real women would struggle to keep their sanity during the event, much less act like it's nothing worse than a bee sting or a snake bite. I didn't want to go into gender issues originally, but since you decided to trivialize my opinion (you do realize I'm a woman, right?), I will now:
It is blatantly obvious that two men wrote that book and that scene, and no women were consulted.
Maybe you're the one who's led a sheltered life in reality. You don't seem to understand how and why rape is so horrible and traumatizing, leading me to wonder if you've ever known any actual rape victims. I helped save the life of one once, a 14yo girl I knew online and only talked to on IRC. She was date-raped and suicidal, and wouldn't talk to anyone in the real world. She barely would talk to
me online, but I discovered she would talk about
Sailor Moon, and it would cheer her up. I quickly started learning everything I could about the show, so I could draw her out more and try to get her out of her clearly suicidal state. It worked somewhat, although she did later make a suicide attempt. Fortunately for her, it was a "cry for help" suicide attempt, meant to fail, and her parents finally learned something was wrong with her. And that bit about saving her life? That came from
her, months after her suicide attempt, when she told me I had saved her life by doing what I'd done. It remains to this day one of the things I'm most proud of, because I made an actual difference in someone's life.
So you can take your "you have led a sheltered life" and shove it where the sun doesn't shine. You can also take your opinion and shove it in the same place. I didn't try to belittle your opinion of the book, as my last paragraph showed clearly. You did the opposite with mine, so apparently you think only your opinion has any validity in the world.
Let me be a bit more blunt in my assessment: It's a horrible novel, with horrible characterization, and trivializes rape because the authors didn't understand it. It also didn't need that rape scene at all, so I question why the authors wanted it in there. Did they think they had to have a woman raped for shock value? Did they think their readers would get off on reading about a woman being raped? I don't know, but the end result was disgusting, and made what was a so-so novel at best into a definite "avoid at all costs" novel instead.
As a final point, the fact that rape occurs every day in the real world is
not a valid reason to shoehorn it into a novel for no good reason. It's bad writing, period, and I'm not alone in that opinion. For example,
this lengthy essay about writing about rape has this part:
Quote:
|
I don’t believe in “Write what you know,” but I’m a big believer in “Know what you write.” If you’re going to write about sexual violence, read about it first. Read about the dynamics of rape and power. Read about rape myths, and read about the statistics and research that bust those myths. Read books written by survivors of sexual violence.
|
None of that happened for
Oath of Fealty.