I don't know if this is really worth it at this point, but I will say it anyway. If you want to write warfare in the middle ages, armies routinely slaughtered whole towns and villages. Pillaging and burning them to the ground. Now when writing the vivid details when a 'noble' knight disembowels a villager with his broadsword, you can't skimp out on his vile pillaging of a woman. Continue on with the vivid raping of her, because that is what happened in the middle ages. Why do we need to have sympathy for a character that is acting his part in an ugly era of history? Make it real, knights did a lot of terrible things and still claimed to be bound by honor and chivalry. Look at the Crusades they were a horrible group of knights, more like a death squad on a mission to wipe out unbelievers under the guise of religious authority. So don't down play the reality that has existed as long as humans have. (Honestly rape is not that fascinating.) Soapbox is over, I need to find something happier to think about now.
We don't need to have sympathy for random knight #42, but the crux of this thread is about major characters and protagonists. If you don't care about sympathy, you can make characters do whatever they like, but if you want the audience to like a character you have to restrain them. Conan the Cimmerian was many things: thief, pirate, murderer, and bandit at various points in his career, but he never raped anybody. The Crusades are far more complicated than you're making them out to be. People like to forget they began as defensive wars, and that exterminating the "unbelievers" wasn't the objective. And as Steerpike noted earlier in this thread, trying to pretend all medieval soldiers were rapists is false.
@X Equestris I know that not all soldiers in the Medieval era were rapists. That doesn't mean that it never happened. I am simply trying to convey an idea as it pertains to the topic of the thread, and keep it short. Ultimately we don't know everything that took place in history, because it is simply not possible. Final thought on this is to acknowledge that some bad things happened back then, and it is not documented well enough to really know what they did back then. At least not as far as sharing all the dark facets of life that affected their lives.
The problem isn't mentioning that they happened, but that the OP is worried about maintaining sympathy for his characters. Simplest way to do that is to not make the ones you want people to like rapists. If you want to show that it happened, sure, go for it, but don't try to make people root for the rapist.
By the way, what about the founding fathers of the US, who were all rapists? No one seems to hate them.
Defense from what? All five crusades were for middle eastern gold. Not much has changed, though now we're pillaging their black gold.
How are you using the word "rapists"? And don't be too sure how people feel about the founding fathers of the US. I wouldn't say I hate them, but... I don't think I could name them. I don't think I care about them...
Care to give specific examples, with sources? Aside from that, some of the Founders do get flak on the slave front, so I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Five? Shows how much you know. There were eight, by some counts nine, crusades in the near east. The first was launched at the request of the Byzantine emperor, who was dealing with relentless attacks from the Turks. There were wider issues with harassment of Christian pilgrims, destruction or seizure of churches and holy sites (most notably the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), and the treatment of local Christian populations that prompted the Pope to launch the First Crusade and set Jerusalem as its target. That's not to say all who went on crusade had such lofty ideals, but pretending that the Crusades were launched solely for wealth is false.
Yea, I was under the impression that the Crusades started out as bodyguards for people making pilgrimages to the holy land.
Indeed. There was a significant drop in the piety of those on Crusade towards the end, to the point where the religious orders were among the relative few motivated by idealistic reasons, but the original point was safeguarding holy sites and pilgrims. They planned to turn over the territory they took to the Byzantines.
I'd say that failing to make a distinction between kinds of rape is akin to failing to make a distinction between kinds of murder. Most people would agree that being burned to death would be worse than having one's neck snapped. They're both awful, and I wouldn't wish either on anyone. The crux is that accepting one act as worse does not belittle it trivialise the other. Evil is deep and endless.
Could be coercive, due to a different in power levels between the victim and perpetrator. Could be statutory rape, where the act is consentual but one party lacks capacity.
I didn't say it would ever not be violent. My point is that, for example, whilst date rape bottoms out the scumometer, gang rape goes even further. I'm not advocating any kind of rape, but I think you'd be a fool not to acknowledge that some of its heads are uglier than others.
This is exactly why you can't (or rather, shouldn't) rank rapes. A date rape can be more devastating than a gang rape. Rape where the victim is coerced rather than held down can be more devastating than a rape where the victim is chained. Saying it could have been worse IS trivialising it.
I could be totally wrong here but didn't the word FUCK come from Fornication Under Consent of the King? Which meant you only needed the consent of the King to have carnal knowledge of a woman - any woman so I suppose the women knew it was coming at some stage and just hoped for a good looking dude who manscaped a bit and generally kept himself cleanish. Didn't they also have First (K)night where the King's number 1 could have any bride on the first night of her marriage - a la Braveheart. Another reason for medieval knights raping women after burning their villages was to impregnate them and flush out whatever "tribe" they were originally. Rape can be whatever you want it to be in your story - it can be vividly violent or it can be serene where the woman plays dead and zones out into a world full of fluffy unicorn farts and fairy dust or maybe your soldier has a problem with rape even though his superior has demanded it. Maybe you want to show it through his eyes, maybe he looks deep into hers and can't go through with it and instead turns on his boss, runs at him with a sword but gets killed. Its your story dude - do what you want.
I recently read a Stephen King book where the MC had a flash back to when her father not raped but molested her. Even though I hated to read that part it did add a lot to book and more incite to the MC's personality and even more tension to the bad memories of seeing possible ghost of her father.
