Gratuitous Rape

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Take a good look at your story. Why do you think a rape is what you need for it to progress? Is there something else that could fill the same function? Unless you have a damn good reason to include rape in a story, you probably shouldn't.

—Rachael Edidin, Inside Out

Gratuitous Rape is Exactly What It Says on the Tin - a pointless rape scene usually happening for little to no reason. Did the Big Bad defeat The Hero? Rape. Did a whole bunch of Mooks gang up on The Hero at once? Rape. Does the angsty Lancer have childhood issues? It was because he was raped. Is The Hero going up against a foe that has Mind Manipulation powers? Mind Rape THEN rape. Did The Hero defeat the Big Bad? Rape - Wait, WHAT?!

There are many guesses as to why Gratuitous Rape is used so much. To name a few: rape makes for good drama, it can show a villain as very, very, evil, or it can be used for just plain ol' Fan Service (from the creators' perspective, anyway). What some creators forget, however, is that rape is a sensitive subject, and therefore rape scenes should be handled with care. When unskilled hands insist on shoehorning rape somewhere into their work, THIS happens. This is a common cliche in Fan Works, but professional works are no stranger to it, either.

A good indicator as to whether or not rape is gratuitous is if:

With all that said, works should not be listed here just for including rape. The reason this trope exists is because the topic is very easy to mishandle, and we at All The Tropes wish to send the message that there are far more tasteful ways of breaking a character than by resorting to this trope.

Contrast Coitus Ensues, a pointless but consensual sex scene. Compare with Rape Is the New Dead Parents, when mentions of sexual abuse are tacked into a character backstory for easy tragedy.

No real life examples, please; this is a rape trope, and All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers.

Examples of Gratuitous Rape include:

Anime and Manga

  • Rape is a prominent staple of Hentai, but a badly-directed Hentai will shove in a rape scene to meet a titillation quota, regardless of whether it actually fits in with the narrative at large.
  • Berserk has been accused of this. Rape happens a lot in the Crapsack World of this series, and many of the major characters (particularly if they're women) have had to deal with at least one attempted—or successful—rape during their lives. It doesn't really help that the nastier villains, particularly many Apostles, are fond of the crime in general.
  • Okane ga Nai has Ayase frequently subjected to this.
  • Hen has a rape subplot that's so gratuitous it falls into Non Sequitur Scene territory. It comes out of nowhere, has no plot relevance, is never mentioned again, and the victim just blows it off and doesn't seem at all affected by the experience.
  • In the Zeorymer manga, Masaki could have explained his sinister plan to Miku without raping her, but he rapes her anyway. With an icicle.
  • Sanctuary tries to play with Tokai habit's of raping random women as Fan Service or Black Comedy Rape, but it generally proves pointless to the extent of making him (more) unlikable than ever.

Comic Books

  • Sleez forcing a mind-controlled Big Barda to star in porn movies in Action Comics #593. He almost did it to Superman, too. (How creepy was Sleeze and this story? Sleeze was kicked out of Apokalips by Darkseid for being too creepy.)
  • Infamously, Identity Crisis created the Retcon of Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny in The Watchtower, and worse, we only found out about it after Sue had been murdered—its only purpose was to motivate the heroes into crossing into very questionable territory. And worse, the entire rape plot turns out to be a Red Herring when it comes to the central murder mystery.

Fan Works

Film

  • As one might expect, this is a common staple in porn and Exploitation Films.
  • The alien parasite shoving a drill/tentacle-like appendage up the heroine's vagina in the theatrical version of Meatball Machine is a scene that was not in the original independent film.
  • In Showgirls, Molly is beaten and raped by her client... just before she was about to have consensual sex with him! One could guess that raping was his kink, but it still came right out of nowhere.
  • The infamous "snowman rape scene" from the Slasher Movie Jack Frost 1997. Jack brutally kills everybody else, but stops to rape the teenage girl taking a bath.
    • With a likely dose of Old Shame for Shannon Elizabeth, the actress who played the girl in question.
  • The rape scenes in The Hills Have Eyes, though the sequel to the remake tries to justify it by explaining the mutant numbers are low, and they needed normal people for breeding purposes.
  • The random attempted rape in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan... fortunately, Jason shows up to dispatch the would-be attacker.
  • The random Attempted Rape in the Sarah Michelle Gellar film The Return.
  • In Evil Dead, the infamous "tree rape" scene was so completely unneeded in the movie, and added so much to its controversy, that director Sam Raimi deeply, deeply regrets including it. In Evil Dead 2, which recreates many of the same situations as the first movie, the evil trees simply kill their victim instead.
  • A triple rape occurs in Naked Weapon, with only the weakest of excuses that the perpetrators are teaching the girls an "important" life lesson.
  • The Condemned contains a scene where one of the characters is Forced to Watch as his wife gets raped and then murdered. This adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and is just needless ugliness.

Literature

  • One especially grotesque example can be found in the third book of Gloria Tesch's Maradonia Saga. Quote: "The false monk Larivier had drugged Krimhilda. He now used his manhood and took advantage of her as darkness fell over Notali, the city of evil." (page 349)
  • Frequently seen in the books of Danielle Steel, mostly done in the style of Break the Cutie or Kick the Dog. However, at least one example was a perfect demonstration of the first scenario—the heroine was already grappling with her daughter's near-fatal car accident, her husband's infidelity, and her overbearing mother. So of course, it turns out that she was sexually abused by her father (which also overlaps with Rape Is the New Dead Parents).
  • Sidney Sheldon liked to throw this in too.
  • Many people think that A Song of Ice and Fire suffers from this. It's definitely part of what makes Westeros such a Crapsack World.
  • The Last-Herald Mage trilogy has a lengthy sequence near the finale where the hero is captured and gang-raped by some mooks. It affects the plot not at all.
  • Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series contains colossal amounts of rape and Attempted Rape, very little of it necessary to the plot. At one point, one of the female characters is even thrown to a pit full of rapists, where the expected happens.

Live Action TV

  • Game of Thrones has a scene where Khal Drogo rapes Danaerys on their wedding night, in a completely different turn from what happened in the book.
  • David Morse's saintly doctor on St. Elsewhere was a victim of Gratuitous Gay Rape.
  • The Titanic miniseries includes a scene where a third-class girl is raped in the shower by an evil steward.
  • Within one calendar year (2005), so many characters on the soap opera Passions were raped that it was known as "The Year of the Rapes". Adding insult to injury, only one of these stories was handled even remotely seriously or realistically (the victim dressed shabbily and could not bear to be touched). All other victims went on with their lives as though nothing had happened.
  • Rome has a few. Marc Antony memorably pauses his army's march back to Rome so he could stop and rape a shepherd girl by the side of the road.

Tabletop Games

  • FATAL gives players plenty of opportunities to engage in this, since rape is usually not even considered a felony in this universe.
  • A common criticism of Cthulhu Tech is that there's just a teeeeensy bit too much rape in the fluff. At least one of the writers appeared on rpg.net and spent quite some time explaining that there really wasn't that much rape in it given its reputation, but fans will be fans.
    • The writers' definition of 'not that much' is rather... subjective. Objectively speaking, at least two of the major Mythos cults feature rape as a routine part of their rituals, and one deity pretty much exists only as a giant walking date rape generator, and they appear in at least three supplements.

Web Comics

  • Discussed in Something*Positive. Davan sends a rejection letter to the writer of a bad play which reads "A better title for your play would be Rape-Rape: A Tale of Rapening. Also, your next play should have a little less rape in it."


Video Games

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