Rape exists in real life. Rape exists in literature. Do you enjoy listening to news or reading them in everyday life? Do you enjoy reading them? In Italy lately we are having a serious issue about it, and everytime I hear about some news about it I feel sick at heart, I feel sick to be a man. We can't compare our taste to that of Shakespearean time nor of Wilde's audience (and Wilde's goal was mainly that to shock, keeping on the tradition of "romance vs novel" of the Victorian Age, a society who "needed" to be shocked because by now living in the falsehood of a surface moralism). We can discuss about both these threads separately but what I wonder is, if this is a game in which people should have fun even in a horror setting, if this is a game with a serious check about some things which can or can't be done due to age of the players, why we should be so willing to accept this kind of rp?
During my gaming here I've heard stories/tales of rapes very often, too often, maybe once a week, involving several different characters and players. I've been protagonist only on one of these episodes as a "rapist" and it was all according to rules and stuff, and I even did that to a char who had already suffered from the same thing. I didn't have any fun at rping that, I won't do that again nevertheless. But I've risked to be raped more than once. I've cut heads of rapists. I play female chars and I'm a straight male, but this doesn't mean I'm insensitive on the topic. The main problem is, rape sometimes seem to be a "fil rouge" of the server because it happens that very often and links itself to many plots and subplots (vengeance, slavery, stuff like this) that even if you don't like it as a fact in real life or something in the game, you always end being involved at least as one who knows it has happened.
This is not a social server. There can be romance, there can be sex, there can be rape, all following the fade to black rule. But nevertheless there are themes which can annoy people even if "talked about" and not only when emoted and "played". And if one feels sick at listening about rapes, which happen not to him/her, and it happens every now and then (rather often, I repeat), what kind of respect there can be for those players anyway?
I simply think that rape is nothing added to horror but rather to a sense of morbid. And even if you follow the "fade to black" rule it's always there as a constant in this server. It's not a blame, but a statement. It's not just by players but also by DMs, and this in my opinion can even be worse since it seems a sort of "legalization" of a status quo.
EDIT: Plus the fact it happens so often makes it even less "scary" and more morbid, seeming almost as if every villain's goal is to rape people.
F.
