Karen's Anime Blog

I realize this is not a pleasant topic, but since it keeps coming up, there’s a few things about it I want to get off my chest. I already started talking about it in my post about Dan Da Dan, explaining why I was still willing to watch it even with the repeated SA of Momo, but then two different episodes of other anime came out that dealt with gang rape as a subject.

The first one was episode two of Welcome To The Outcast’s Restaurant! which I gave a kind of meh review of the first episode. In the second episode, we are introduced to Henrietta, a female knight in full plate armor who is looking for a new adventuring party. Our hero Dennis finds an all-male party for her to join, only to learn after he sets her up with them that there’s a party of men going around and gang raping female adventurers in dungeons. Putting two and two together, Dennis gets there just in the nick of time and overpowers the rapists, seeing to it that they get brought to justice.

First, I question why they thought it was a good idea to include gang rape in what is ostensibly a cooking show. Anime that heavily feature cooking are usually meant to be soothing, “chill” sorts of shows, which this clearly is not. Of course, there’s no law that you can’t have graphic content on a restaurant-related show, but it does feel a bit like Outcast is trying to have its cake and eat it too. While there was dark content in episode one– with the implied mistreatment of Atelier in slavery and the fate that would have befallen her if an evil man had bought her– episode two took things to a much more visceral level. I don’t think the audience was prepared for this.

Second, the attempted rape was dragged out for mysterious reasons that feel suspicious. We find out that the group of rapists is around, Dennis becomes aware of it, and then we spend a long time in the dungeon with Henrietta and the scumbags before he comes to rescue her. Long enough that she’s screaming, is pushed down on the floor, has her armor ripped off of her, and is rendered immobile by a status spell, just to put the icing on the cake. When we see her lacy pink underwear, it’s framed erotically, like this is supposed to be sexy. This is the wrong way to frame sexual assault in a piece of fiction; what is happening is a violent physical attack, not an act of intimacy.

Sure, let’s just make the audience complicit in the gang rape of Henrietta, that sounds like I what I like in my cooking anime.

So in short, this episode of the anime used sexual assault in an exploitative way, and I’d like to see less of that in my anime. And everything else, come to think of it.

The other show that had a gang rape was Clevatess, but the story is very different. Clevatess is a dark show dealing with very dark themes, so people weren’t blindsided by the second episode dealing with rape. The show introduces Nell, a slave who serves a group of vicious bandits. Nell reveals that she has been beaten and raped by the bandits for years, and lives a truly wretched life. Nell isn’t attractive, because that’s not the point; she’s a woman born into an unfortunate circumstance and that’s why these things happen to her.

Don’t worry Nell, Clen has got your back. He’s probably about to slaughter 40 people now, but he’s got your back. Notice her lack of teeth, because they’ve been knocked out.

At one point two bandits take Nell outside and it’s strongly implied that they rape her, but they don’t show it. They do show the bandits beating Nell’s butt before letting her go, and even that I think was a mistake, but it looks grotesque rather than erotic, which was the point. The effect of Nell’s whole story is to make the viewer hungry for Clen to dispense his particular brand of justice on the bandits, which will be gruesome.

In this case, the rape isn’t portrayed as an erotic thing: it’s a disgusting thing. Nell’s story informs our view of what a harsh world Clevatess takes place in, and does it without eroticizing physical violence. I don’t want to say that there’s only one correct way to portray sexual assault, because art is more complicated than that, but if your rape scene is titillating the audience, you’re probably doing it wrong.

For the record, I’m not talking about hentai and things that are actually meant to be erotic– I don’t watch that stuff, but it advertises itself well enough that I never watch it by accident. I’m fine with it existing, in its own lane. Non-consensual encounters in porn is a slightly different topic, and one I frankly don’t know enough about porn to pontificate about. What I’m concerned about is SA in non-hentai anime– particularly fantasy anime– and how it’s often used poorly.

The thing is, it’s effective as a storytelling device, up to a point– I was certainly rooting for Dennis to get in there and bust some heads when the rapists were just about to rape Henrietta. But there are so many other ways to get that reaction from the audience without making the audience feel complicit in the rape by the nature of the way it’s framed.

You could boil my point down to “less rape in anime plz,” but honestly, that’s not even it. Rape and SA in general is a huge problem, and pretending it doesn’t exist by banning it from fiction isn’t going to help. But if anime is going to continue use SA as a plot device, I wish it would be done in a manner that is more respectful to the characters and to the audience.