Basic Trope: Rape is considered the worst crime one can do.
- Straight:
- Emperor Evulz has killed many innocent civilians, but that one time he raped a woman is his Moral Event Horizon.
- Evulz executes any of his henchmen that commit rape, but every other law is fair game.
- Exaggerated:
- Emperor Evulz has blown up several galaxies and inflicted And I Must Scream on an entire planet's population, but the time he raped a woman while under the influence of alcohol is considered the worst crime he has ever done.
- Emperor Evulz is a genocidal maniac who has ordered the murder of trillions ... but he finds rape utterly disgusting and has rapists in his kingdom punished with death with the most gruesome and excruciating torture imaginable.
- Downplayed:
- The fact that Bob and his drug crew are willing to sell date rape drugs, is what makes them worse than most drug gangs.
- In the setting, rapists are considered equally as evil as terrorists, tyrants, torturers, spree killers, serial killers, and first degree murderers.
- Justified:
- The specific acts of sexual violence depicted which are treated with this judgment are shown or otherwise explicitly indicated to be particularly brutal and senselessly cruel in nature and execution to degrees exceeding what categorically defines the crime of rape, patently earning a special level of condemnation beyond how other, lesser sexual assault is judged.
- Evulz himself was raped as a child. So as much as a bastard he is, he won't subject his victims to the same fate as him for personal reasons.
- Inverted:
- Bob saves Alice from getting raped, and is considered more of a hero than Charlie who saved someone from getting killed by a murderer.
- Bob rapes Alice in a less overtly violent way. Afterward, someone compares this to murder, and Bob angrily responds that while he may have been willing to take such advantage of a woman, he would never murder someone which is far worse.
- Even though Charles is a rapist, he thinks every other crime vile, disgusting and wrong. Like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking for example.
- Subverted:
- Rape is so common, it's not really considered "special".
- Bob raped someone in his backstory, but he feels deeply remorseful over it. He turns himself in, and when he gets out he speeds the rest of his life repenting. In other words, despite being a rapist, Bob didn't cross the Moral Event Horizon.
- Emperor Evulz mocks the idea rape is super-evil, instead considering it a tool lesser evil minds resort to.
- Bob attempts to call out Emperor Evulz for raping Alice, but Emperor Evulz retaliates and calls out Bob for his Skewed Priorities, as he cares more about the rape of one woman than the many lives Evulz is responsible for killing. He manages to warp Bob's argument against him and make Bob seem not like an All-Loving Hero, but as a selfish man who only cares when people close to him are the victim but otherwise could care less about anything else that happens. This causes Bob to go into a Heroic BSoD that focuses on him questioning his own sense of morality.
- Double Subverted:
- Just because it happens often, doesn't make it any less evil.
- Bob is only good because he repented. Other rapists who never felt any guilt are viewed as scum of the earth. In fact, part of Bob's repentance is helping his victim Alice hunt down and kill her other rapists.
- Bob may have redeemed himself, but it takes an entire lifetime of penitence and good deeds, and he's still looked on with suspicion. Characters who have committed murder, theft, treason, arson, genocide, and other crimes are forgiven after a simple apology and promise to never repeat their actions.
- Yet, knowing how it offends Alice, Evulz incorporates rape in his plan to torture her.
- Bob snaps out of it and ignores everything Evulz says while apprehending him.
- Parodied:
- The Super Hero team is trying to stop Doctor Destructo's Planet Exploder Ray, but stop in order to arrest a rapist instead.
- Emperor Evulz does some terrible things on a daily basis, but the moment he sees a mook looking at a woman longingly, he reacts with horror because he thinks his mook will rape her.
- The mere inclusion of the word causes moral outrage, which causes everyone to use the word to receive blind support for whatever they're trying to achieve—which eventually results in historians and linguists being confused as to the exact origin of the word.
- Zig Zagged: Emperor Evulz rapes a captive woman and that event is what cements his reputation as a monster, but due to Blue-and-Orange Morality, Emperor Evulz and his Empire genuinely think it's a heroic act and celebrate the rape. But the victim doesn't feel that way and tells Emperor Evulz so, at which point Emperor Evulz wonders if it is evil, but then shrugs and continues to rape her because Evil Feels Good until she starts to accept it as normal and not "special" at all…
- Averted:
- The villain committing an act of rape is treated as evil and morally reprehensible, but no more or less so than the numerous acts of murder and torture they had previously engaged in.
- Rape is considered to be morally reprehensible, but less so than murder; perhaps a reasonable position given that some rape victims are eventually able to recover and return to normal lives, but a murder victim will never recover from being dead.
- Enforced:
- The writer feels that this trope is a bit overdone, and seeks to subvert it by having a character commit a rape and then be portrayed as sympathetic later. However, his editor believes that this will cause a backlash from readers and Moral Guardians everywhere, and thus "strongly encourages" the writer to change the story so that the rapist dies a painful Karmic Death.
- The author or a friend/family member of theirs is a rape victim.
- Lampshaded:
- Two random mooks are preparing to violently rape a woman in an alley. One looks at the other and says, "Isn't it weird how, even though the psychopath we're working for is going to blow up the earth, we're still seen as more monstrous because of stuff like this?" His friend agrees, just in time for the hero to swoop in and violently execute them.
- Emperor Evulz is an All-Loving Hero, who has cured cancer and established world peace. The second people learn he raped someone in the past, he is considered a monster by the world.
- Invoked:
- A clever villain looking to make a hero with a Thou Shalt Not Kill rule defy his principles, and knowing that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, specifically sets out to kidnap and rape the hero's Love Interest (or, even worse, his child) in the hopes that this will drive the hero into a murderous rage.
- A character argues to Emperor Evulz that he shouldn't rape them because that would cross the Moral Event Horizon, even though he's blown up three planets so far. He agrees.
- Exploited:
- A villain looking to make the hero with a Thou Shalt Not Kill rule defy his principles and knowing that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, allows his mooks or his Psycho for Hire to rape his Love Interest or child in the hopes that this will drive the hero into a murderous rage.
- Even though Emperor Evulz is a Complete Monster, he makes a big show of never committing rape and of killing rapists on the spot- not because he has an actual moral objection to it, but because his society's hatred of rape is so powerful that these actions are enough to make him a Villain with Good Publicity.
- Defied: The hero, despite being devastated and hating the villain with every fiber of his being, realizes what the villain was attempting and maintains his Thou Shalt Not Kill rule by restraining himself and carting the flabbergasted villain off to jail. The villain is still given the death penalty, but this way the hero can see the villain dead without dirtying his hands. He then thanks The Powers That Be that, even though the event was traumatic and will take a long time to help them through it, his Love Interest and/or child are still alive.
- Discussed: "Hmmm… I'm bored with kicking puppies. How about we go the next level and rape?"
- Conversed: "Wow… That kind of evil is above and beyond!"
- Implied:
- Though Emperor Evulz has committed numerous depraved and violent crimes, Alice reacts the most noticeably when it’s mentioned he has raped.
- Bob is unperturbed by seeing Alice's dead body until he notices her state of undress.
- Deconstructed:
- Because rape is considered worse than anything else, only rape is eventually considered a crime in the setting. Which means that killing people, Cold-Blooded Torture, genocide, killing children, starving people to death etc. is considered perfectly acceptable as long as there's no rape involved.
- To avoid a rape charge, the rapist murders the victim and mutilate the body beyond recognition so no one can prove the victim was raped. Going as far as burning the crime scene and killing people who might have heard the victim's scream. The rapist is already irredeemably evil by this trope so why hold back?
- Because rape is considered so much worse than everything else, anyone in the setting who is merely accused of rape is immediately jailed without trial (or at least any man, if double standards apply in this setting), the justification being that it doesn't matter how many innocents are locked up along the way as long as the rapists eventually get locked up too. Anyone who thinks that rape cases should be investigated like any other crime, and that the accused should be considered innocent until proven guilty, is viewed as being just as morally abhorrent as a rapist and jailed right along with them. Hopefully they are lucky enough to get the innocent people as cellmates. Bonus Irony if the wardens observe Prison Rape happening all the time with the captives, but do nothing about it and show no empathy whatsoever, deeming that all inmates are scumbags who deserve it.
- Bob believes only a Complete Monster would be capable of something as heinous as rape, and since he isn't one, there's no way he'd ever be in danger of overstepping someone's sexual boundaries. Then one night he gets drunk and convinces himself Alice really wants sex with him...
- Reconstructed: People become more reasonable and, even though rape is still a revolting crime, it's not placed higher on the evilness scale than crimes that are just as bad or worse. And just with any other crime, they investigate to make sure it really happened before casting any judgement whatsoever.
- Played For Laughs: Rape is certainly considered a 'special' kind of evil- as in, that rapists are a bunch of idiots that clearly have no better idea when it comes to torture. Thus everyone is morally offended because they're a gigantic insult to Evil, causing criminals of all types to be offended whenever someone tries calling them one- since they are intelligent professionals, thank you very much.
- Played For Drama: Since rape is considered an ultimate kind of evil, children conceived by it are treated like monsters, whereas anyone who didn't mean to or are trying to redeem themselves aren't given the chance. Even the victims themselves don't get off, being considered Defiled Forever and thus nobody thinks they can be genuinely happy again or move on from what happened.
Back to Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil
