What makes something a Gratuitous Rape?

I apologize for making a new thread so soon after my last one, but I stumbled upon Gratuitous Rape today and I have some concerns. This is supposed to be an objective trope, but it seems to be complaining about rape being used for shock value and some examples cite fan/critical reactions. My question is, can you define a rape as being gratuitous by some objective metric? To me, that seems like something that's subjective. Someone could always argue that the inclusion of a rape had some artistic merits.

Sure — if a story gains nothing from the rape at all. My personal go-to example would be the comic Identity Crisis (2004), primarily a murder mystery that infamously has a retcon where one of the supervillains raped the wife of a longtime superhero. None of those involved — the villain, the wife, or the hero — have any effect on the murder mystery, and the entire thing is a Red Herring to mislead from the actual plot. Especially gratuitous about it was that it was confirmed to be the result of Executive Meddling — editor Valerie D'Orazio stated that the sole reason the rape was added to the story was because the higher-ups said "They needed a rape."

There's a bunch of other reasons why that comic series mishandled rape (it does nothing to explore how it affected the victim because it's not even her story), but by that metric alone, one can definitely use it gratuitously. It's not an adult theme added for artistic merit, it was just a shock moment to appear "mature" and "edgy."

Right. If a rape is gratuitous, that means you could remove it from the story and not alter the story.

But is that something you can objectively say? My problem is that saying "this could be cut out and nothing would change" seems subjective, even though this trope isn't YMMV.

I mean, not really.

Take the example mentioned above. Cutting out the rape stuff doesn't affect the story at all, because that plotline was ultimately irrelevant. Think of it this way: If the rape doesn't impact the characters, doesn't push the plot forward, doesn't tell us anything about the world, etc... If you could skip it on a watch/read/playthrough/etc and not miss any relevant information... If you could replace it with any other gruesome and shocking act (murder, cannibalism, suicide, etc)... then it's gratuitous.

Sure, there's a degree of analysis involved, but just because someone could argue that the rape in "Identity Crisis" was plot-relevant, that doesn't mean it holds up to scrutiny.

I'd say it's objective if an element is sufficiently divorced from the plot it's ostensibly a part of. While it shouldn't be an exclusive way to look at works, there is a certain calculus to how stories are constructed using the component tropes within them, and the presence of certain elements may or may not factor into others — this trope lists when rape ( often a very dramatic act treated with a lot of gravity), functionally contributes nothing. That is a metric that can be treated as a matter of fact.

I personally don't see objectivity/subjectivity of tropes as really a black/white dichotomy; it's more of a gradient, but even in that case where you can define this trope as a judgement call, I'd still lean far more towards it being objective as it's highlighting the construction of the story and how the addition of a rape feels perfunctory and is functionally more or less identical to if it was absent.

Edited by number9robotic on Dec 18th 2023 at 5:33:29 AM

I think an issue might be the word "gratuitous", which implies a value judgment. It's possible for something to be inessential to a story (as in, you could remove it and nothing else would have to change) but still be a positive (or at least neutral) addition, while gratuitous suggests that its inclusion was a mistake.

Like, in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, having an animated opening credits sequence showing Santa getting into lots of slapstick antics is inessential - it has nothing to do with anything else in the movie. But I'd never use the word "gratuitous" to describe it.

I mean, I can't think of any scenario in which a pointless rape scene is a positive addition.

I mean by that metric I can't think of any times where a rape scene *period* is a positive addition, but that might be personal hang-ups

But isn't it an expected part of detective mysteries that there will be misleading hints sprinkled about? The two criticisms I see of the rape in Identity Crisis is that firstly, it sprang from something bad + female victim = rape and never explores the consequences upon the victim (it only motivates the others) and as such was a lazy plot point, and secondly, it tried to make Dr Light more menacing, but only changed him from a harmless one-note villain into a dark one-note villain.

So the rape wasn't gratuitous in the sense that you could take it out and not affect the plot. It was gratuitous in that it could have been replaced by some other villainous action. (And the whole sub-plot with Dr Light ended up being irrelevant to the real culprit, but that's a different problem).

Because of this, I would be on the side of make this into an audience reaction.

Well, that's another thing with the description. It mentions that one of the qualifiers is that the rape could be replaced with another crime and it wouldn't change a thing. That does strike me as something (whether the rape could be replaced with another crime) that's open to interpretation.

I mean, the fact that the Doctor Light subplot went nowhere is the problem. They set up a Serial Rapist storyline solely for a red herring, when he could have done anything else to become the suspect. The fact that the woman was specifically raped was not plot-relevant; the only relevant aspects of that subplot were the characters involved. That's one scenario where you could change it to just about anything and the story would still make sense.

For contrast, I can think of a rape plot-line that would fundamentally change the story if it was removed. In Veronica Mars, Veronica got raped at a party following the Lily Kane investigation because she and her father had become pariahs. This wasn't just for the sake of showing how much everyone hated her, though; it permeated much of her character development, offered a clue as to who Season 2's killer was, and gave her a personal stake in the Serial Rapist mystery of Season 3. In that case, making her be a victim of anything else would have drastically altered the course of the plot, so you can't say that the rape was there simply to be shocking and dramatic. That's what I've been mentally comparing the Identity Crisis stuff against.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 19th 2023 at 12:03:47 PM

I can see where the trope is coming from— rape which has no plot relevance and mostly just exists to make the story more dramatic or serious. The examples aren't very good, tho, tbh. Only about half explain why the rape was unneeded for the plot, the other half just say that a rape occurs somewhere in the story.

Should this be listed on Garnishing the Story, by the way? The other Gratuitous trope are all there. (I mean, I wouldn't agree that adding rape is an improvement, but clearly the idea here is that the creator thinks, for whatever reason, that the story would be better with some random rape sprinkled in.)