sometimes fanficrants really frustrates me.

"In fanfiction, there are a lot of characters who can be turned into rapists. It takes more effort to portray some of them as rapists convincingly than others, but I'm sure it can be done. However, you may want to think twice if you want to write a story where a usually nice person becomes one."

A) Hello black and white character sketches, my old friend.

B) Define nice!  

C) Define rape!

Then again, sometimes I think all my main characters can be defined as rapists, so, yeah, apparently I'm taking the George R. R. Martin / Marion Zimmer Bradley approach.  Sometimes I also think my actual goal is to make people hate all my characters.  I clearly have issues with certain characters.  And rape.  I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with me. 

But see, this is the kind of statement that I agree with:

"I have to admit I am puzzled by your feelings about rape used as a plot device. You seem to be sick of it’s existance, sick of it used to drive a story forward. I guess I understand that…sort of.

I guess I think that if it keeps coming up, then this is playing in peoples subconscious, they are trying to make sense of it. Some of them are doing a good job of portraying the “absolute horror of rape” and some are doing a terrible job of portraying that, or anything, in a way that resembles real life.

I put the “absolute horror” of rape in quotes, because sometimes rape is an absolute horror, sometimes it is merely a frightening, life altering experience, sometimes it leaves people maimed and deformed, and sometimes it leaves people confused and seeking.

I think it’s a waste of time to talk about censoring storytelling, however. Instead, we should work towards making our society less violent as a whole. We have violent rapes in this country because we live in a society the glorifies violence and does not glorify the elimination of poverty or injustice."

And I really don't understand statements like this:

"Then, all of a sudden, they started losing the magic a bit (it’s still better than most things on air right now, IMO) and into that there was suddenly a massive fallback on the same old rape threat. The three of four main female characters who were threatened with rape were all subjected to this within the space of one season. It was just vile. The fact is that BSG is a dark show so the rapes themselves don’t fairly represent the show’s general attitude towards women. 

Anyway, I thought I’d weigh in here as BSG is in my top couple of favourite shows and I love feminist analysis of the show. It’s really goddamn low what the writers/creators did to the great female characters last season."

I just.  What?  I don't understand.  I honestly feel reading this whole discussion that they really don't want rape depicted in any way.  Ever.  (For that matter, I sometimes wonder if women are better off just never being mentioned, that way they can never be represented incorrectly)  So much hysteria. 

Then again I've never understood the idea of a "plot device".  I mean, anything can be defined as a "plot device", right?  Murder is a plot device, is that okay?  Everything that's in the plot, everything that advances the plot, is part of the plot.  You can argue about whether the author depicted it correctly, but the accusation of "plot device!!"... like, yeah, characters are plot vehicles, I mean, what do you want?  It's fiction.