Rapetastic
Yeah, I felt compelled to write a follow-up to this article, in the perspective of my fandom for Dominic Deegan. Lesnick’s right about the convention of Rape as a tool for writing, and how it’s an “instant depth” type thing. I don’t think that’s what Mookie’s doing, necessarily. I think he’s more using his comic as an outlet to discuss an issue he wants to discuss. But I could’ve gone without it.
I’m a pretty big fan of Dominic Deegan. I’ve written about it before. Quite favorably I’d add. I’m a fan. That’s clear.
This whole story arch has been quite uncomfortable, and not for the reasons of its topic. Its execution and its overall tone have been pretty unnerving. I mean, I know Mookie’s not trying to do it, but it feels like the story is trying to justify rape somehow. Presenting us this imaginary setting and situation where hypothetically, rape is ok. Like, as long as it’s saving someone’s life. Yeah.
It’s been interesting on one level, because it’s about the orcish society in the Deeganverse, and they do things differently. Different social laws. Hell, a different species. Their concept of what’s right and wrong is completely different than ours. It’s a different world, different lifestyle, different standards, etc. They’re orcs.
But yeesh. This arch has been pretty melodramatic, even for Dominic Deegan. Personally, I’m waiting for it to be over. Because as far as the story’s grand scheme goes, there’s more important shit to talk about. Like what’s with the orcish infernomancer, and why is Stonewater enjoying his company. The rape? Could’ve been better served in subtext, or otherwise skipped. I’m not digging the in-depth back story of rape with the extended cast. But it’ll finish soon, and the comic will get back to its normal thing, and I’ll be enjoying it again. Mookie wants to do this, he’s going to do it, and when he’s done he’ll be done. I can’t exactly ask for more.
But still. Good article, Josh. And welcome to The Dialogue. Have a scone.
Also welcome to Chris Paluszeck, writer of Carzorblog. A good outlet of some harsher but still constructive criticism.
January 27th, 2006 at 2:57 am
It is strange, but I have a completely different point of view. From where I see it, it seems the author’s intent is yes, to torment a character, but not with suffering rape, but with having to *inflict* rape. The whole thing is the standard lose-lose situation in comics. Save the girl or a bus full of kids. Save the supervillian and let him continue his life of evil or let him die and fail to save a life. Etc etc etc. In these situation, a good guy is put in such a trap by life that he has to choose the lesser evil. The standard comic solution is to pull a deus-ex-machina where the hero just chooses not to do evil and instead does something super-heroic and manages to get out of the dilemma.
What Mookie is doing here is ballsy. He puts the guy in that situation, and then forces him to choose. No deus-ex-machina, the guy just had to do evil. In my eyes the rape is not being “defended” by the storyline, because the guy doesn’t feel proud of what he has to do to save the girls’ life. He done evil and has to live with it.
Rape has a very nasty taboo/touchy stigma attached, but the conflict is pretty simple here. The guy who goes to war and has to kill people in cold blood faces the same predicament, but killing in a war is socially OKAY. Might return with a bunch of medals and be proclaimed a hero, but killing in any context is still bad. So is rape. This is an evil world. For people wondering about orcs societies, hell, this happens TODAY in the world, in some places. 9 year-old girls are forced to marry with old guys and then forced sexually. We’re no better than orcs.
January 27th, 2006 at 9:21 am
I can definitely see that, Maritza. I felt that way too at first. Positively, I mean.
It’s clear to us that the moral issue is as you say, the lesser of two evils scenario. And we’re getting a glimpse in the mind of the man who has to inflict the rape which is pretty uncommon in narrative (well… non-pornographic narrative anyhow).
I’m kinda standing in the middleground level between your stance and Lesnick’s. But still leaning towards more the negative opinion of the story. And in that case, it could simple be a manner of my personal taste.
This rape business is a complex issue. And difficult to do well. I give Mookie props for trying it. But I’m just not particularly diggin’ on it.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:09 am
I would agree with you, Maritza, except that Mookie didn’t do this with a character that was already established, one that we recognized and already liked, he gave it as our only backstory for a character we don’t really know anything about. So basically, “Oh this guy? He raped this chick, but it’s OK, he HAD to.” It’s weak character development, and it’s cheap. It rings false because of the way that the characters interact with each other.
I’m also a little angry because I liked that Melna was a strong female character, arguably the only strong female character in the series, and then Mookie had her raped. It doesn’t present to me as something he had planned for her all along, but then it’s been a while since I read the archives. I guess it just disappointed me.
January 27th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I agree about how it’s inovling a fourth-tier character and lowers the impact of the story. But you can’t go and say that Momma Deegan isn’t a strong female character, can you?
January 27th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
I agree with Maritza, BUT I also agree with Abby. It’s a lose-lose situation, and we’re introduced to orc society just enough to see that there’s no appeal - that either he forces himself on her to demonstrate the orc male population’s dominance over the female, or if he refuses, they do it themselves by killing her. But there are open questions: what about Stonewater’s tribe? Why and how does he start caring about the plight of the female half of the population - is that an aspect of his tribe (one would imagine so, the way he feels like his people can “save” her) or is that just an aspect he’s taken on in seeing how his hero treated his family? There aren’t enough answers - it’s just presented as cut-and-dry.
I know how Mookie wants us to take it, and I think he sort of has a half-victory. By no means is he says rape is good - Stonewater’s guilt and the way Melna looks back on the incident, I think she almost wishes she’d had the freedom to CHOOSE death. Making her hysterical and unable to listen is too much a hamfisted trope - “well, she didn’t say no, and why would she want to die?” - but I don’t think Mookie is trying to get us to accept the situation in any way. It’s just a bad situation overall, and nobody was happy with any way that it came out. Melna’s happy to be alive now, and although technically she says she’s forgiven Stonewater, by what she says about what her father would have done to him, I would infer that she really hasn’t. She knows he regrets his actions, and she’s redirected her focus to the society at large, but it’s not something she’s forgiven.
Does Mookie succeed? No, not really - he doesn’t altogether fail (i.e. I don’t think you can argue that he’s trying to say that “oh, rape is ok in certain situations” - he sets up something where there IS no victory, just… not very well) - but I would attribute this to a larger problem of how he handles sex. I don’t think Mookie writes sex seriously - it’s either an altogether bad thing or used for comedic effect… even when Gregory finally “gets with” Pam, it’s set up as her ‘thanking’ him and the last thing we see - him throwing up the horns in a “woo-hoo!” gesture. It’s funny, and that’s what we focus on - a sort of teenager “alllll riiiiiight!” sex portrayal - similar to a flashback when Dominic’s amazon friend (forgive me, I forget her name!) initially started dating him, and essentially “jumped his bones” (if you’ll pardon the expression) without giving him much of a choice in the matter - we see a shot of him in his underwear, tied to the bed, screaming “HELLLP!” Comedic effect.
When sex is portrayed as BAD - well, there’s all of Amelia, Szark’s lust (not for Dominic, just in general, as he became sort of a living id), the whole TOWN of Erossus, Celesto Morgan, Helixa (who lusts after Rillian, which is her undoing, mostly), Brett Taggerty, and of course - Serk Brakis. It’s kind of unfortunate - for as multifaceted a character as Celesto was, Serk was MOVING in that direction with his “uh oh, I think I’m really beginning to fall for Luna” but reverted to mustache-twirling badness when he reacted so poorly to the “protection scroll” being used when he and Luna had sex. Sure, it gave Dominic something to extra-mad at, but wouldn’t have been a greater betrayal when - after seemingly good sex, and a warm relationship - Luna found Serk in bed with her sister, that it wasn’t something she could see coming? That maybe Serk has stuck to his original plan, and that bugged him… and that Luna found it harder to trust ANYONE because things had seemed so happy (and this could convince the skeptics that Luna has a more solid reason for not sleeping with Dominic yet - even though the other happy couple - Gregory and Pam - obviously have. But that’s just me tossing that out there). I think Mookie is a great writer, but he seems to rely on sex too much as an obvious trope for bad guys. Sure it’s a weighty thing, but use something too much and it loses that weight.
But - to quote Phil - I’m just saying is all.
January 27th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I must be reading a different comic, because DD has plenty of realistic female characters, with various degrees of strenght and different personalities.
Also… uh. Maybe this is gonna ruffle feathers, but… don’t strong women get raped too? If a woman gets raped, this automatically makes her a weak woman?
I say you have to be pretty strong to get over rape and not let it run your life.
January 27th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Echo Maritza (wanted to say so before but I wrote all that as I was getting ready for work, and yeah, I should not have done that because it made me late, shhhh) - there are many strong women in DD. I think Pam and Luna - while not seeming as strong, really are. Luna has grown to not rely on Dominic, but support him as well, and welcoming his support rather than needing to have it - he pulled her back from the brink of despair, but if he were gone I don’t think she’d collapse into useless grief - she’d DO something about it (and she was willing to sacrifice her life to give him a chance at success not just because she loves him, but because his cause was the WORLD’s cause). Melna is strong, but so is Miranda Deegan, so is Jayden, so was the dryad, so is Dominic’s amazon friend (whose name I still cant’ remember, arrgh).
And also, what Maritza said. About the being strong. I echo that wholeheartedly.
January 27th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
And then we found tiny footprints all over her brain…
January 27th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
One of the things that really threw me off was the way the topic of the rape came up. Stonewater and Melna were talking about the infernomancer, and she was specifically mentioning how she had forgiven him.
Grench joins in, defending the infernomancer pretty fervently. Melna decides to reveal his horrible crime in as terrible a light as possible - out of the blue, for no real reason, and seemingly having no connection to the discussion of the infernomancer himself.
Now this just leaves me all confused. Did Melna understand and accept Stonewater’s reasons, and forgive him because she understood it was a no-win situation that was painful to all involved? Did she forgive him for some other strange reasons? If she did forgive him, why bring the topic of rape up to his friends as she did, out of the blue?
Now, despite how uncomfortable the situation itself is - especially as it does seem to have a bit of ‘drama for its own sake’ - I have been drawn back into the story a lot more than I had in the past. I *remain* eager to find out more about the Infernomancer, and get a bit past this entire incident.
I don’t think the incident was, in and of itself, poorly a bad story idea - it obviously stirred up strong sentiment both for and against it, and that can be productive. I just found the *way* it was handled to be a bit of a letdown, in the end, and perhaps that is what is so disappointing about it.
January 27th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Mr. Myth, I think the reason for what Melna does is that she really *hasn’t* forgiven Stonewater. She obviously likes him now, (she rushed up to him and gave him a hug) and accepts his reasons. But there’s still the fact that she *was* raped, and she has all that pain still bottled up with no one to blame except orc society as a whole.
And I agree wholeheartedly with Maritza. I enjoyed the way this story was handled, all in all.
January 27th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Explanation is not justification. Trying to understand, culturally and situationally, why something like this happens does not disqualify one from also denouncing it morally.
And ditto Maritza.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
Wow. All the sudden you’re getting all these comments. Popular!!
January 29th, 2006 at 11:16 am
That does make sense - and thinking about it in that light actually does reassure my faith in Mookie’s writing. Especially when viewed with the Friday strip, we can see there is a lot of turmoil going on in Melna - in her head she understands and accepts things, and wants to forgive Stonewater, but her heart is still filled with the pain of what happened, and prone to lash out.
And we certainly have seen that Melna is one to generally run with her emotions pretty quickly.
So hey! I’ve answered my own question. I should do that more often.
Regardless of my previous feelings on this arc - which I am reevaluating as we speak - it has me more interested in the comic than I have been in quite a while, and that is certainly a good thing.