Plenty of YA and kid fiction which manages to include some adult level grit without resorting to threats of rape. Excluding this from the narrative toolbox would lose nothing. Although from the description of the backup strip, this isn't aimed at the YA audience anyway.
Someone points out there was a rape attempt in the original series as well. In the comments, Dan Mishkin almost apologizes and says he went over the line. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1zwg391&s=6
Yeah, I wouldn't mind so much if writers used rape because they actually wanted to say something intelligent about rape. But 99.9% of the time it's a means to an end: we need to motivate somebody to be angry, or establish somebody as a bad guy, or what-have-you, and once that end is achieved the writer isn't interested any more.
While both of them are bad cliches, I think they're actually different bad cliches. The old one is the basic adventure-movie "fate worse than death" threat; it's upping the ante at the climax of some dangerous fantasy situation. The new one, with rapists in the mundane world who get their clocks cleaned by the heroine, is more like a stab at "realism": see how edgy and mature we are!
Mr. Mishkin indicated his intent in the first series was kind of as you describe, but admitted the dialogue and art ended up crossing the line. Which I think was kind of big of him to acknowledge, especially doing so in blog comments.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2012-09-21 04:34 pm
no subject
Someone points out there was a rape attempt in the original series as well. In the comments, Dan Mishkin almost apologizes and says he went over the line.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1zwg391&s=6
no subject
no subject
no subject