This post contains descriptions of real war and violence that readers may find disturbing.
This was originally going to be a reply to a conversation between @. keysmashslushy and @. dickgraysonsptsd. (Breaking the @'s because I don't think this is a fun read to get notified for). As I was writing, it ballooned in scope, and I decided to make it a standalone post.
When I talk about sexual assault, I like to hide behind statistics. That's more difficult for me to do here, so I have to get more personal to make my point. Forgive me.
A constant refrain I hear from people who oppose descriptions of sexual violence in fiction is that "sexual violence is just so much more real than killing." More real to whom? I have a family member who was murdered. Two different people have tried to kill me three times. People are sometimes surprised to hear that, but I don't think that makes me extraordinary. Growing up, I swear everyone I knew had at least one story of how someone they knew got killed. I only had the one, but some of my classmates had two or three.
I said before that I had trouble with statistics for this post. That's because most of the statistics I did find had one of three problems:
- They included vehicular homicides by drunk drivers, which I'm less interested in as a manifestation of a culture of violence
- They measured only gun violence to the exclusion of other means and weapons, and/or included suicides with homicides
- They cited no sources, or cited only studies conducted by partisan think-tanks.
I wanted to find an answer to "how many people know someone who has been murdered by another person," and I don't think I'm equipped to find that number. Regardless, the statistics I did find paint a far grimmer picture than what these fandomites must imagine. 17% of Americans have seen someone get shot. 20% know someone who was shot. For Black Americans, those numbers rise to 34% and 31%, respectively. Murder is the #4 leading cause of death for Native American men and #5 for Native American women. It is the leading cause of death for Black Americans ages 10-24, and the #2 cause of death for those between 25 and 34. Now, the United States has a high murder rate, but it has a lower murder rate than 60 other countries. And American civilians are not among the two billion people, fully one quarter of the world's population, who are currently in or fleeing active war zones.
If murder, legal or illegal, isn't real to you, you're privileged. There's really nothing more for me to say about that.
Pivoting to fandom. I am not going to argue that murder in fiction is realistic or representative. Fictional killing's unreality actually has some overlap with fictional rape's unreality. Fictional murder victims, like fictional rape victims, are mostly nameless and faceless. The violence exists to show the reader the power of the perpetrator. Focusing on the dead, the survivors, and the grieving friends and families is useless to that end.
But there is another unreality that isn't shared between the two. A large portion of fictional murder is presented as justified. Fictional violence is often part of a power fantasy. Audiences want to see hypercompetence. We want choreographed fight scenes where one man gets jumped by ten men and leaves all ten on the floor. We want to see people narrowly dodge bullets. For cape fans, we want this power fantasy to be even more fantastical, to see people fly through the air and punch each other through walls.
Most people with these fantasies also want to be good people. Thus, the physical hypercompetence must be complimented by moral hypercompetence. Fictional vigilantes have perfect discernment. They always know who's guilty, always know how to find them, and always give them what they deserve. In the same way nobody wants to see John Wick throw out his back, nobody wants to watch a movie about a WhatsApp vigilante stoking himself into a fervor and then killing an innocent person. It would be too real. When leftist cape fans see the Punisher skull on a cop car, usually the only critique they can muster is that Frank Castle would kill the cops, too. It's a bridge too far to wonder if they themselves have the discernment of their favorite heroes; to wonder if cops and WhatsApp vigilantes love these stories for the same reasons they do; or to wonder if their favorite stories still carry some of the themes of their progenitor.
Not everyone cares so much about being good. Given the theme of this blog, I can't resist shining a light on Deathstroke and his fans. During my career as a Tara Markov backstory canonicity defender, many times I've pointed out the bizarre double-standard Slade fans have, being okay with him killing kids but not okay with him touching them. Slade fans have some canned responses to this. Some of my favorites are "that was an OOC hitjob by some writers who didn't know what they were doing" ("some writers" there means Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two people who created Deathstroke, in one of his earliest stories and the story that established his supporting cast, motives, and other lasting elements of his characterization); "Tara was actually manipulating him" (Tara being a fifteen-year old who related to Deathstroke as her lover, her employer, her guardian, a man who monitored her constantly with contact lens cameras, and the only person she could trust with any true details about her life); and "Deathstroke is Literally Me, and I wouldn't do that, so he shouldn't either" (I think this one speaks for itself). I've seen all these dealt with multiple times on better blogs than mine, but I do want to get into one more argument they give me time and time again: "Deathstroke killing people is fun, but him being a rapist is too real."
What about Deathstroke isn't real? Mainly, his hypercompetence. As a comic book antihero, Slade has been blessed by the narrative with supersoldier serum, precognition, accelerated healing, superhuman strength, and the rule of cool plot armor worn by all action genre protagonists. He's also a genius tactician and gets away with schemes that have way too many moving parts to work in a more grounded setting.
Deathstroke is also a mercenary. He is revered by his fans as a killer with a code of honor, even though he's employed in the most dishonorable business in the world that's still legal. This, to me, is not at all unreal.
To start, mercenarism is in vogue. We in the 21st century are living through the "second golden age of mercenaries." For-profit companies are the industrial half of the military industrial complex. During the GWOT, the ratio of private contractors to regular soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by the US peaked at 3:1. In 2023, Wagner nearly captured Moscow with little resistance. PMCs operate in just about every conflict zone in the world. Wagner and its post-integration successor Redut torture and kill civilians in Ukraine, Syria, and Central Africa. Western PMCs conduct "anti-terrorism" operations the world over, and occupy mines for blood minerals in the DRC. Abu Dhabi based PMC Global Security Services Group is currently are helping Sudan's RSF conduct its genocide in Darfur. And all of this for good money.
Some real mercenaries are also cultivating followings similar to their fictional counterparts. After he was assassinated, shrines cropped up across Russia in honor of "Father Prigozhin." Today, bronze statues of his likeness stand in St Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, and the Central African Republic. If you're American, you might remember not too long ago being browbeaten to support or vote for Graham Platner, two-time US Armed Forces veteran and one-time Constellis contractor who, in his own words, joined the force because he "wanted to have an adventure and kill some people." Platner's campaign only died because a survivor came out and said he raped her; for the left-wing imperialist, neo-nazism, killing for fun and money, and campaigning on revitalizing the US military are all well and good, but rape is too real.
I have had the misfortune of interacting with ex-PMCs, both Russian and American. Given the state of the world, they're not difficult to find if you live in either country. In my experience, they are universally small men with fragile egos. They were all motivated to join because they had bad prospects elsewhere, and they wanted to do something that made them feel important, powerful, and masculine. Despite that, they'd all defend their choice as just another job, and they all believed that they had some personal code of honor that made them noble men despite their ignoble work. And all of them were totally callous to the people they killed. "If they didn't want to be beaten to death with hammers, they shouldn't have deserted. Really, they were in the wrong. Was he afraid to die? Should've been a man." "The guys behind the Nisour Square massacre deserved Trump's pardon. Any one of those people could have been terrorists." Likewise, those who glorify men like this do so because they're macho men, honest and rough around the edges. And their fans also never think about the people they've killed.
To wrap up, I'll deliver the original idea I wanted to write, before I wrote fourteen paragraphs to justify it. It is damn near impossible to write a character for whom being a serial killer is in character, but being a rapist is out of character. The overlap in motives is too big. We're talking about characters who are always convinced that their violent outbursts are justified, and who feel a need to stave off insecurity by asserting their power and dominance. That is why people rape. And that's why, in real life, so many serial killers are also serial rapists, and rape is handwaved away as a "tragic but inevitable" part of war. It's not about sexual gratification.
It's not out of character. It just forces you to actually think about the character and what he's doing. That's why murder is okay and rape isn't. Dead men tell no tales. We can write them off as criminals, as terrorists, as "the enemy," say they deserved it, ignore them completely - they won't complain. It's too hard to do that with rape. When the story has a survivor who gets to have a name and a face, the audience can't ignore it. When fans make excuses for why sexual violence is deserved or "doesn't count", when we choose to ignore or demand retcons of canon sexual violence by our favorite honorable serial killer, we participate in a culture that glorifies and seeks to empower real rapists and serial killers, real vigilantes and real mercenaries. Our culture is already up to its neck in power fantasy. It's not worth it to erase representation of victims and survivors, so you can have just one more.
