Only one time have I been actually mystified as to why a friend would ever recommend a book to me. This book was Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind. The friend was a girl I was working with at the time; we’d both discovered we had a mutual love for fantasy novels. I lent her George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and she said I had to read Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, which were her favorite books. So I grabbed it at a bookstore, hoping for a new set of bookstop fantasy tomes to gobble up.
I’m still mildly scarred from the experience of reading this book, so much that I couldn’t be induced to read it again to refresh my memory of it. So I apologize for any blurring of plot information. I think Goodkind’s writing is illustrative of why many people roll their eyes and steer clear of the fantasy genre. The characters are very stock, and the plot is a Star Wars rip-off.
But what really shocked me about this author (more so because a female friend recommended him to me) was his prevalent, even casual, use of rape. To be fair, we don’t actually see a lot of rape in the first book, the one I read, though from what I’ve heard, it gets worse. There is, however, a gratuitously lengthy and descriptive segment involving sadomasochistic sex and torture. It takes up about 80 pages of the book. I honestly couldn’t get past that, and ended up skimming the rest of the book.
It surprises me how many people, even women, don’t think critically about what makes a good female character. I’ve seen Kahlan, the main female character in the Sword of Truth series, described as a strong female character. I gather this is because she’s important and special and has strong magical powers that cause men to fear her. Kahlan is a Confessor, which basically boils down to her having a magical power that forces people to spill their souls to her and confess the truth. Confessors can’t cut their hair, because… well, this isn’t really made clear other than the vague explanation that their magic won’t let them, but of course, we all know it’s so they will all be hot. And Kahlan can’t have sex with Richard, the male lead, because when she has an orgasm she will lose control of her power and destroy his soul. Yes, this is her main personal conflict throughout the course of the book. She loves Richard but having sex with him will kill him. OH NO! Shock! What will possibly happen? Do you think they’ll ever find a way to get around that one?< /sarcasm> When not being able to have sex with the male main character is your major personal conflict, well, there are problems. It seems like fantasy authors sometimes think, “Well, I gave her really super special magic, so why are you saying she isn’t strong?”
As I’ve said, I stopped after the first book, but from what I’ve read in reviews, Kahlan experiences nine near-rapes in the series to date. And her sister is brutally gang-raped as a plot device. The bad guys engage in pedophilia. You get the idea. I do not have a problem with authors depicting sex, and even violent sexual situations, if these situations and their implications are treated thoughtfully. But this isn’t the case with Goodkind. As I said before, the word that describes it best is gratuitous. The “good” characters” are in love, and so their use of sex is “good.” The “bad” characters are evil, so they rape and sexually torture, or are raped and sexually tortured.
The world of Goodkind is a twisted place.
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I don’t see why you guy’s keep saying rape is “uncreative” and “overused”. I think rape is a great way to show someone is evil. It is almost as evil as you can get. Magic, swords, elves, gnomes, dwarves, and other magical things are used in many more stories then rape. Thats like saying “Oh, well, someone has mudered someone in another book, so i guess I have to think of another way to show my readers that this character is evil.”
I wouldn’t be interested in a book about a charcater who goes against the one guy who called me a bad name as much as a book about a hero deafeating a evil tyrant. It just makes you feel all the more warm and fuzzier inside when that evil… person gets what they deserved.
And I know, somehow or another, something I said was either really stupid or offensive to someone or another, so I cringe in fear and wait for your response.
Nick J.(Quote) (Reply)
Well, yes, on the surface. Unfortunately, the questions you’re asking require a fair amount of explanation, so I’m going to point you to a couple of links which go into depth and then try to summarize.
Using rape to show someone is evil means you’re using rape as a plot device. The rape victim is not a character whose pain will be addressed. This might be acceptable if it happened once in a while, and meanwhile there were lots of roles in which women were the stars, heroes, villains and other fully fleshed out, fascinating characters. Unfortunately, not only is the rape-victim-plot-device woman an extremely common character… there are not enough juicy roles for women to balance this out.
As for “uncreative”, there are plenty of other ways to show how evil someone is. You could show someone telling a lie that gets someone killed or betrayed. You could pick any of a hundred moments from Hitler’s period of power and mimic them in a story to show how vile someone is. You could show someone terrorizing an innocent person, or a cohort who’s failed at an impossible task, or coercing someone into betraying a loved one. Or mutilating someone. Those are just off the top of my head. But rape is easier to write – it’s sensational, and you don’t have to explain or convince the audience of why they should be appalled. And therein lies its weakness: when writers choose rape to convey that someone’s bad, they tend to rely on the sensationalism to get their point across and miss a lot of opportunities to get us reacting emotionally to the villain. Because the mere mention of rape doesn’t evoke much emotion in someone who’s never been raped, doesn’t know anyone who’s never been raped, and prefers not to think about it too deeply. And that’s a sizeable portion of the populace.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Most of the time in this book (If i remember correctly) the character who was raped was adressed, and it showed how that character progressed and changed because of that action. (For anyone who has read the SOT series, im mostly talking about Beta). For the one’s who weren’t adressed, (which usually was adressed in some way or another of how horrifying it was), it’s, again, to show how evil it was. I mean, Terry Goodkind went into great detail, pages and pages, on what the Order does. Most of that wasn’t about rape. He gave us many many more reasons why these people were evil. Raping is just another thing on the list on all the evil the Order has done. Raping was just to emphasize it because, rape has more of the “shock factor” and we can emphasize with someone who is raped, and just in case the murder, lieing, cheating, stealing, and betraying wasn’t enough.
He got the point across quite well that the Order was evil and got my emotion’s involved in the book and made me want to finish the Order myself, and when Richard finally did solve the problem, it was the greatest feeling in the world that people like that (fantasy world or not) finally got what was coming to them.
I don’t know how more creative you want him to get. And, like someone said before, there are plenty of “juicy roles for women” in the books. Most of the main characters are women. Ann, Cara, Nicci, Denna, Kalahn, Jensen, and Beta, just to name a few. And again, be gentle on me. Most likely put something stupid on here, just havn’t noticed it yet.
Nick J.(Quote) (Reply)
You think that’s bad, check out the fifth book, where Goodkind teaches us that democracy is bad and we would all have been better off surrendering to the Nazis (seriously!).
Tam Lin(Quote) (Reply)
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