2022 may be one of the biggest years for the fantasy genre. With incredible new shows and movies that belong to the genre being released, fantasy stories are some of the most popular today, transporting the viewer to an unknown world with dragons, witchcraft, and mighty kings. There is no lack of adventure in these foreign lands, as evidenced by the slew of fantasy titles this year alone — House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, Wolf Like Me, The Quest, Theodosia, The Legend of Vox Machina, The Witcher: Blood Origin, Fantastic Beasts, The Princess, The Sandman, and more.
Because these fictionalized worlds can be so different from reality, authors and filmmakers use some grounding elements that help the audience grasp what the story is about while also enjoying the fantastical elements. There has been a supposedly ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ tope that has become increasingly normalized in the fantasy genre, though: the use of sexual violence (especially against women) as a grounding tool. What started as brief mentions became long and graphic scenes of people being raped and assaulted in almost every story in the genre released recently.
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Sexual violence has never been portrayed so much in the history of movies and television. This is particularly true in the genre of magic and impossible quests. Here is how sexual violence is being used in fantasy.
Fantasy vs Real Life
New Line Cinema
What is the function of fantasy? To depict reality or escape from it? The fantasy genre has always had a difficult time answering that question. George R. R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, told The New York Times that, “My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought.” It is interesting to see what elements filmmakers and writers will include because they’re ‘historical,’ and that they think will ground the audience in reality, even if their creation is fantasy. Infections, dysentery, and even the flu are considered some of the most likely causes of death in the Medieval Ages, but somehow they are not as commonly shown on television as rape and any other type of sexual assault.
Martin is not wrong when he says that rape happened a lot during these moments in history, and unfortunately, it still happens every day at an alarming rate. But it sounds like a cop-out to say that a scene where a character is brutally raped by her now-husband, and that the main point of the scene is how that man feels, is what keeps a fantasy show ‘grounded.’ As Ann Foster writes for The Mary Sue, “Historical accuracy is a bad excuse for rampant sexual assault in fantasy.” One should probably ask: whose fantasy are we seeing?
A Plot Device
Warner Bros.
One of the worst parts of how sexual violence is portrayed in movies and television series is that it is, most of the time, merely a plot device to move the story forward. It is there for the sole purpose of inspiring someone to take action or show a different side of the victim, both could be done very differently and be much more interesting. When any type of violence is used this way, it becomes shallow and never is discussed or treated the way it should be.
The highly common one, and probably the worst, is the one where later on the female who was brutalized accepts what happened and falls in love with her aggressor. Also, a common one is when the victim is ignored, and the people around her are the focus. Will the husband avenge her? How will her parents cope? This doesn’t add anything to the character of the victim. The brutal event they went through is never really discussed or sometimes even acknowledged, leaving it to be what it was: a weak plot device.
The Danger of Normalization
Warner Bros. Television Distribution
After a few years of watching a certain type of story, some elements can become desensitized to the audience. This has also to do with the amount of information and video footage available today. A few decades back, watching a real police shooting was a lot harder than today when all you have to do is look for it on YouTube. The same thing happens to elements seen in movies and television shows.
Gore and violence were very different from the movies in the fifties and eighties to the ones being produced today. There has been a need for more explicit content and gore as never seen before on television and the big screen. A bullet injury? Add the sound of a broken bone: that can make the audience more uncomfortable. This kind of desensitization can probably be most clearly scene in pornographic films, which have gone from tasteful nudity in magazines to some truly horrible stuff online. Audiences get used to things, and so content creators feel that they have to up the ante continuously.
The great danger of becoming desensitized to these things is that it becomes considered normal. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of people dying every day to a single disease seemed like something that would happen in a dystopian movie. Now, it doesn’t phase people anymore; hundreds of people are literally still dying every day from Covid-19 in America, but hardly anybody discusses it or care anymore.
Media Violence Does Influence People
Trust Nordisk
The same thing can happen with sexual violence. Once it is normal, something that doesn’t phase people, there is a normalization of these types of violence against (majorly) women, as it happens with watching scenes where racism and homophobia, for example, are seen as normal and are not condemned. Obviously, not everyone who likes action movies, for example, are going to shoot people because they like gunfight sequences, but the effects of violence in media has been downplayed for a while now (because it’s profitable).
In fact, most experiments which study the impact of violence in media finds a strong correlation in actual violence, with, “increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions, aggressive thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes, and physiological arousal, and was related to decreases in prosocial (helping) behavior,” according to the National Institutes of Health. The idiom ‘garbage in, garbage out’ has some quiet truth here, despite the cliché.
Some Examples of Sexual Violence in Fantasy
Sony Pictures Television
One example jumps almost instantly to mind when talking about sexual violence against women, especially in the fantasy genre, and that is the worldwide sensation Game of Thrones. Rape becomes almost as common as political discussions and blood being spilled in the series, with the series featuring 34 rapes or attempted rapes. The show’s creators have defended the horrid and graphic scenes, especially the ones that weren’t a part of the novels. With House of the Dragon premiering, and the statement that there won’t be any sexual violence in the show, it raises the question if any of those scenes were at all necessary to tell the story.
The Handmaid’s Tale used so many types of violence (including sexual assault on a minor) that it’s considered, for many people, torture porn. It is a stark difference from the source material, Atwood’s novel, since the violence is not the focus of the books, and the passages that show them are brief.
There are other shows, however, that use sexual violence differently. Outlander is a fantasy show that (at least in the instance of the first season) showed rape in a very different way, and that affected Jamie very deeply as the seasons progressed. Orange is the New Black is an example outside of the genre that deals brilliantly with a plot line of sexual violence, to the extent that Jada Yuan of Vulture called it, “the only TV show that understands rape.”
This whole article is not to say that writers should completely ban sexual violence, as it does happen at an alarming rate to this day. However, how it is shown on television, how graphic it can get, and the treatment the violence and the victim receives needs to change drastically to be somehow okay. It is important to be reminded that when something gets shown a lot on television, the audience becomes desensitized, or the status quo is only reinforced, one where one in three women experience sexual violence. They’re called ‘scripted shows’ and ‘fantasy’ for a reason; hopefully, people can start writing some better fantasies.
