Defining Darkness at the Expense of Others

Though I assume most people who were planning to have already watched the first episode by now, I’ll warn that the first episode of Goblin Slayer – and by extension this discussion of it – includes references to sexual assault and rape, both generally and specifically.

As I mentioned in my Goblin Slayer first impressions post, I had the desire to write further about some of the extreme content that appears in the episode. This isn’t because other bloggers and reviewers haven’t been writing about it, but more because I haven’t seen my thoughts and feelings reflected in most of the reactions and I’d like to provide my perspective. A lot of what I’ve been reading in the past week has been very analytical, weighing various points in an attempt to come to some kind of logical conclusion about whether the episode’s content is warranted or appropriate. I believe that kind of disaffected point-by-point examination of scenes and images is the luxury and privilege of those whose lives are untouched by crimes of sexual aggression. I’m not trying to make enemies by saying as much, but I feel that there’s a certain survivors’ perspective on this matter that can be difficult for others to understand except from first-hand experience (or an incredibly robust sense of empathy).

The first episode of Goblin Slayer has at this point been primarily defined by its extreme violence, as well as its inclusion of a scene in which a young woman is brutally raped by a group of goblins. There’s nothing appealing about this scene; the woman’s terrified screams and the goblins’ violent clawing of her flesh as they attack her is clearly intended to be sickening to the viewer. As the episode closes, we see the woman one last time; as she rides away in the back of a horse-drawn wagon with a group of other female victims, it’s clear that she’s no longer the brash combatant she was when she entered the goblins’ cave; her lifeless eyes and huddled posture say all we need to know about the spiritless husk of a person that she’s become. As the audience, we’re meant to think “oh, what an awful, cruel world this is, so unlike our own.”

What the episode fails to show, though, is the true aftermath of this attack – the affect it has on this woman’s life days, months, years afterward. Sexual assault is an experience that influences a survivor’s life in one way or another forever. It’s an experience that can tear apart a person’s sense of safety and security, adversely affect their ability to form relationships, or cause them to feel negatively about themselves or their bodies. Depending on their environment, it can stigmatize and isolate them from others. This does not mean that survivors are doomed to an awful life; many (including myself) are some of the strongest people I know. But that experience is always with them. The way sexual assault and rape are used in fiction, however, is more often to provide a character with some kind of blunt-force revenge-worthy backstory, or as in this case, to indicate that the world in which the character exists is dark, backwards, horrifying, and particularly violent. It is utilized to create shock-value and to define media as hard-core. Too often, though, it does nothing to honor survivors’ experiences. We will likely never bear witness to how the young woman processes what she went through, because that’s not what the storytellers deem to be “important.”

I find this type of world-building troubling for several reasons. For one, it implies that this type of violence (at least to the level portrayed in instances like this one) is somehow unrealistic – that it’s an element of fantasy that just “doesn’t happen here.” As much as I wish that gang rape were a foreign concept in our world, or even some horrifying crime that we left behind in the dark ages, the truth is that it’s something that happens to this day. It happens in refugee camps, at colleges, in religious settings, and essentially anywhere there’s an unequal power structure in place. To claim it as something from long ago or far away is disingenuous at best.

It also suggests that perpetrators of these crimes are somehow sub-human. In many anime, rapists and perverts are defined by their physical ugliness; In the case of Goblin Slayer, the rapists are literal beasts. It’s fashionable (and, honestly, understandable) to claim that rapists are “monsters;” that no one with an ounce of humanity would choose to victimize anyone in this way. It is convenient to think that you and I aren’t on the same level as these types of criminals – I’ve seen so many people I know say things akin to “I want to murder that piece of shit” when they read news about a rapist’s crimes. I feel this is the type of rhetoric that people who consider themselves rational feel comfortable proclaiming when they believe there is some fundamental difference between themselves and the target of their anger . The unfortunate truth is that people who perpetrate sexual assault are people, full-stop. They’re people we see and with whom we interact; we likely know someone who’s done this, even if it never comes to light and they experience no repercussions. I’m not saying this to try to sow paranoia, but more to provide a reminder that we do ourselves a disservice by othering perpetrators; if we can convince ourselves that their crimes are true aberrations, then we can absolve ourselves from any responsibility of correcting the culture and power structures that helped them to flourish in the first place.

It’s an unfortunate truth that sex crimes are most often gender-based. While it’s certainly an experience that can happen to anyone regardless of their gender, the unfortunate truth is that these crimes are most often committed against individuals who are socially vulnerable and have access to less power. Despite the strides that we have made over time, women still occupy more vulnerable social positions in ours and many societies. The events in episode 1 of Goblin Slayer do nothing to reject, refute, or deny this; despite the fact that the story takes place in a fantasy world in which the rules of society could have taken almost any shape or form, the story’s creators chose to mirror our own in the way that the adventuring party experiences their defeat. The swordsman is brutally beaten to death, which is horrifying in and of itself, but it’s the women who have their dignity stripped away along with their lives. The Mage is stabbed, poisoned, and has her clothing stripped off by goblins; there are several very uncomfortable shots of the character’s nude, bloodied body sprawled on the cave floor. The Martial Artist’s fate has already been discussed at length. I understand the necessity of establishing danger and brutality in this kind of low-fantasy world, but even so there’s something especially frustrating when it still falls on the women alone to bear these additional horrors.

Why, when given literally limitless opportunity to write a story that takes place in a brand new world, a world in which it’s clearly common for both men and women to seek out adventure and to wield various forms of physical and magical power, would a creator feel obligated to then fall back on tropes that do a specific disservice to one gender more so than another? I struggle with this question quite a bit, whether related to anime, novels, live-action television, or other forms of media. I believe that human beings are true storytellers, and I am often blown away by the stories that people are able to dream-up from their own minds. And yet, whether bleak or beautiful, harrowing or heart-rending, darkness and “”””realism”””” still sometimes seems predicated less on what women do, but what is done to them. Despite our position as creative beings, are we still so woefully uncreative that we cannot picture for ourselves new worlds in which evil is not described in part by gender-based horrors?

Though fiction allows us to explore scenarios that exist outside of ourselves, it is ultimately informed by the experiences and beliefs of those creating it. The phrase “a fate worse than death” was originally a euphemism for rape; in societies that consider the shame of rape something that a victim bears alone, the weight of that shame and its varied consequences are probably more terrible than a quick or even violent death. I find it maddening that, even as we are becoming more enlightened to the aftermath of rape, the affects it has on survivors, and the need to find and prosecute individuals to commit this crime, we still find it necessary to fall back on rape as an easy, unsubtle shorthand to convey a sense of darkness in a fictional world. Ultimately this is what bothers me about Goblin Slayer; it cribs from the experiences of rape survivors to avoid doing the leg-work of creating a genuinely affecting atmosphere. It also treats rape survivors like chaff; expendable in this pursuit of ultimate edginess. It steals without giving back. It creates rape survivors but does not give them the dignity of telling their stories. In a world of limitless possibilities I feel like we ought to be able to do better by now.

This isn’t meant to be a call for censorship, by any means; I think if people want to watch this anime, they ought to be able to. My hope, though, is that perhaps at some point we as a fandom may become more willing to look critically at media that very blatantly “punches down” or serves to harm a group of people who are already at a disadvantage. I hope that, eventually, individuals like myself whose life experiences are at the forefront of their media consumption won’t be made to feel as though our act of speaking out is somehow inconvenient to others.

As always, thank you for reading.