Does Thelma (and Louise) fit the trope? That was a while ago.
Or it could be the result of a more wide-spread awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault. If one includes all unwanted contact with a sexual component, from being groped on public transportation on up to beating and penetration, I don’t know any woman who hasn’t been sexually assaulted.
But the dreary, wearying disrespect of being frequently publicly groped doesn’t make a compelling back story, does it?
A seeming trope/cliche might also appear to be arising from two different tropes becoming fashionable at around the same time, dovetailing in some aspect. So, for example, you might have Strong Female Character™ (itself not a bad concept, mind, but one that might like anything else be executed poorly, or cynically), and Rape As Drama™/Anything Dramatic Involving A Woman Involves Sex™ coming into prominence around the same time, giving the impression of correlation and causation.
Maybe a male example might be more like…I dunno, Served In 'Nam™, plus Funny 80s Hair™ leading to a seeming message of “Having fought during Tet makes you grow a Mullet.”
But why does rape have to be the traumatic event? Artemisia from 300: Rise of an Empire is a good example. Here’s how Wikipedia describes her background from the movie:
Why did she have to get raped in order to want vengeance? I’ve seen lots of movies where a man’s family is all killed and then he spends the rest of the movie getting revenge. In the Punisher Frank Castle didn’t have to get raped to want to get vengeance.
And it’s true that in some movies the female characters would be at risk of sexual violence in certain situations if things were realistic. But in action movies with marginal amounts of realism, where people can have long involved fights without getting exhausted, and get shot but still soldier on, and crash through windows with getting at all injured, why is sexual violence the realistic part that they choose to keep in?
Dominique, you mean, Dagny is a character in the other doorstop. Apocryphally reported to have led Rand to rebut critics “if that was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation”. But Rand characters are not normal people* to begin with*.
I get it, it’s just that her part is pretty much interchangeable with a male playing the same role. No one would blink at a rugged hero smuggling out the abused sex slaves of the big bad guy (except that one would probably become his love interest) so I don’t think it’s really a reflection of the trope to have Furiosa doing it.
The “Rape makes you stronger” trope seems very female specific where a woman undergoes the trauma and finds some well of inner strength, vengeance or similar. The issue is that it always seems to be sexual assault that does this and not simply being physically (nonsexually) assaulted, much less something like having her family murdered or her house burns down or some other life-shattering event. You make a woman into a hero via nonconsensual sex. Furiosa’s role is more or less genderless which is why I feel it doesn’t apply.
In the graphic novel, one of the Five Wives asks Furiosa if she was herself once a “wife” but Furiosa never answers (in context, she says very little, period, to the FW until near the end). But even if she was, it still doesn’t seem to be her motivation: she berates the Five Wives for not realizing how good they have it to have ample food, shelter and water – to bathe in! – while others died of thirst. And she mocks their protests of lacking freedom by saying there’s no freedom in the wastes, just death. Whatever her expanded history, she doesn’t step into the story as any sort of feminist crusader.
She’s not, I agree. Much like Max, she doesn’t really seem to have an ideology. What she does is more about immediate concerns.
I did see someone point out that of all the ways that Furiosa could have turned against Joe, saving the wives is the one she chooses, and that probably means something. She could have tried to start a revolution at the Citadel (or attempted a power grab). She could have joined an opposing faction. She could have simply tried to escape to the Green Place by herself, if that’s what she wanted.
All in all, she doesn’t seem to show much concern for the wretched masses under Joe’s thumb, but the predicament of the wives gets to her. It seems personal. If it’s not just because they’re cuter than your average radiation-poisoned half-life, it does seem fair to assume that there’s a connection to her own backstory.
Yep, sorry. The other one. 
Because sexual violence is the type of violence that reinforces/asserts the status hierarchy. Shooting a woman doesn’t ‘put her in her place,’ but raping her does. (I’m not saying that this is what I believe to be good or right or correct or useful; I’m claiming that this position is fundamental to our current culture.)
A strong female character makes many people–male and female alike–uneasy, because the existence of such a character threatens to upset the hierarchy status-quo. Defining that strong female character as one who has been raped relieves the uneasiness, because it lets us relax in the knowledge that the character has (at some point) been put in her “proper” place.
I think much of it is because rescuing them gives her an excuse (to herself) to risk leaving everything else and returning to the Green Place. They want out, she knows they’d never make it out there, she knows of a place where they could find succor and now she had a reason to return there herself.
She didn’t care about killing Joe or being in charge but, at the same time, she couldn’t justify leaving behind all she had gained just to hang out with the lady-farmers again. Rescuing the Five Wives gives her the impetus to do what she had always wanted to do.
Furiosa says she wants redemption, not revenge. As a lieutenant of Joe, she was a tool of oppression. So she needed to cleanse herself of her sins, not erase those that were done to her.
That is the feminist dogma, yes. That doesn’t make it true. Sexual violence is not always about class warfare any more than carjacking is. Sure, someone might steal sports cars as an attack on the upper class who can afford such things, but more likely they do it because they like driving fast cars but don’t have one.
I don’t see anything in the quoted post about class warfare.
Quite right; I wasn’t referencing class warfare.
Technically, maybe it’d be more termed a “Caste ‘Police Action,’” if anything. Y’know, as far as the diplomats and politicians are concerned.
Since Trish (Patsy) Walker becomes Hellcat in the comics I bet we will see her kicked big guys asses in the future. This was the beginning of her training.
Non-metaphorically, she used herself as a human shield on one occasion and later died saving the others. That’s fairly heavy as lifting goes.
All the wives gave up their position (which in material terms was as good as it was ever going to get – a temptation which eventually weakened one of them) and risked their lives in the escape. Furiosa had the skills to lead the operation, but it’s clear in the movie that Angharrad (the pregnant one) is the motive force and spiritual leader of this rebellion. “Women are not things” is her credo, not Furiosa’s.
I think the difference between rape-as-motivation in Fury Road and in 300:2 is the amount it tries to explain. In FR, it explains why the wives are fleeing Joe. It’s not meant to explain their characters or their relationships with others, or their outlook on life. In 302, the fact that Artemisia not only has her own needs, desires and plans but also is prepared to act off her own bat to get them is presented as something so weird and inexplicable that the only sufficient reason can be a grossly traumatic childhood rape. It reduces everything about her to a facet of her victimhood. She talks back to men (because she’s a rape victim); she’s aggressive, brave and uncompromising (because she’s a rape victim); she’s sexually forthright (because she’s a rape victim).
The idea that women who have their own ideas and act on their own initiative need some kind of explanation is weird enough as it is. The idea that that explanation has to be rape is beyond bizarre.
Rape as a backstory is a cliche in general. Instanta drama and relatability.
On a meta level, it’s part of the idea that character personalities can be explained by singular events as part of their so called backstory. People want to know the character’s past to explain why they act the way they do. The flashier, more traumatic the event that changed everything, the better. In many cases the blank slate is alive and well.