I understand, but I disagree. She would not have understood it as rape, so it wouldn’t FEEL like rape. People back then thought differently than we did. Our atttitudes change, our reactions change. The character may have felt brutalised or violated, but not raped.
I still disagree with you, Evil Captor, but it’s off-topic so I’m out. But maybe it’s just semantics or splitting hairs anyway since “brutalized” & “violated” can pretty much equal rape.
Minor note but I believe the Quiet Man is actually set a generation earlier than it was made, around 1922.
Looks like you’re right: The Quiet Man - Wikipedia
Wings Of Honneamise-
The male protagonist tries to rape a woman but fails, he apologizes and they remain on good terms. It is a very interesting part of an otherwise straightforward movie, do you continue to sympathize with him?
He tortures (by breaking his toes) and murders a man in Royal Flash. Admittedly the guy he tortured and killed was a very bad man, who had just tried to kill him, but it was in no ways self-defence: he has him tied up and drops him over a cliff after promising to “let him go”. (He does “let him go” - over the cliff).
Why is that a shock? He’s certainly no stranger to killing people, and as per the OP he’s raped at least once, in the first book - an Afgan woman (which of course has dire consequences for him).
I dunno where the heat is coming from. Flashy doesn’t deny he’s a rotter, he revels in it. The reason he’s amusing as a protagonist is that he’s an honest rotter, but that hardly makes him a good guy.
Tommy Gibbs, the main character in Black Caesar, rapes a woman he’s coerced into a relationship with him, and in fact complains that their (married, by then) sex life isn’t consensual (“Why you always got to be raped?”). He buys her gifts to clear his conscience, but clearly resents her for not loving him. And yet, for a murdering, gangster, rapist, Tommy is a sympathetic character: he’s merely trying to succeed in a world that won’t allow a black man to do so legitimately, and is consequently overly fixated on the trappings of material success, and filled with rage over the various injustices that have marked his life.
To add to my previous post: there is even an example of an attempt at formal assassination by Flashy - albeit unsucssessful. In his old age, Flashy attempts to assassinate Colonel Sebastian Moran, but is forestalled by the would-be victim’s arrest (this is in the short story Flashman and the Tiger - in that case, his motives were for once honorable - he’s saving his granddaughter from Moran’s blackmail, he’s out to humiliate her by blackmail-forced sex in order to revenge himself on Flashy).
Is Moran arrested at the behest of Sherlock Holmes in what we know to be Conan Doyle’s story “The Empty House”?
Yes, and there is a very funny scene
Where Sherlock comes across an elderly Flashy pretending to be a wino lurking outside the empty house (he was following Moran to kill him), and makes all sorts of mistaken deductions about him … while Watson almost recognizes him.
Nice. I like it.
I totally agree with you. The Forsythe Saga is 19th century England, and even though what the lawyer Soames did to his wife was legal, and all the fall out of her leaving him caused her scorn in social circles, what he did was rape. She knew it, more importantly so did he.
From The World According To Garp
There’s an episode of Law and Order: SVU where, for a brief tiny moment, you feel sorry for the rapist (well, in this case an attempted rapist.)
The beginning of the episode has the would-be-rapist break into a woman’s apartment, but before he can do the dead, she manages to defend herself, keep him restrained, and call 911.
When the police arrive, he wants to press assault charges on her, while she wants to press rape charges against him. He’s angry and confused, because he says she wanted to have sex. He then tells the cops about a rape-fantasy website he went to, where he and the woman were messaging each other. He showed them messages that “proved” she had a rape fantasy, and told him how to break into her apartment to have sex with her, and that she would “act” like she didn’t want to have sex.
It turns out that the woman’s psycho ex-boyfriend made the fake profile (so had plenty of pictures, and knowledge of how one could break into the apartment,) and was trying to get her raped. The would-be-rapist may have been a creep, and perhaps even pretty naive about things, but he honestly thought he was going to have consensual sex.
not to be too snarky about a serious subject, but Pepe LePew the Warner Bros cartoon skunk was always forcing himself physically on females who clearly didn’t want him. not my favorite cartoons, but I guess some people liked him.
Sexual harrassment and stalking certainly, but surely not rape … unless there were Pepe LePew cartoons that I didn’t see as a kid. 
That seizing the hand and running kisses up and down the arm would probably get him pepper sprayed today. 
(Of course, his propensity for calling women “so round, so firm, so fully packed” might get him shot.) 
Correct I thought of my mistake while I was away from my compute and just came back to correct it.
Simon Adebisi from OZ seemed to be pretty popular character although he would rape inmates on daily basis. I didn’t find him sympathetic though. I’m glad that Kareem killed him.
Side question: is it easier for a rapist to be a sympathetic character if said rapist rapes men, rather than women? My instant impulse is “yes.”