I don’t know how “sympathetic” he is, but most readers have a perverse fondness and admiration for that appalling bastard Harry Flashman. His vileness has been toned down over the course of the books {rather regrettably, in my view: in the latest, Flashman On The March, he’s little more than a genially unscrupulous womaniser with a casual attitude towards his duty}, but in the original Flashman, he rapes a woman.
Its from early in the first book, its not a flashback.
I seem to remember (its been a very long time since I read it, so i could be wrong) that he’s under the impression that the woman he rapes is a hallucination, so there is something of a mitigating factor.
I’m not going to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that the rape, the reasons for the rape, and the consequences of the rape are worked into the plot very well.
ETA: Beaten to it!
Blume (George Segal) rapes his ex-wife i(Susan Anspach) n “Blume in Love.”
John Leguizamo’s character in Casualties of War is treated somewhat sympathetically. He caves in to peer pressure and participates, reluctantly, in a gang rape.
Hmmm, people have already picked my two – Flashman and Thomas Covenant.
English folksongs are pretty full of that kind of thing, so how about Tam Lin?.
“He’s taken her by the milk-white hand
And there he’s laid her down
And there he asked no leave of her
As she lay on the ground.”
But as it turns out, Tam Lin has been enchanted by faeries (which may or may not account for his cavalier treatment of the lady) and is doomed to be given a a tithe to hell. So for his love, the (former) maiden waits at Miles Cross and wins him back from the Queen of the Faeries.
I came in here specifically to mention Luke. I wish I could see that episode again…when I watched it when it aired originally, I never interpreted it as a rape, and I wish I could see it again to remember how it all went. I remember Laura being pissed with Scotty, and flirting with Luke, and Luke being in love with her. I thought at the time…well, to be honest, I can’t remember what I thought about it all, 30 years ago…but it seemed to me at the time that Laura had a lot to answer for in what transpired.
Thomas Covenant is a leper, one of the side effects of which is impotence. One day he gets hit by a car and wakes up in The Land, a magical realm where his leprosy is cured. He’s convinced that he’s in a coma and is having an extended dulsion. He gets aroused by a woman for the first time in years, and thinks, “What the hell, none of this is real, so I might as well enjoy myself.” Turns out, The Land is a lot realer than he’d given it credit for. Since he keeps jumping in and out of this alternate world, and time moves faster ther than it does here, he later meets the adult daughter his rape engendered, who holds a position of power in the governance of that world.
Ah, amazing…the power of YouTube. Okay, my brain definitely edited that, probably due to all the stuff that happened afterwards…Gosh, they were all young and cute back then…
Sean Connery’s character, Mark Rutland, pretty much rapes Tippi Hedren’s Marnie in the film by the same name. This is on their honeymoon after he blackmails her into marrying him in the first place.
Ooh, that reminds me. The canonical hero/good guy, D’Artagnan, pretty much rapes Milady in The Three Musketeers. (She spurns him, so he disguises himself as her lover and plows her in the dark.) Definitely a shabby thing to do, but Dumas puts it in a favorable light – just another feat of derring do by our boy hero.
This is some obscure fiction, but in this novel, Easy Connections, by Liz Berry, a rapist comes off as a hero. The book is intended for teen females, which always struck me as a little odd.
Some 20-something rock star rapes a 17-year-old girl, thereby getting her pregnant, and then stalks and harasses her until she agrees to give up her college and her career and marry him. There was even a sequel, which apparently chronicles what happens after the victim marries the rapist, but I’ve not read it. The first was quite disturbing enough, more so because teen girls seemed to find it wildly romantic.
If we are using “flying under false colors” as a definition, then Louis from Revenge of the Nerds counts. He nails Betty while passing himself off as her boyfriend in disguise.
Tom Ripley? He kills often enough, I can’t recall if he also rapes.
The Guy that rapes Starr in Preacher.
Regarding Luke Spencer from General Hospital:
I also saw the original rape scene, but remember it a little vaguely. There is a song called “Rise” that I refer to as Luke and Laura’s Rape Theme. The show did get lots of letters of complaint when the two of them fell in love after the rape. They were about the hottest couple on television twenty years ago.
Well, he performs oral sex on her (and apparantly rather skillfully), rather than conventional “nailing” intercourse.
Same with Uther Pendragon raping, err, Arthur’s mother, wassname, after Merlin disguised Uther as the woman’s husband.
But Uther really wasn’t sympathetic.
Does Valmont count in Dangerous Liasons (and any other film version of it)? It’s a bit difficult to portray it as a straight rape, especially as it’s depicted very ambiguously in the book.
ETA: I’m referring of course to the seduction of little Cecile.
Edward Hyde in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen forcibly buggers Hawley Griffin, The Invisible Man, to death in retribution both for Griffin’s treachery with the Martians and his beating and rape of Mina Harker: Hyde then goes on to heroically sacrifice himself by destroying one of the Martian war machines and eating the occupants, getting himself incinerated in the process. Sadly, none of these proceedings made it into the movie.