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I'm about half-expecting us to have a scene right at the end where Furnace wakes up and is immediately recruited into one of a couple of available shadowy conspiracies.
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Sep 18, 2015 18:45
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Who turn out to be literal Men's Rights Activists.
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Sep 18, 2015 18:56
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Flesh Forge posted:Who turn out to be literal Men's Rights Activists. "We like your posts on reddit Mr. Macket; we wish to offer you the chance to be part of something wonderful, but first you must take this red pill."
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Sep 18, 2015 20:10
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I think someone mentioned earlier that Mary's deeds going public would also make the rape victims into accessories to the murders. I had completely forgot about one of the first scenes in the chapter straight up being a victim's family directly speaking to Mary.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:16
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Zerilan posted:I think someone mentioned earlier that Mary's deeds going public would also make the rape victims into accessories to the murders. I had completely forgot about one of the first scenes in the chapter straight up being a victim's family directly speaking to Mary. I don't think anyone knows about that part but Moonshadow and that family. I don't think it's even come up at all since then.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:26
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Zerilan posted:I think someone mentioned earlier that Mary's deeds going public would also make the rape victims into accessories to the murders. I had completely forgot about one of the first scenes in the chapter straight up being a victim's family directly speaking to Mary. More than that, it was (apparently) her mother and father as well as the victim herself.
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Sep 18, 2015 23:29
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Oh dear, the comments section is trying to suggest that the actions of invisible lady are equal to people fighting back against a lynch mob. Rather than being the lynch mob herself. Well, if this is the end of the chapter I think I'm going to call it quits.
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Sep 19, 2015 00:37
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Oh, Ok comic.
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Sep 19, 2015 01:25
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Nuebot posted:Oh dear, the comments section is trying to suggest that the actions of invisible lady are equal to people fighting back against a lynch mob. Rather than being the lynch mob herself. You can't be invisible when fighting a lynch mob. Fighting against a lynch mob involves standing up in front of a bunch of people driven mad with bloodlust and trying to talk them down. Going directly against the human compulsion to agree with the crowd, and putting your life on the line, because if you can't talk them down, there's a good chance that they'll kill you just for getting in their way. And you certainly can't use violence against a mob like that, because it'll just provoke them into swarming at you. It takes real guts to go up against something like that, not just a knife and some half-assed self-justification.. It's much easier instead to speak in a safe zone where everyone already agrees with you so you're not really conveying any meaningful information an just reaffirming opinions.
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Sep 19, 2015 02:36
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I think it's the mark of a good writer when they can create a character I don't agree with, but even if I don't think they have a point I can still respect them as a character because of the quality of their writing; Brennen Mulligan is not that writer, and Mary is not one of these characters. It's not the fact that she just mike dropped our "hero". It's not the fact that she's essentially saying that her murder spree is anything resembling a positive step forward in combating any social problem much less rape. It's not even the fact that the last twenty pages or so are just one contrivance after another. It's the fact that the author let all this happen and let the bad guy get away with nothing meaningful to take away from it because we've already tread the whole "Allison's paralysis of analysis" towards social issues chapters ago. If this was a better chapter; Mary going to the dam would have only been about her trying to put on a huge show about how "This is what happens when you side with Rapists" not some bullshit routine about proving Furnace guilty of rape. That's such a cop out by the writers and it's not the first time they've used Furnace as a cheap strawman but it's probably the last time. Speaking of Furnace, if he is dead he died a Martyr because Mary didn't get her little home video and he was the only person this whole chapter really saying that she was evil. And Allison should have something better to say than "I understand your angry but we should just calm down and talk it out". Originally we thought that Mary had killed dozens of people leading up to this, and Allison finds out that that number is actually in the hundreds. This should have been an enough-is-enough moment where Allison has to put aside her feeling of guilt over partially creating the monster that is Moonshadow. Saving the life of the person who literally tried to slice your throat open is the kind of behavior I expect from a shonen action hero, not a retired superhero who fought giant robots and mutant knife men. And not taking precautions against a clearly deranged illusionist is amateur behavior from the person who tackles teleporters on reflex. But no, we have to have our heartfelt scene where Mary reveals she is exactly how she has acted, a monster. And Allison get's another 10 pages to feel bad for herself for not being more decisive and taking the initiative. So there's that to look forward too. Carrasco posted:I don't think anyone knows about that part but Moonshadow and that family. I don't think it's even come up at all since then.
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Sep 19, 2015 03:56
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Nuebot posted:Oh dear, the comments section is trying to suggest that the actions of invisible lady are equal to people fighting back against a lynch mob. Rather than being the lynch mob herself. Reminder that last year I pointed out in this very thread that most lynchings were done under the excuse of the accused having committed sexual assault or rape to point out the problem with this chapter, and you had motherfuckers here defending lynching.
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Sep 19, 2015 03:59
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You know, she can't be THAT far away from Alison, since she still has to be in ear shot of a casual conversational tone in order to, you know, hear her. Though you would think at some point Alison would wonder why Mary's voice is sounding more and more distant, or why it sounds like she's talking from mostly one side. That and the blood would be an easy way to track her, illusions or not, since she DOES need time to really work the details, as Alison mentioned earlier, and cover up every little drop of blood. I mean, not that I expect any of this to be addressed, what with the narrative at the moment. Just some observations.
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Sep 19, 2015 04:31
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Brought To You By posted:Speaking of Furnace, if he is dead he died a Martyr because Mary didn't get her little home video and he was the only person this whole chapter really saying that she was evil. That is an old writer's trick, where you package the opposing view in words delivered by a very unappealing character the reader is obviously not supposed to identify with and who is sharply contrasted with the protagonist. Furnace is very deliberately an idiot and a redneck and a Haver of Bad Opinions so the reader can feel self-righteous and justified about the notion that yes actually the unilateral cutting up of rapists with knives is pretty great. e: and yes as you say he is literally the only person in the chapter that disagrees with Mary's killings in the slightest, which is pretty deplorable quote:Originally we thought that Mary had killed dozens of people leading up to this, and Allison finds out that that number is actually in the hundreds. This should have been an enough-is-enough moment where Allison has to put aside her feeling of guilt over partially creating the monster that is Moonshadow. The second she knew it was Mary (when Miles was murdered and Clevin stabbed) should have been the enough-is-enough moment. Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 04:37
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Flesh Forge posted:That is an old writer's trick, where you package the opposing view in words delivered by a very unappealing character the reader is obviously not supposed to identify with and who is sharply contrasted with the protagonist. Furnace is very deliberately an idiot and a redneck and a Haver of Bad Opinions so the reader can feel self-righteous and justified about the notion that yes actually the unilateral cutting up of rapists with knives is pretty great. I just think it would be hilariously tragic if there was a news blurb next page talking about how Furnace's speaking out against the invisible slasher resulted in his death and prompted a police investigation into the connection between the killings and the rape victims. So even after he threatens to kill people on national television he get's to be a more positive influence than Allison. But at this point I'm drifting into "hate-reading" territory for this webcomic which will be a first for me and I stuck with Dominic Deegan to the bitter end.
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Sep 19, 2015 04:48
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Brought To You By posted:I stuck with Dominic Deegan to the bitter end. Allison will start to think that "wait what Mary's doing is wrong and I should still stop her" but it will turn out that she only thought that because Furnace's ghost was whispering to her.
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Sep 19, 2015 05:58
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I'm still kind of amazed that Furnace has the best characterization this chapter solely because he was a strawman and the authour figured he had to spend a bare minimum on him (I gave the benefit of a doubt but between the alt text and comments on the artists blog its clear that they never intended him to be anything other than a pathetic figure at best).I guess less is more and having actual subtle characterization based on what is all too common trumps the hell out of walking talking points like Mary. Really this chapter has been kind of incredible in how it managed to characterize its characters the exact opposite way it wanted to. And then there was the times it just straight up dumped on characters it had previously treated with dignity like Hector (seriously, reread the Cleaver chapters, the characterization of Pintsize there and this chapter is night and day). Basically gently caress this awful chapter and I hope that the creators stray back into topics where they actually have any business talking about their themes because for all that they hate rape culture they really didn't have anything to say about it past the bit with Miles. E: In summary ManlyGrunting fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 06:20
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Flesh Forge posted:e: and yes as you say he is literally the only person in the chapter that disagrees with Mary's killings in the slightest, which is pretty deplorable Allison disagrees too? Just not for the reasons you want her to. And no one agrees with what she's doing either, save for the victims seeking revenge. The comic is all about no one having all the answers.
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Sep 19, 2015 12:38
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"I don't think killing will work as well as teaching" "= I think killing works, but teaching works better" If she actually disagreed she might say something like "I think killing does not work." Maybe even "Killing is wrong." It's really hard to interpret Alison's dialogue as anything other than an endorsement (however reluctant) of Mary's actions but congratulations. As far as who expressly agrees with her, the conversation with the doctor is nothing but tacit agreement even though she says she doesn't agree - she has a highly specific set of statistics conveniently memorized and says "It's just uninteresting to me, the question of whether the killer is a bad person. It's just supremely uninteresting." "I'm baffled it didn't happen sooner." The whole page in context is about as subtle as a brick. There is nothing ambiguous about what's going on, and even Garth loving Ennis doesn't try to paint vigilantism this way.
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Sep 19, 2015 13:18
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The world has really turned upside down when ostensibly progressive people are advocating revenge killing and neckbeardy comics fans realize something's hosed up with that Trump 2016 
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Sep 19, 2015 13:32
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Flesh Forge posted:If she actually disagreed she might say something like "I think killing does not work." Maybe even "Killing is wrong." It's really hard to interpret Alison's dialogue as anything other than an endorsement (however reluctant) of Mary's actions but congratulations. The chapter's ham-handed, but this is kind of dumb. What, you think Alison says, "Mary, killing is wrong!" and then Mary will be all, "Oh gosh, you're right! I never thought of that, guess I'd better stop." It's clear from the way she behaves that Alison thinks killing is wrong, but she's also going to know that this kind of argument isn't going to work on Mary; she's too far gone. But she still wants to talk her down (used to be friends, doesn't want to kill her, plus keeping her imprisoned could be tricky), so she tries a tack that she thinks might work: There are other ways, and you might end up killing an innocent. Given the lengths to which Mary has gone to avoid killing an innocent, it's reasonable to think that it had a shot at working. It doesn't work, because Mary's pretty far gone, and because (as was said above) this is a story about not having all the answers. Overall it's not a good story, but wanting what you want here would make it worse.
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Sep 19, 2015 14:46
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Good, Mary got away, and Alison has egg on her face. I kinda hope Mary has a copy so she can go full supervillain and release it to the world while making a hammy statement about rapists beware. Become the new Menace, Mary! It is your destiny!
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Sep 19, 2015 14:47
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Falstaff posted:The chapter's ham-handed, but this is kind of dumb. What, you think Alison says, "Mary, killing is wrong!" and then Mary will be all, "Oh gosh, you're right! I never thought of that, guess I'd better stop." It's clear from the way she behaves that Alison thinks killing is wrong, but she's also going to know that this kind of argument isn't going to work on Mary; she's too far gone. That's not clear at all after her conversation with Doctor Rape Statistics, and she's known Mary was killing people ever since Miles and Clevin got shanked but has told no one except Patrick (who also appears to tacitly approve because he refused to help Alison find Mary). Alison has had plenty of time and opportunity to intervene and stop Mary but has chosen not to. Or rather, the author has chosen not to write that. e: Yes yes in the last couple of pages she has finally informed the government super administration bureau or whatever, but not before now and there's just no good reason for that. The only action Alison has taken up to that point had been talking to Patrick. Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Sep 19, 2015 |
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Sep 19, 2015 19:29
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Allison didn't report Mary straight away because she felt obligated to confront her former team mate personally, likely due to some kind of sense of responsibility for Mary turning out this way given her conversation with Brad. In a better world Mary's ridiculous escape would be stopped by Furnace abruptly showing up and flamethrowering the entire area with extreme prejudice.
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Sep 19, 2015 20:19
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Well, not exactly. Alison first began to suspect it was Moonshadow when she caught a glimpse of her just prior to Clevin's wounding. Her first action after that was to get him medical attention so he wouldn't die. She wasn't sure she'd seen Moonshadow, so she brought up the subject with her doctor/handler and was told, actually, she's been cleared and it definitely wasn't her. Of course, the actual story she got didn't make any sense to her, so she kept digging. She went to talk to Patrick to get Moonshadow's contact information. Patrick, in the meantime, does not give two shits about rapists getting killed as a subset of not really caring that much about murder, and therefore wasn't going to tell her until she threatened, beat, and emotionally blackmailed him. She went to Moonshadow's place, discovered that it was her, and immediately, as soon as she knew, got in touch with the authorities. Then she went personally to stop Moonshadow in addition to that. The only thing she's really guilty of is giving her a chance to come in peacefully at the end instead of just smashing her into a red mist. Which would be kind of at odds with the "don't take justice into your own hands" thing she was trying to impart.
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Sep 19, 2015 20:22
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Oops, I had forgotten that part of the conversation. It's buried behind the gobsmacker of "No I don't think this is a big deal and in fact I'm going to directly tell you to stop looking into it because hey your dad has cancer" so that's partly my excuse but yes I shouldn't have missed that. Although Patrick comes right out and tells her "I may have hallucinated you, and I've been working hard to convince myself I did" 
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Sep 19, 2015 20:45
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The most annoying part isn't even the bullshit morality, it's the whole execution of it. It could've been this quick thing with just an invisible slasher and mysterious killings, and then at the end of the arc, Mary could go into her schpeil and give a shocking revelation that all the people she was murdering were actually rapists, and then, in the spur of the moment, it could seem briefly morally ambiguous. It's not like the police would be that forthcoming about the exact particulars of how all the victims were related, especially when it makes them look bad. Although I guess that would mean the author wouldn't be able to concoct a specific context where it makes sense for someone to threaten to murder anyone who makes a rape accusation. Instead, the comic had to string it out through: -Each of the murders -The whole thing with the cyborg prof which adds nothing to the chapter -A rant from the scientist on how there's no point in getting riled up over a little murder -The entire Patrick sequence where I'm not entirely sure what he was ranting about aside from "PS, I've actually been murdering all the extras from previous scenes" -giving some last minute character development to inferno so it wouldn't seem as much like killing a straw man I mean, it doesn't make sense that Allison would be torn on how moral Mary's killings were, because she's had weeks to mull it over in her head, while we the readers have had about a year to decide what our opinions were. Narratively speaking, this entire chapter has been grotesquely bloated, and that's why it has far overstayed its welcome even if you were open to sympathizing with Mary's line of reasoning.
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Sep 19, 2015 22:46
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I think it would have been better if Mary hadn't shown up personally at all, because "it's wrong for Allison to hunt down the invisible murderer because it's counterproductive" is interesting and arguable, but "it's okay to murder (possible) rapists because society won't punish them" kind of isn't. Once she started getting lines the story became about her and she doesn't really have much going for her as a character.
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Sep 19, 2015 23:24
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Tenebrais posted:Allison disagrees too? Just not for the reasons you want her to. Except the comic went out of its way to bury the idea that no one had all the answers this chapter by making every confrontation a black and white "use of force was completely correct, the person who was assaulted was terrible" situation.
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Sep 19, 2015 23:42
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Fried Chicken posted:Except the comic went out of its way to bury the idea that no one had all the answers this chapter by making every confrontation a black and white "use of force was completely correct, the person who was assaulted was terrible" situation. The only way the comic claims to be absolute is that all of Mary's victims were guilty (if that; so far it's more just unquestioned). No one claims she was right to kill them.
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Sep 20, 2015 00:05
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It's not that there isn't any opposition to Mary's methods, it's that this chapter presents a very weak voice for that opposition. Looking at the major interactions this chapter; Allison's advisor sides with Mary for unknown reasons. Don't know why the guy who was mind controlled for months would be ok with another biodynamic exerting their will over the population. As previously stated, the doctor isn't interested in the morality of the killings but is rather focused on the implications of disenfranchised people gaining power and acting out against their oppression. Problem is, she quotes the often mentioned but already disproven 1 in 5 statistic and a 2% conviction rate statistic that I can't find outside of the RAINN website. I can't help but feel it's the authors trying to paint an out of context picture of the severity of rape. (fake edit: Remembering the early life of this thread I'm putting a disclaimer here. I'm not saying that rape isn't wrong but inflating an issue doesn't help people conceptualize it's impact on the world around them) I can't even begin to understand if we are supposed to take these statistics as a representation of the global view or just the American view of the problem. Furnace's news speech puts him firmly in the "gently caress the slasher" camp but he's the series strawman so we can't agree with him without endorsing assaulting, and murdering rape victims. Patrick has exactly one good point about how this problem should be looked at and how Mary's method is not efficient before that whole conversation devolves. Finally we have the confrontation between Mary and Allison which ends on this note.  Way to underplay what's going to happen Allison. So we have the problem of a series where the hero is constantly reminded that she can't "punch" a problem in the face confronting a villain who is doing exactly that. But instead of having this whole thing turn on Mary in a bad way she has had 100% success rate in only killing rapists, she has been able to evade implication for her actions until Allison blew the whistle on her, and now she's more than likely going to get away to continue her spree. Where in this chapter do you see a single solid argument against Mary's actions besides "killing is wrong". Because to remind you, Mary already finds that idea funny because she believes she's on a crusade for justice.
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Sep 20, 2015 01:03
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Aside from furnace, there's also this amazingly polite war criminal. Contrasting with Mary, who has skimped on the bill for the soldiers she hired, but she did obtain some equally expensive ammo, in order to prove that she's not being cheap, she's just a dick.
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Sep 20, 2015 01:24
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Probably should've just killed Mary.
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Sep 20, 2015 01:49
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Brought To You By posted:Problem is, she quotes the often mentioned but already disproven 1 in 5 statistic and a 2% conviction rate statistic that I can't find outside of the RAINN website. I can't help but feel it's the authors trying to paint an out of context picture of the severity of rape. (fake edit: Remembering the early life of this thread I'm putting a disclaimer here. I'm not saying that rape isn't wrong but inflating an issue doesn't help people conceptualize it's impact on the world around them) The number isn't disproven, though? Studies disagree on the exact prevalence, but it's usually in the ballpark of 15-20 percent, with the caveat that sexual assault is heavily underreported. The U.S. Department of Justice did a survey in 2007 that found the rate to be 17.6%. Seems dumb to quibble over 2.4%, given the context.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:32
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Falstaff posted:The number isn't disproven, though? Studies disagree on the exact prevalence, but it's usually in the ballpark of 15-20 percent, with the caveat that sexual assault is heavily underreported. The U.S. Department of Justice did a survey in 2007 that found the rate to be 17.6%. Seems dumb to quibble over 2.4%, given the context. Here's the thing about the 1 in 5 statistic. It was originally a study that dealt with university students and had a sample size of less than 5,500. Now it's been extrapolated by a lot of other groups to be a national statistic. I'm not going to go in to the problems with the original study itself but the long and short is that the study plays very loose with the definition of sexual assault and had some very loaded wording. And more recent studies (this one is from 2012) show that the actual rate of rape and sexual assault is 1.3 per 1000(Page 2) for americans ages 12 and up. So I don't know where this statistic keeps getting ground. As for the 2%. I still can't find a credible study backing up the RAINN so it's just as suspect to me as the 1 in 5.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:57
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Brought To You By posted:Here's the thing about the 1 in 5 statistic. It was originally a study that dealt with university students and had a sample size of less than 5,500. Now it's been extrapolated by a lot of other groups to be a national statistic. I'm not going to go in to the problems with the original study itself but the long and short is that the study plays very loose with the definition of sexual assault and had some very loaded wording. And more recent studies (this one is from 2012) show that the actual rate of rape and sexual assault is 1.3 per 1000(Page 2) for americans ages 12 and up. So I don't know where this statistic keeps getting ground. As for the 2%. I still can't find a credible study backing up the RAINN so it's just as suspect to me as the 1 in 5. The statistic that you're picking says that 1.3 per 1,000 Americans ages 12 and up reported a violent sexual assault to the police in 2012. This cannot be compared to the other statistics.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:18
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Dogwood Fleet posted:The statistic that you're picking says that 1.3 per 1,000 Americans ages 12 and up reported a violent sexual assault to the police in 2012. This cannot be compared to the other statistics. That statistic actually includes crimes not reported. It's still hard to compare because the 1 in 5 statistic is not for any given year, but rather than 1 in 5 women have at some point experienced sexual assault. Also, the number was based on the question "Have you ever had sex while drunk or high," which is probably not fair.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:45
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Dogwood Fleet posted:The statistic that you're picking says that 1.3 per 1,000 Americans ages 12 and up reported a violent sexual assault to the police in 2012. This cannot be compared to the other statistics. Also on page two: The NCVS collects information on nonfatal crimes reported and not reported to the police against persons age 12 or older from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. Page five has the exact split between reported and unreported crimes, if you're interested. Cryophage fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Sep 20, 2015 |
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Sep 20, 2015 05:47
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The one thing I don't get about the whole Dr Stats page is the bit where it's justified as a way to have control, but control over what? She said that she's only ever slept with her husband, is she lying? Is there marital abuse, did she have a relative who was abused or assaulted? Like it seems like a pretty minor thing to add that would make it a hell of a lot less contrived and actually have it have some weight about societal permeation and mean something more than the world's laziest setup for the point short of everyone looking directly at the viewer and rattling it off. e: \/\/Fair enough, I recant my point. I still think it's jawdroppingly lazy storytelling though. ManlyGrunting fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Sep 20, 2015 |
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Sep 20, 2015 07:38
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ManlyGrunting posted:The one thing I don't get about the whole Dr Stats page is the bit where it's justified as a way to have control, but control over what? The reader's opinions.
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Sep 20, 2015 09:48
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ManlyGrunting posted:The one thing I don't get about the whole Dr Stats page is the bit where it's justified as a way to have control, but control over what? She said that she's only ever slept with her husband, is she lying? Is there marital abuse, did she have a relative who was abused or assaulted? Like it seems like a pretty minor thing to add that would make it a hell of a lot less contrived and actually have it have some weight about societal permeation and mean something more than the world's laziest setup for the point short of everyone looking directly at the viewer and rattling it off. Sometimes people who have not been sexually assaulted are still terrified of the idea of it happening. In fact, most of the women I've ever talked to about the subject have said that they are or have been frightened by this concept at some point. This is one of those privilege things that the comic is trying to get into; I remember the first time I had one of these conversations and it was completely baffling to me. I mean, I've occasionally been worried about being mugged for the contents of my wallet under very specific circumstances (wandering around a city at night with not a lot of people around), but being afraid just sitting alone at home or cutting through an alley in broad daylight or when a stranger gets onto an elevator are sufficiently foreign concepts to me that it's hard to have any kind of visceral understanding of it, even if I can intellectually grasp the concepts. What the doctor is saying is that sometimes understanding the problem helps her feel like she has some influence on it, even though that influence is largely illusionary and she's still afraid. This issue is, in another way, what Mary is trying to get at when she yells at Alison about her plans to save the world, and what Daphne's roommates mentioned to her in a more casual way back at the beginning of the chapter. Alison hasn't been afraid of any physical danger since she was a child, so it can be hard for her to understand the perspective of people who have been. It probably would have been best to give the doctor an extra line or two to explain this, but on the other hand her dialogue was already a pretty heavy infodump, so I dunno. Brought To You By posted:It's not that there isn't any opposition to Mary's methods, it's that this chapter presents a very weak voice for that opposition. Looking at the major interactions this chapter; Because he understands what it feels like to be violated, presumably. The only thing I find weird about that scene is that this dude is just randomly showing her the video while she's in his office on other business, but Alison seemed to find that weird too, so it didn't bother me as much.. Brought To You By posted:As previously stated, the doctor isn't interested in the morality of the killings but is rather focused on the implications of disenfranchised people gaining power and acting out against their oppression. To be fair, she also does say that what the slasher is doing is wrong. She just considers it an inevitable consequence of powers being assigned in a wholly random fashion, and thinks the problem is likely to get worse. She's looking at things from a statistical perspective (as shown by her other dialogue), where the moral factor is basically irrelevant in the face of mathematical mapping of social trends. From her perspective, it's like talking about individual morality when looking at crime statistics, when you'd have a much better time if you looked at economic indicators for that same period. Brought To You By posted:Problem is, she quotes the often mentioned but already disproven 1 in 5 statistic and a 2% conviction rate statistic that I can't find outside of the RAINN website. I can't help but feel it's the authors trying to paint an out of context picture of the severity of rape. (fake edit: Remembering the early life of this thread I'm putting a disclaimer here. I'm not saying that rape isn't wrong but inflating an issue doesn't help people conceptualize it's impact on the world around them) This number has actually been confirmed by additional work. The six percent figure is for a single year, rather than "at some point", and is generally considered to be an underestimate anyway. I used to think it was wrong, too, until I started talking to more women. These days, frankly, I wonder if 20% is too low an estimate. 7% of men, too, and I would bet large sums of money that that's low, because men are much more reluctant to admit it when they're raped, even in confidence. The 2% figure, there is no good data for, unfortunately. (For the purposes of conversation, anyway. I'd love it if that figure were wrong and it were actually 50% or something.) It's widely-circulated, so it's not surprising that the doctor might use it, but doing a study of how often rapists are convicted if you're trying to include unreported rapes is basically impossible. You can get some raw numbers of sexual assaults by using the methods above (surveys, essentially), but many people will commit multiple offenses, so you can't tie that directly into a number of rapists. That said, generally, the highest estimates I found say about a third of reported cases get prosecuted at all and conviction rate is less than 50%, so even using relatively optimistic numbers and assuming every single rape were reported, you'd be looking at a maximum of about 15% of rape incidents leading to a conviction. A 2-3% figure is not totally out of the question in that case. All of these numbers are American statistics; other countries don't necessarily even gather the same data. (I strongly suspect the situation is worse in many parts of the world, but that's an intuition based on observation, not a statistic.) Even in the U.S. there's wide variance by region, since handling of crime is mostly a state-level affair and even some city's local police forces handle things differently. (For example, in New Orleans only 14% of reported cases were investigated at all between 2011 and 2013.) I have many problems with this issue, but its statement that this country is super lovely at handling rape is not among them. Brought To You By posted:Furnace's news speech puts him firmly in the "gently caress the slasher" camp but he's the series strawman so we can't agree with him without endorsing assaulting, and murdering rape victims. Patrick has exactly one good point about how this problem should be looked at and how Mary's method is not efficient before that whole conversation devolves. Finally we have the confrontation between Mary and Allison which ends on this note. The issue definitely does not spend a lot of time arguing that Moonshadow's methods are wrong, although a few characters do just state that they are. I believe that this is because the creators (potentially incorrectly) assumed that most readers would already start out disagreeing with her methods and would need a lot of lift to get them to the point where they'd even consider her point of view. I mentioned crime statistics above. We know that people commit more crimes when the economy tanks (although that is not in any way the only factor involved). You can kind of understand why that would be, with people feeling hopeless or turning to illegal sources of income, etc. But if you're faced with an individual person who is, say, robbing your neighbor's house, that doesn't mean you say "well, I understand that the economy is bad right now, and therefore it's okay for you to do that". You still call the police. The fact that we're supposed to be given an understanding of Mary's actions does not mean that we're supposed to excuse them; the author presumably did not feel like he needed to explain to the audience that murder is wrong. (I actually still would have, if I were writing it, but that isn't the choice they made and I don't think it's because they're cool with vigilante rapist murder.) I also don't think we're meant to be celebrating Moonshadow's escape here. It's pretty clearly cast as a failure on Alison's part, and our sympathies are meant to be with her, not the people she's confronting. Moonshadow used her knowledge of Alison's "boy scout" nature to trick her and run for it so she can keep on serial-murdering dudes. It's a downer ending.
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Sep 20, 2015 15:58
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