Serial Rapist

[xnull]

The first thing I would like to say is thank you to everyone who gave me feedback (and "fuck you" to the person who gave me no feedback at all!).

The second thing I would like to say is that feedback (including some I've gotten outside of the IS forums) I have gotten on Serial Rapist falls into two categories:

• Holy shit. I'm disturbed. It sounds like you are writing from your own serial raping experience. Very realistic.
• Ugh. I'm disturbed, and this story was totally unrealistic.

The point of this story never got written in time for the competition. It's supposed to be more about the internal struggle of the serial rapist himself and how he justifies the things he does for himself. After the rape, the character saunters back home, lost in thought, goes through daily actions (with a bit of a shake in his arms and random moments of daydreaming about sex). But then he finds he can't immediately sleep, and slowly realizes the gravity of what he has done. He becomes violently physically ill, perhaps being psychosomatic or perhaps its something else. The situation fucks from his head and he seriously beats up on himself and laments for what he does. He beings to fantasize at several points turning himself in and doing something to give back to Tatana/Tessa and to make the rest of their life okay again.

Raised Mormon, he embraces religion as an escape and ultimately finds it more damaging to him than good. He pulls his hair out on a daily basis, loses weight and hates himself but also struggles with an animalistic sense to continue and forget his sins.

The reader has a choice to end now or allow him to give in to urges. The reader will of course be in charge of picking all of his victims and all of him methods. He begins working out and eating healthily solely so that he may rape better. He gains a level of infamy, but is much smarter than he was that first time (he gets lucky his first run). This becomes the main portion of the story. The main character slowly evolves a sense of righteousness to what he does, but there is always a new excuse and a new reason he brings to the table, evidence that he just needs to believe that he is a good person for his own mental health. Hopefully the reader can understand these sorts of justifications and perhaps question the ways that they themselves justify themselves.

I'm not sure how the story will end, and perhaps that will be enough for you to read it (when I finish writing it of course).

Essentially, I understand the feedback. The character never got a chance to evolve. You never got to learn about him and how he thinks and what he needs.

Without further ado, el feedbacko:

The plot seems solid and I am interested as well as repelled. I don't think it is something I would read if I were looking for pornography, but it does have a perverse appeal none the less. Usually when I read something from the perspective of a criminal I feel for the criminal, but this guy is disgusting. Is that intentional? He seems like a "boyfriend rapist" but I kind of feel sorry for those guys most of the time. Although he seems to be romanticizing his rape he isn't justifying enough from the onset for me to really believe that he thinks what he is doing is ok. He is really disturbing. I'm interested however to see how he gets out of explaining the bruises he put on her face by back handing her twice. I kind of hope he is destined for some kind of rehabilitation facility hopefully where he will be butt raped. Anyway on to the rating stuff...

Any reaction to this character be it empathy, hatred, or even jealousy is a healthy and natural reaction. My attempt isn't to make you feel some particular way about the rapist, but to have you make his choices and for me to get into his potential mindsets. From my viewpoint a serial rapist is the same as everyone else, he just deals with things different ways. He needs to have self esteem for self-justification, for example, and he needs to find a way to achieve this while he's surrounded by people who quote "Thou shalt not rape thy neighbor" at him through their television sets and newspapers.

I was too uncomfortable to really enjoy it. Perhaps I related too much with the victim. But I am interested, and I think it is a solid addition to the site.

This person gave me a 9 for enjoyment, even though they were "too uncomfortable to enjoy it". Such kind words and ratings could have only come from KatieWroteIt. Thank you Katie, very much, for your feedback.

Edit: Katie probably isn't it... Ves is my guess. "Perhaps I related too much to the victim."

It’s a very well done story. If you had completed more of it you would’ve received several additional points to plot. Unfortunately, I could not justify giving you a high score with how little of the actual story was completed. Still, this is a good piece, worth finishing.

This sounds like Apoth's writing.

I plan on completing more of it. The question always remains: how many hours should I allocate to what? Can I justify taking time away from X of N (here N is a very large number) of personal projects to write about rape? I sincerely hope I will get to continue writing this piece in addition to 2023.

Well Xnull wanted a crapload of feedback, so here’s my uncharacteristic effort.

There are a few problems I have with the story despite liking it overall.

For the hooker branch, I have a really hard time believing the guy couldn’t get a skanky ghetto hooker and they were all turning him down. I could see it if they were high class ones or maybe even if he was impossibly ugly, but cash and ghetto hookers is pretty much a done deal.

The point that I perhaps didn't get across was that he didn't end up asking any hookers. He was in the ghetto asking whatever women he could scrounge up the courage to ask. He's pretty naive when it comes to spotting a hooker from growing up in a wealthy Mormon neighborhood, and there is a strain of superiority he feels over them. He thinks he can go to the ghetto and there will be women all over the place willing to hand out pussy.

A more realistic scenario is a ghetto hooker accepting the offer, but then having some thug mugging him when they got to the place where they were going to have sex. From this frustration then he goes and rapes another one (or maybe the same one later).

This definitely could have been worked in had I envisioned it. It's pretty plausible and it would have created a tough scenario. It would then be a trial for the character to explain how he got baseball bat wounds (or whatever).

For the neighborhood girl one, the main problem is his serial raping isn’t going to last very long. His parents and her parent know one another and he told her mom that he was taking her out, so hitting and raping her would sort of tip everyone off pretty soon. Even if she was so scared to tell.

This will fuck with the main character's mind. I planned on dealing with this eloquently.

The only possible way out for him would be if his dad was some high ranking Mormon that could cover it all up and it was one those stricter closed society of Mormons who didn’t speak of such things and women were second class citizen status for the most part. Still, the rape might still be frowned upon (His dad might beat the shit out of him for disobeying god or something) and hell he might even be forced to marry the girl if he got her pregnant. (That would be a funny ending)

Hehe, totally a twist of fate. Hey, weirder things have happened.

Anyway that’s my feedback.

Thanks again. ^^

What you have here are the beginnings of a potentially very good story. Your writing is clear, never too belabored, and I can see it improving rapidly through your future efforts. I would certainly encourage you to continue with this project, though it needs some major revisions and developments.

Honesty. Thank you.

My biggest critique of this story, besides the fact that it’s incomplete, is that I find it completely unbelievable. The whole idea of the “baby-faced killer” only works if there is a real level of menace lurking somewhere in that individual’s personality.

I'm not a fan of Thoreau, but I do find his quote "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation" fascinating and true. But haven't you noticed the men who lead rapid, loud lives of desperation?

I think it's a cop-out and an easy explanation to pass off innocent-seeming "sinners" as being deeply disturbed from a young age, and wholey an explanation which does not ring true. Here's a list of people who led rapid, loud lives of desperation. Okay, you can blame a few of them on "bed-wetting" incidents (I'm serious, read a lot of these), but on the whole there are a surprising number of serial murders who are in fact baby-faced-killers without that real level of menace.

In any case, I hope that the shortened outline of the story above will satisfy your lust for the realistic better than this introduction.

[xnull]

I don’t think that what amounts here to nothing much more than hormonal lust would drive this young man to commit a very serious and severely punishable crime. So what if he’s a porn fiend? That can be said of the vast majority of his peers as well. There needs to be something that makes this guy different. I want to know more about him. What kind of sick fantasies exist in his head? The real pinnacle of unbelievability came when he leaves the house and starts soliciting sex on the street, for several hours no less! No pasty white kid would last this long in the hood without getting his ass thoroughly kicked in. This part of the story would have been much more effective if he had waited to go to a known prostitution area, probably at night, and in the car which he would have had to invent some excuse to borrow. The bicycle caused a further problem because it made him see obscenely juvenile.

A repeat of what I said above.

Also, the way you wrote it, his muscles turned into gelatin almost the second that he got on the bike. If he is really that out of shape, then how is he able later on to easily subdue an adrenalin-pumped girl trying desperately to get away from him?

Perhaps this is an oversight on my part. I didn't realize that I made him seem out of shape. Since this seems to be the case, I'll have to go back and edit that. Thanks!

The better branch was the one which you didn’t develop as much: the one about Tessa. I found her character to be interesting because she was vague and somewhat mysterious, and allowed to have more of a personality than Tatana. Also, I’d like to know how he thinks he can get away with raping his own classmate. Does he ever once think of repercussions? Again, it comes back to the same issue: I know he wants to get laid, but this is a far cry from being capable of sexual assault. What is the nature of the missing link? If he is simply a sociopath, and raping someone really is as easy as going for a long bike ride, then you need to offer some clues pointing to his capacity for extreme sadism. They can be subtle. They just need to be there.

Again, I think being a sociopath underneath is an easy comfortable world to live in. I promise the character will be developed later on, but if I understand what you are saying... no, I don't plan on having having some poor boo-hoo history for the main character or some deep dark inner hatred for everything (at least not any more than a typical someone). I promise that the main character will question why he did what he did as well.

You would also benefit from having a richer sense of atmosphere in this story. I had a vague sense of it taking place somewhere in suburban Nevada or something, but that was about all the information you gave. It would be interesting to see this world from your character’s viewpoint. Does he see it as it is or is his vision skewed by his internal realities? What I’m saying is that having a better sense of the place would in turn offer up a better sense of the person.

"The description of the oppressive mormon neighborhood is spot-on" Quote from another commenter.

For this commenter, the description of the Mormon neighborhood was actually the only saving grace of the story.

So I suppose you are right. I need to make things more atmospheric. I thought I did a decent enough job by highlighting how odd the sensation became for the main character when he biked down rodes he typically drove (and other such descriptions). Okay, well most of these are from a 1st person-esque perspective. I'll try more 3rd person omnipotent narration.

Keep working at it, and for God’s sake, create a finished (or nearly finished) product in the future so that you don’t screw yourself out of plot points!

Wonderful advice! (*Mutter mutter*)

I know I really, really need to.

There's not much here, and that really, really shows. I don't know how you could have broken what you have now into smaller bits- I'm pretending you have dummy rooms, that would work better. What you do have is very linear, and the places that do finally break into choices seem odd, especially considering all of the parts in the narrative that would have made a good breakpoint.

Yeah, I wish it had been finished more.
I'm really trying to reserve the reader's choices for rape-scenes. Like EndMaster's Necromancer, I save choices for plot points which force the reader to take on the identity of the main character. I'm doing something different, still. I'm not sure why or to what end or effect, but I desire to make the reader choose who gets raped and how. Sorry I don't have a deeper explanation for it.

The description of the oppressive mormon neighborhood is spot-on, and is what saved this fragment for me, flat though it feels. Though, only a mormon hooker could think she can get away with only a handjob. Uggh. Mostly, I'm just confused as to how the main character becomes so twisted so fast. He just randomly decides to go off the deep end.

Tatana wasn't in fact a hooker. Well, not in the "I make a living on the streets" sort of way. I suppose I'll need to go back and redo bits of the ghetto portion so that I can more clearly illustrate that it isn't quite filled with the hookers that the main character thinks.

This seems to be the most frequent claim about the work. "There is no reason for the character to have raped. Simply none, and I refuse to believe that it is realistic."

In combination with the other things I have said I would like to remind you of the following: Authors typically take illustrious situations (sometimes even completely unrealistic ones) to draw the reader in and to execute introspection.

If you can not believe that this young man might ever, in a moment of weakness, rape a young woman, please suspend your disbelief so that you may experience and learn what there might be to experience and learn from reading the story.

[Vesnic]

If you can not believe that this young man might ever, in a moment of weakness, rape a young woman, please suspend your disbelief so that you may experience and learn what there might be to experience and learn from reading the story.

But you're not talking about a moment of weakness. All of Crime and Punishment centered around one moment of weakness, which helps to make the murders at the beginning fairly believable. This is different. The name of your title is Serial Rapist. The implication that this is going to be a repeated behavior pattern is the reason why everyone is demanding to know more about what is going on in his head.

[xnull]

You will know more about what is going on in his head later.

Like I splurdged out before, this piece was not written to that point before I had to submit it for the competition.

So hold on to your horses.

It's good to know at least how large the demand is.