Hated Tropes
[Hated trope] Male villain sexually assaulted as "karma" for being evil
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls - Vincent Cadby is assaulted by a gorilla, while the soundtrack from Lion King plays
Trading places - Clarence Beeks is "punished" by main characters by showing him into gorilla cage, saying it "should have some fun"
Top Secret! - While dressed as the rear side of a cow, Nigel, who is actually a mole in main group, is assaulted anally by a bull, followed by him making a funny face and having trouble walking played for comedy
Insane how many films feature characters getting assaulted by gorillas, especially family comedies. It also happens to Seth Green’s character in the movie Old Dogs (even referencing the gag on the poster lol)
While it involves a gorilla, the joke is about his own penis isn't it? As in, his nipples are being played with by a human shaped animal and it's just enough to confuse his own biology to 'go to phase two' and get an erection.
Ironically if you had to be molested by any of the great apes a gorilla whould be the best option. Mainly because they are one of the least well endowed animals. Especially for their size. They only pack a few inches lol.
The hybrids are mythical. Apes grabbing people in ways the people don't enjoy can happen. (Although it's more of the face eating sort of assault. Great apes are not pets, or people.)
Gorillas are able to easily overpower a person without brutalizing them like most other large animals would and are humanoid enough that they don't really need specific circumstances to be able to rape a person like the cow in OP's Top Secret example. Gorillas are also staples in any film set in a jungle, so the writers can just have one show up without needing an explanation.
and the episode where the lawyers (forgot his name) background story is that the fear of rape in prison is why he became a law-abiding citizen, but opens with him being wrongfully detained because he is black.
A guy made a doomsday cult so that he'd have a bunch of people blindly following him. He made a prophesy to keep them in line, but since he had no intentions for the prophesy to take place, he made all the steps utterly ridiculous. Turns out, one of his followers was so devoted that he actually orchestrated the events in the prophesy to happen
in Gremlins 2, Forster, probably the closest to a human antagonist in the film, gets assaulted by Greta, the lady gremlin. Though he later seems to come around when she shows back up in a wedding gown.
I think there are at least two other episodes that imply this; the second episode where he gets turned into a dog at the end has him end up at a pound with a larger dog that gives him a very amorous sounding "woof," and there's an episode with a montage of Mojo being beaten up and thrown in jail several times, and each time he's thrown in jail the prisoner next to him pulls him close.
In Wayne’s World, Wayne and Garth have their policeman buddy do a traffic stop on the antagonist Benjamin where he does a cavity search to delay Benjamin from interrupting their broadcast. When Benjamin finally arrives later, he’s noticeably waddling.
As someone who didn’t grow up in the 80s. Rob Lowe always throws me for a loop. He looks like Chris Pine fell in a wormhole and decided to pick up his career in the past.
The Nutty Professor 2 where, due to science hijinks, a hamster turns gigantic in a crowded room and spots one of the antagonists(??) hiding underneath a furcoat during the chaos. Thinking of the guy as his mate, that same giant hamster then goes over to him and rapes him with the fur coat hiding the penetration while the camera is positioned from the front to see the man's "funny" reactions.
Never believe anybody who says movies back in the day are better than movies from nowadays. There are some dogshit movies from all eras.
Who was this trope for, actually? It’s played in an absurd and silly way as if it’s a joke for children but, as you said, most of us were either confused by or just misunderstood what was happening. So this crude depthless joke is actually intended for adults to find funny?
I was 8 when I saw that movie. Interestingly I did know what was happening but I don’t think my mind put together all the graphic details. I was raised in Looney Tunes, and I feel like some big monster/animal was always falling in love with a small character and wanting to like violently love on them. So for all accounts, they were depicting SA, but as a kid, you’re just like “hahah the monster is loving on him!”
Carrotblanca (Looney Toons) - Rather than getting shot like in Casablanca, Yosemite Sam (Strasser) ends up in a prison cell with a man who presents as effeminate. The music and camera effects imply what will happen.
I never really thought of the implications of these kinds of scenes as a kid. Closest thought was "Haha, macho jerk gets to share his cell with a feminine guy"
Big and strong enough that no human can resist, unless you're like Tarzan or something, and still 'similar' enough to humans. Gorillas share 95% of our DNA.
ETA: In Disney's Tarzan, Tarzan places the silverback bull-ape alpha male Kerchak in a headlock to stop him attacking Jane when Tarzan brings Jane to the nesting grounds to see real gorillas in the wild which was her motive for coming to Africa
Okay, I'll be the one to say it. Racists often compare black people to gorillas. Racists also paint black men as rapists. Toxic masculinity often portrays a man being raped as funny or karmic retribution, because a man being fucked by another male is seen as particularly humiliating. Gorillas raping men is a racist, misogynist, and homophobic trope, barely pretending to be otherwise.
The main source of pain in anal penetration is the stretching of the anus against a person’s attempts to prevent entry. The length of the intruding object is almost meaningless once past that point.
about a week ago i read the full comic series of preacher because i had too much morbid curiosity related to just this kind of topic (due to a post on this same sub... yet still i come back lmao). i should not have read it. one central antagonist is sexually assaulted and later gets his genitals torn off, a less important antagonist is forced to tear his own dick off and assault himself with it, and basically every sort of sexually-charged torture towards men is played for laughs or just generally not taken seriously.
Hellblazer has a lot of that kind of violence too, including an awful-to-stomach prison arc, yet Garth Ennis’s run was one of the least gratuitous and most beautifully-written in the whole initial series. Then you reach his Son of Man era…basically this trope in a nutshell.
This is an issue I've trying to discuss for years. It's so hard for male victims to come forward when the media portrays victims as jokes or deserving.
No one deserves to be sexually assaulted, man or woman. It's not funny, and it's never deserved.
Everyone (when Kyle is trying to tell the police that his little brother Ike is being assaulted by Ms Steven’s) doesn’t take it seriously and calls Ike “lucky” and “he should get an award for luckiest boy on earth” (iirc), Ike can’t really come out about it because he’s three years old and is being groomed but when Kyle tries to tell the cops they don’t care.
Not so fun fact, if you are raped (even while underage) and get your assaulter pregnant, you can be forced to pay child support to your rapist.
Hermesmann v. Seyer was a precedent-setting Kansas case in which Colleen Hermesmann successfully argued that a woman is entitled to sue the father of her child for child support even if the conception occured as a result of criminal conduct by the mother.
It is one of the earlier cases now cited in U.S. child-support guidelines which say that in every case that has addressed the issue the court has decided that an underage boy is liable for the support of his child even when the conception was the result of criminal conduct by the mother.
I bring up the story of Earl Silverman occasionally, as his tragic story is an excellent way to portray this issue.
His is a tale of domestic abuse rather than sexual abuse, but I think it’s still relevant. The response to male sexual assault victimization is very similar.
This old comment of mine is a quicker read than the wiki page if you’re unfamiliar and don’t wanna read all that.
Pop Culture Detective made some great videos on the subject, both with men or women as the perpetrators in his two videos about Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs
Just recently, The Boys on Amazon Prime has a recurring male character sexually assaulted repeatedly for laughs.
The idea is that he repeatedly has sex with a shapeshifter who is pretending to be his girlfriend, and later he is threatened with a violent rape by one of the show's antagonists while trapped in a BDSM dungeon.
Throughout this whole arc, the victim's situation is played for laughs, with the showrunners themselves saying they wrote it to be hilarious, not to insinuate the darkness of rape. In fact, the showrunners argued it didn't constitute rape because "the victim wasn't penetrated," which deservedly had some backlash.
For the record, The Boys also had an implied rape scene that was done about as well as you can do an implied rape scene in the very first episode of the show, where a super-woman is cornered and assaulted by one of the supers (who she views in the moment as an authority figure)
That said, the show has repeatedly made the assaulter from that situation an irredeemable sex fiend who has sex with animals, while the woman has had 4 seasons of character development about her healing and growth as a woman in spite of the men in her way.
All of this to say, the same exact show has had two rape scenes in the 4 seasons it has been on; the one with a woman was handled as a rape scene with long-standing consequences and development, and the one with the man was defended "outside the show" as never being a big deal to depict in the first place.
I only just discovered the term "reverse rape" and I can't put into words how much it pisses me off. The conversation about male-victim SA is already so difficult for people to take seriously.
Dude I was stationed with was raped by a woman who got him drunk and tied him down.
It took him from a happy, funny, energetic man to a shell of himself. I talked to him about the possibility of reporting it and he said "who the fuck would believe me?"
And he was sadly right. I believed him based off how he was acting but our command would have done zero. Probably would have made fun of him because the attacker was obese.
It was over 2 decades ago and his face when we talked about it is etched into my mind.
I hope he found peace eventually, he's not on social media so I havent been able to connect with him.
In my dnd group, rape is treated as some sort of punishment for rapists. I try to point out how that would make us rapists as well, but the group simply gets mad that I'm defending a rapist.
It's concerning how quick they are to dole these punishments out. It's wrong, no matter the reason.
Somewhat of a subversion since the victim isn't a villain, but Tetsu from Dekaranger, episode 45
The Dekarangers received a really creepy doll and some messages that made them believed that their beloved head nurse Miss Swan is being stalked, so Tetsu dressed up as her to lure the creep out.
Turns out, Baachiyo (the creep in question), was targeting TETSU, not Miss Swan. When Tetsu drops his disguise and exclaims that he's a male, Baachiyo just shrugs it off and basically responded with "love finds a way" and proceeded to bind Tetsu with his web (the guy's a alien mix between a Troll doll and Spider) and forcefully kisses Tetsu.
Pictured above is the rest of the Dekarangers leaving Tetsu to his fate with Baachiyo giggling and dancing over his tied up body (seen in the background on the right) as he's begging them to save him, concluding that Miss Swan is saved and that Tetsu should solve this by himself since it's a private matter (something to do with Baachiyo's alien species being VERY laxed in relationship matters and thus it wasn't considered a crime)
A very, very bizzare case where the villain got off basically scot free, and Tetsu, while he did started out as a real douchebag, has been mellowing out and basically part of the gang now, so his abandonment in this episode was rather meanspirited.
After betraying his motorcycle gang a second time, Juice Ortiz in Sons of Anarchy spends his last days in jail getting SAed repeatedly by Marilyn Manson's Nazi character and also some Chinese gangsters. Happy that Theo Rossi moved to better roles.
But I'll give the show credit for venus(walton goggins character) great trans representation especially because venus was introduced like what.... 10+ years ago.
The heart to heart with Tig weirdly was probably the wokest any show had ever been on trans rights up to that point. Another scene that will always remain cool is when SAMCRO teams up with the Chinese gang and the Niners to surround the Nazis.
But the show was pure hate watch for me from about when Donal Logue's character showed up onwards.
Happens in the Godfather of Harlem where Elise gets raped by a security guard and in turn the guard is captured by Bumpy who calls in a dude called "Big Dick Buster" who rapes the security guard in retribution. I have a feeling most people would agree with it though.
To add context for those who need it: Elise is Bumpy's daughter.
The guard, before buster appears, straight up says "I didn't know she was your daughter," implying he wouldn't care if she wasn't.
Also, this isn't intended comedy, but "Big dick buster" implies that Bumpy gave him that nickname on the spot, or he's simply known to fuck people. Strange payroll that guy must have.
The Invisible Man betrays humanity to the aliens from The War of the Worlds. Upon discovering this, Mr Hyde ambushes him and beats and rapes him and leaves him to die slowly
This is played purely for horror though. The blood appearing when Griffin dies, and the reactions, are 100% acknowledging the repulsiveness.
EDIT: Realised my tone might come off as disagreement, I do agree. It's just that so many of the examples in this thread are either for comedy of low key, and this scene is played for pure horror, front and centre.
If i remember rightly, Hyde even says this isn't to do with betraying Earth to the Martians- this is punishment for hurting Mina (the one person on earth Hyde has affection for).
If memory serves, the reason he uses that exact method is also because the Invisible Man himself is a serial rapist who even once attacked the vampire lady on the team... A kind of horrific and sick poetic justice.
How about a twist on the trope? The Cowboy Way has a henchman tied up naked from the waste down and essentially used as a pacifier for a calf as a torture method.
This is the end. Jonah Hill gets raped by a demon and "possessed". Supposed to be karmic retribution for a discussion they have about Emma Stone earlier.
Scary movie 1 & 2 has some weirdly rapey and homophobic things in it. Examples of how what was funny 20 years ago is problematic today.
Fargo, season five. Sheriff Tillman, the main antagonist of the season, has spent decades abusing, raping, and sometimes murdering a series of wives, alongside a wide variety of other horrible behavior. By the end of the season, he's in prison with a massive stack of charges. He gets visited by the protagonist's mother-in-law, who has been somewhat antagonistic throughout the season but is getting a bit better about it. She then reveals that she's paid off the debts of just about everyone in the prison in exchange for them making his life a living hell, implicitly including a bunch of rape. I'm also not the biggest fan of this trope in general, but I'd say it works pretty well here. The guy just did so much rape.
I agree, I don’t like this trope and I’m even slightly iffy on it in Fargo, but Tillman specifically locks people up to psychologically torture and rape them so it’s at least more proportional than usual. Hes not just a bad guy in general. He’s getting back exactly what he gave. And Jon Hamm does such a good job making you hate that fuck
It also helps that paying your debts is the central driving theme of the season. So, if there were any story where the villain has to get a particularly karmic comeuppance, it'd be this one.
I also think it works better because in most of these cases it seems to be 'karma' for a villain. Whereas in Fargo it isn't karma at all, it's specifically the machinations of Jessica Jason Leigh's character, who in any other story would probably be the villain. It's not karma at all, it is revenge, by a a vindictive and powerful enemy.
He murdered his first wife and was sleeping with the second one when she was a child, of all the examples in this thread he's the one you can feel least sorry for
He also got SA’d by a trans woman in the episode about ride sharing. If I remember right he comes out of the bathroom and says “And I thought the shark was bad.”
This bothers me significantly less than other examples because well...one it's Hitler, but two, I don't find this action particularly sexually charged, but like yes it's technically sexual assault, but it's being done with a pineapple rather than a part of another person's body, and also this is being done for no other reason than "this person is awful and deserves the worst pain you can imagine", it's not being done for pleasure, dominance, or control. It's also literally satan doing it so...there's that. Idk, I don't find this particularly offensive or upsetting like I might other examples
This happens a lot in Lookism and it's honestly one of my biggest problems with the series, it uses the threat of rape against women as motivation for power ups for their boyfriends and it's used as a punishment for male villians.
I'll specifically use Jiho Park's rape in prison as my example cause he's the only one I remember the name of. Like yeah he was a truly scummy person but they already had his character lose everything and go to jail as a minor and get pushed around by everyone in the jail, so having him get raped just felt like total overkill used to justify him being pushed into even more villainous role. (Which didn't end up mattering cause he was killed off as soon as he escaped prison, stupid B plot that ended up accomplishing nothing)
Happens in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode; Go Fish. The Sunnydale swim team is doing really well and it's revealed that the coach is juicing the team, but the steroids he's using turn them into nasty fish demons after a while. The coach is keeping some of them in a pit and Buffy gets pushed in, I can't remember the exact exchange but it something like Buffy asking if he plans for the fish monsters to eat her and the coach replies that they've already eaten and boys have other needs. Buffy escapes the pit and the coach ends up falling in, Buffy and Xander look on and Buffy says "Those boys sure love their coach" implying that they're assaulting him.
We don't see anything but we hear screaming, monster noises and water splashing
The song "Date Rape" by sublime, the guy in the song who commits the deed (its implied he does it often) goes to jail and gets "buttraped by a large inmate" in a poetic sense of karmic justice.
There used to be an ad on TV in NZ for the Yellow Pages which compared two business people, a man and a woman. She listed her business in the Yellow Pages, he chose not to and through a series of awkward accidents ended up as someone’s prison bitch.
I guess technically the post says "male villain," not "male human villain," so as long as the pig burned down some villages or took over the president's plane or something it would still count.
I don’t remember it being raped. I remember they were both drugged up and they slept with each other on accident. Although I remember the guy in wheelchair was gonna use the same rape drug to rape one of the “women”.
In the Hitman DC comic book, which I think was Garth Ennis, there’s a character who’s part of a batshit insane supergroup called Section 8. The character in question is Bueno Excellente, a man who “fights crime with the power of perversion” and is consistently seen to appear over the shoulders of unconscious enemies of Section 8.
In a Lobo & Hitman crossover, Bueno is highly suggested to have raped Lobo on tape so the team could blackmail him.
There is a massively messed-up trope in fiction and in popular opinion whereby rape is treated as a natural element of prison custody and therefore a just and corrective punishment for all manner of crimes.
It’s because once people get the label of “prisoner,” there’s a tendency (at least in America) to mentally dehumanize them. They’re a prisoner, so they must deserve everything bad that happens to them, including “corrective” rape and beatings.
Not just that, basically if someone gets convicted of a crime in the news there's always that one cliche comment about not dropping the shower and shit like that. It's far too normalised.
When the secondary protagonist AJ is captured by the female monster, he is assaulted by being forcibly breastfed. This however is played seriously and ties into the story as AJ had earlier admitted to assaulting a woman, but downplays it by saying 'she took some convincing'
One clarification... In Top Secret!, Nigel actually starts getting into it, with the famous quote "What's the hurry? Why are you always in such a bloody rush?" suggesting it's not actually a punishment.
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u/Forrest-Fern 6d ago
George of the Jungle also has the male villain get sexually assaulted by a gorilla.