On the subject of rape in the Buffyverse: I'm not sure of its fit with regard to patterns and context, but there's a few panels in IDW's "Spike: After the Fall" comics that to me are clearly a depiction of rape -- but not so to the comic's writer. It's the story arc in which Los Angeles has been sent to a hell dimension, and Spike is there protecting a group of humans and Illyria (who he believes is sharing the shell with a resurrected Fred.) He and his group are captured by the evil demon Non, who has Spike beaten up, chains him in a cell with the humans, and reduces the humans to living skeletons.
The behavior of Spider, one of Non's young female henchmen, is just as deplorable. Having taken a fancy to Spike, she "visits" him in the cell: crawls onto his lap, forces a kiss on his mouth, unzips his pants, and demands that he get an erection so that she can mount him. He's both drawn and written as showing disgust, and tries to kick her away. He asks her to help his suffering human companions, and she scoffs that they're dead already. He demands to know if Fred is all right, and Spider pouts, "Stop thinking about her! Think about ME!"
On IDW's message forums, I commented on how horrid I thought Spider was, and how I was glad that Spike was depicted as being revolted by her sexual molestation of him. I was floored when the author of that comic replied to me that it wasn't rape or molestation at all; that Spike enjoyed Spider's attentions and that he (the writer) thought that Spider would make a cute girlfriend for Spike. O_O
He seemed genuinely surprised that I found Spider and the scene offensive -- and he didn't answer when another poster later asked him to imagine the scene with the genders switched (Buffy chained and being forcibly mounted by a male demon, for instance.) I tried to explain to him that in my book, it doesn't matter how cool the guy is or how pretty the girl: if someone's making you have sex when you've made it clear that you don't want to be having sex, that's rape.
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The behavior of Spider, one of Non's young female henchmen, is just as deplorable. Having taken a fancy to Spike, she "visits" him in the cell: crawls onto his lap, forces a kiss on his mouth, unzips his pants, and demands that he get an erection so that she can mount him. He's both drawn and written as showing disgust, and tries to kick her away. He asks her to help his suffering human companions, and she scoffs that they're dead already. He demands to know if Fred is all right, and Spider pouts, "Stop thinking about her! Think about ME!"
On IDW's message forums, I commented on how horrid I thought Spider was, and how I was glad that Spike was depicted as being revolted by her sexual molestation of him. I was floored when the author of that comic replied to me that it wasn't rape or molestation at all; that Spike enjoyed Spider's attentions and that he (the writer) thought that Spider would make a cute girlfriend for Spike. O_O
He seemed genuinely surprised that I found Spider and the scene offensive -- and he didn't answer when another poster later asked him to imagine the scene with the genders switched (Buffy chained and being forcibly mounted by a male demon, for instance.) I tried to explain to him that in my book, it doesn't matter how cool the guy is or how pretty the girl: if someone's making you have sex when you've made it clear that you don't want to be having sex, that's rape.