I know we had this discussion at some point in the past with the whole 'is there really a difference between non-con and dub-con stuff', but I was looking for some Five/Turlough smut I hadn't already read a dozen times, and ran across a strange little fanfic in which the author's warnings were: dub-con (maybe), non-con (kind've).

Deciding this needed looking into further, I decided to read the fanfic. It took me a moment to get past the fact that it was Eight/Turlough, two characters who never interacted in the series (the original series was canceled after the movie in which Seven regenerated into Eight was made). As near as I know, they've never met in any of the Big Finish Audio productions put out either. They do interact in the excellent book "The Eight Doctors,' where they seem to get along just fine, which makes sense, given that Turlough was in the episode "The Five Doctors,' so he's aware that it's possible for different aspects of a Time Lord to exist in different places at the same time.

Well, as it turned out, it was mostly dub-con and no non-con. I was still puzzling over what Eight and Turlough were doing together, and reading the author's notes, I discovered that what I'd suspected was true; the author slashed them because she thought they looked pretty together.

At least Eight had the common decency to stop when Turlough said no, which is more than you usually get in these sort of fanfics.

Now I'll admit, I'm a fan of hurt/comfort. I don't mind the occasional 'whump!' fanfic, but I'd really prefer that the hurting and whumping not involve rape. Probably because I've seldom seen it done well.

I've just recently gotten back into writing fanfic after nearly a year-long hiatus, and I've discovered that there's much more rapefic in Dr. Who fandom than I recall there being. I write Classic Who, but even it's plagued by this crap. As for the new series, I don't know whether we can blame it on the more sexual angle the show's taken, the fact that society is more open about sex than it was when I started watching the show (it's not that the stuff didn't exist, it's just it was harder to find because most Classic Who fanfic was printed out in zines and sold at cons). I've noticed that, in New Who, poor Ten seems to get it particularly bad. I realize he's not the most stable of guys, but I honestly can't see him just going around raping companions willy-nilly. Makes me miss the days of subtext.

The point is that 'rape' seems to be a taboo word in the fanfic lexicon. You get dub con and non-con, but seldom do you get the truth. This confuses me because it happens in TV shows, in movies and books, and in real life on a regular basis, and I can't tell if the fandom writers are trying to fool themselves (and their readers) that they're writing about a subject that really should be handled more delicately (or maybe not at all).

Your thoughts?

They avoid the word because they think nobody will notice what the act is if it has a different label. Or maybe they don't think it's really rape, especially if it's between fictional characters whose reactions the author controls.

It could also be a labelling issue. Objectively speaking a rapefic, a noncon, and a dubcon might all contain something which would be judged as rape in court, but they're split into different groups so that readers can find exactly what they're looking for.

I've noticed that adultfanfiction.net has taken a stand on this - the only tag available for any form of sexual assault there now is RapeFic. Obviously they don't have the resources to re-tag all of the older stories, but it's a step...

I like non-con fic. And yes, I'd say it's a labeling issue. To me, I'd assume something labeled "non-con" was porn and something labeled "rapefic" was about someone dealing with the trauma of rape. Dubcon's hard to define, but I don't have a problem with the label existing.

^Pretty much that. If I see non-con, I expect it to be all trashy and not even trying to deal with rape in a realistic way. Dubcon is "complicated".

Last I checked, that was mostly in the 80's, Badger. Most of the romance genre has moved away from rape-is-love. I've read some interesting essays about that, which postulate that perhaps as women are more able to 'own' their sexuality, the less they feel the need for an imaginary figure to 'make' them feel something.

I don't read much romance, but if there's literally nothing else to read, I will. Most of what I've seen post 1995 has sex scenes that are most definitely consensual. I do, however, read Smart Bitches, Trash Books. The snark is delicious, and they address the 80's trope of "Heroine raped by Hero; turns out to be in love."

Well, now it isn't romance novels youngins budding into puberty are reading, but rather hardcore porn that is free and can be easily found if you google "porntube" and hardcore porn fanfics on livejounal and adultfanfic. blah blah blah normalization of rape and lack of sex ed and all that stuff blah blah blah

Complaining about the "rape is love" trope and complaining about non-con are not quite the same thing.

The writers who are truly the worst about "rape is love" have a tendency to not use labels like "rape", "non-con" or even "dub-con" because they think that later approval of an act can retroactively make it not be rape.

Which simply isn't true. In real life, people will occasionally fall in love with and forgive their rapists, but this is rare and it doesn't make it not-rape. Just like if you forgive someone who purposely burned your house to the ground, it doesn't mean that it suddenly wasn't arson. If you forgive your murderer while that murderer is in the act of stabbing you to death, it doesn't mean that the murder suddenly becomes suicide.

You tend to come across the worst examples of "rape is love" completely unwarned because those who are deeply invested in the trope don't think there is anything warn-worthy about it.

For those who label, "rape" usually means that it will be portrayed realistically, usually with more of a focus on the aftermath and rape recovery than on the act itself. You are quite likely to find a hurt/comfort fic with the victim getting psychological support from another character.

The label "non-con" tends to mean a more fictionalized version of rape, likely one where it is not realistic or is presented for the kink or is fetishized in some way. These are the writers who don't want to use the "rape" label but still recognize on some level that rape is basically what happened.

The label "dub-con" is extremely complicated and can mean all sorts of things.

It can mean a brutal rape that the writer found sexy, so they are too chickenshit to label it as non-con or rape because they want to believe it was somehow justified or good.

It can mean a situation where the characters did consent but this isn't made clear to the readers until after the sex act (such as a role-played rape scenario that is not revealed to the reader as being role-play until later, but the characters knew it all along).

It can mean a situation where alcohol or drugs are involved, not enough to completely invalidate consent in everyone's eyes but enough to make it possibly questionable (a truly conscientious writer will put on a dub-con label just to be clear, if for example two characters in a long-term relationship have sex after even one glass of wine).

It can mean a situation where sexual coercion is involved, but not of an unquestionably serious degree. For example, threatening "I'll kill your child if you don't have sex" is certainly rape, but other things, such as "I might give you a promotion if you have sex with me" or "I'll get you an autograph from your favorite movie star if you have sex with me" might fall under the category of sexual abuse or harassment instead of rape, and would not exactly be rape in everyone's definition.

It can mean that one character is in that gray area between 15 and 18 where laws and societies have a hard time deciding whether any sex with an older person counts as statutory rape or not (but in this case, a conscientious writer can solve the problem by putting on an "underage sex" label).

It can mean a situation where a love spell or love potion is involved, which to some people is analogous to real-life brainwashing and is therefore rape, but to some people it is a "magical" way of producing consent, is too fantastical to be related to anything in the real world, and therefore doesn't count as rape. The situation can become particularly muddled if the characters in question were already attracted to each other before the love potion/spell and thus it could easily be believed that they might have consented naturally.

If people consent to have sex, but it is not fully-informed consent, it might fall into a gray area where reasonable people could argue about whether it was really rape or not and thus qualify for the dub-con label. For example, Prince has an arranged marriage to Princess, but Random Servant Girl drugs Princess and substitutes herself at the last moment. Prince, not knowing the difference because he's never seen Princess, has sex with Random Servant Girl. Did Random Servant Girl rape him? Another example. Bob and Alice fall in love online. They talk a great deal, but Bob never sends his photos to Alice, he sends Charlie's photos instead. When Alice wants a real-life sex date, Bob sends Charlie instead and Charlie and Alice have sex. Did Alice get raped? Or another example, Stacy's highest ambition in life is to have sex with an astronaut. Stacy finds Bill, who says he's an astronaut though he's actually a con-man. The two have sex. Was Stacy raped?

I like consensual D/s, particularly lifestyle stuff, as well; it pushes different buttons for me than the non-con.

I can understand that it's frustrating and yeah, I agree that the labels are misused a lot and that sucks. I do think the problem with defining dubcon is that there are a practically limitless number of very different scenarios that could all fit under the "unclear consent" umbrella, as Notanoni outlined pretty well. But yeah, sobbing victim is not dubcon (unless it turns out it's a roleplay scenario at the end or something).

I've written two dub-cons and have a non-con in process for one fandom, but even they split hairs. I have to judge it on a case by case basis.

#1 Established relationship, but the Big Bad had brainwashed the husband into his finest minion (which happened in canon). The fanfic part is a "what if" where the Big Bad's forces found the wife. Big Bad being a real piece of work, decided to brainwash the wife into something mindless, then throw her at the husband/minion as "an incentive."

I wasn't sure whether to call it dub-con or non-con, but settled on "dub-con" because husband and wife subconsciously recognized each other and their feelings for one another, despite the whole situation being a twisted mess.

#2 was for the same universe, and different characters, and I labeled it "dub-con" because the consent issue was very hazy. Male Protagonist was trapped in a strange world he didn't understand, and Female Protagonist (a native of the strange world) was, for lack of a better term, a covert agent. Male Protagonist was trying to sleep when Female Protagonist broke into his room to interrogate him, thinking he was another covert agent. Male Protagonist, having no idea what's going on, answers her questions honestly. After realizing that she and Male Protagonist were on the same side, her curiosity gets the better of her and she seduces him. Female Protagonist's people don't have the same idea of sex as humans, and Male Protagonist frankly didn't know what the hell was going on, but decided it was better to go along with it.

#3 (work in progress, same universe), I label non-con. Uses the "husband" character from #1 and the brainwashing Big Bad. Again, the Big Bad being a real piece of work, decides that his minion could "serve" him in a few other ways than just being the one-man brute squad. That, and he had a case of Foe Yay for the guy even before the brainwashing, and wouldn't it be so nice to have that smug former enemy lying on his back and begging for it?

I filed that one for non-con because of the flagrant power abuse there. Sure, the minion's begging for it, but he's clearly been mind-raped and his brain given a nice shampoo. There's no residual feelings on the minion's part - he hated the guy before! And the Big Bad is doing this to f-ck with his defeated enemy on every possible level and to take pleasure in his power over said foe.

I like non-con. But I don't like it turning into "I like this". Because it's so, SO unrealistic. There are only very rare examples of when somebody falls in love with their rapist and there are even less of it happening mid-rape.

I was enjoying a Scourge/Sonic rapefic, right up until Scourge apparently hit the right button in Sonic's ass and made him want it. And then stopped. And made Sonic beg one of his greatest enemies to continue with screwing him.

If it's not easy to be aroused by regular rape (since your rapist rarely bothers with trying to coax pleasure out of you) then ass-rapeage is gonna be even worse.

Has any of these guys tried to even put ONE finger up their ass lately?

Some women have had orgasms while being raped, but it doesn't mean they wanted it or were falling in love with their rapists. Orgasms in that situation are just a physiological reaction to friction.

As I've always seen it, non-con is just a fanbrat way of saying 'this is rape', as covered previously in the thread. However, dub-con has always been a strange term - since it's short for dubious consent, it can apply to any area where the validity of the consent given is questionable.

Usually, I've seen the label appear for a character consenting to have sex while they were sauced or otherwise intoxicated, but there have been a few, rare exceptions, where, say, someone became uncomfortable their first time with someone, but didn't mention that they were no longer consenting for the other person's sake.

Up your ass is not a good place to feel friction however.

GREEKS RAPED THE ECONOMY

FUCK GREECE