>>135 I am really, really confused why that second >>132 comment is directed at me. I have maintained a calm, reasonable approach to this and that seemed bizarrely out of place. I'm going to assume that it was put in by mistake, or directed at someone else. Otherwise that's just rude. I was using the 'war-rape' example as just that; an example. Are these normal circumstances that the nine mercenaries are in? Going out every single day to die dozens of times in violently horrible ways, only to come back? Mixed up with a bunch of people from varying backgrounds that don't always agree, in a time period where there's a lot of tension between genders, races, and countries? Would their sole motivation be rape for pleasure? I'm really, really not taking to the idea that we should consider six of the nine teammates to hold a genetic flaw that tells them to blindly rape for pleasure's purpose (or rather, the genetic purpose of raping to mate). That is excusing lazy writing, and it gives another excuse to keep the six characters generic and flat by having them all use the same driving purpose. There should be some effort put in to understanding how rapists work, and not simply grasping for the easiest to obtain reason and the copy-pasting it onto multiple characters. You've been very well set that this story is written well, that it's compelling, that it's interesting. Your reasoning has been that we shouldn't stick to canon for everything, and that 'most' rapists do it because it feels good and because they are genetically driven to rape. So it excuses dumbing down the characters as well as dumbing down their driving purpose. This leaves very dumb characters. I'm going to call this Metroid: Other M Phenomena, since it's a very similar issue. Pre-established characters that behave in certain ways should not be so radically changed that we have nothing comforting to fall back on. The one thing that had been a bit of a comfort at the beginning, for example, was seeing that the Heavy and Medic were friendly to one another. Apparently. That, however, wasn't conveyed beyond the "tell, not show" method of establishing it, and was soon abandoned. When the reader has nothing familiar to fall back on and they can't recognize their favorite characters anymore, it immediately becomes a difficult read. People rape for a number of reasons. Jealousy, fear, anger, miscommunication, delusion, and so on. Six people don't simultaneously agree that it only feels good to rape vaginas and then do so. Unless that genetic flaw is also some sort of genetic hive mind that activated once a vagina was detected in a 20 meter range. And if the teams are mirror images of each other, why wouldn't they kidnap the enemy Pyro? Or was it really as simple as the entire team hating each other so much that casual rape for the sake of rape was as perfectly logical as continuing to breathe? I'm just completely not understanding you.