What so many people don't seem to realize though, is that Goblin Slayer only worked as well as it did because it treated rape as rape, AKA, something horrific and traumatizing to everyone but the perpetrators. We get a few more gruesome scenes in the beginning, and some allusions later on, but they don't go into graphic, fetishistic detail. They're dark, they're grim, and they're portrayed somberly, with respect and dignity so as to not trivialize something so horrible. After the MCs trauma from witnessing the act is established and the audience knows exactly what they do, they stop showing scenes, because they don't need to. They can just talk about it, and it works so much better than overdoing rape for the sake of shock. We didn't get graphic details about what happened to the Sword Maiden, and we didn't need it. Her scenes still managed to be some of the most touching and emotional in the entirety of the show, maybe in general, because they didn't overdo things, they treated a victim of a horrific act in a respectful manner, and they didn't try to posture some fake motivational speaking or some sort of "get over it" mentality that a lot of other works seem a bit too comfortable pulling out. Her scene with Goblin Slayer was a talk between victims of goblins, there was no fluff, no unnecessary positivity, yet their interaction was beautiful because it showed solidarity in the realest way possible.
If authors were more capable of using respect and decency to broach a topic like this, I wouldn't be so upset over it, but it's so infuriating seeing so many people willing to toss around such a touchy and uncomfortable subject just for the sake of making their work "darker". They don't show it affecting anyone but the victim, and oftentimes, they just handwave the whole thing later on and make it out to be something mild. Hell, I've seen a few works that willingly inflict rape as a punishment on female characters because they're villains or something. There was one (I Left my A-Rank Party to Help My Former Students Reach the Dungeon Depths!) that had a random girl thrown to orcs and shown being violently assaulted and raped just because she wasn't on the protagonist's side, even though she didn't do anything directly to him or his friends, and merely just existed in his former party. Her crime was saying a few mean things at most, and her punishment was utterly terrifying. And that was supposed to be a more wholesome manga as well, so I was genuinely appalled when it appeared so suddenly, and continued so uncaringly.
This willingness to just insert rape into a work without any regard for how horrific of a thing it is shows nothing more than complete and total disregard by the author, and is the quickest way to get me to drop a work, because I know if they can disrespect victims of rape, especially from a country that's unfortunately become known for having molestation and rape cases, they don't deserve to have their work viewed. They don't deserve to think that what they're doing is okay by me giving them another metric to look at and go "see, it worked, so many people read my manga."
