Taus was raped: Heavenly Bride, a few pages ago. And I wasn’t expecting a large reaction, but some reaction wouldn’t have surprised me either. I did get some, too, from the people who speak to me personally.  Everyone now hates Lhung.

I mean, the guy walks in on the tail end of the event and shuns Taus as if she were the plague. Why wouldn’t everyone be mad at him? As one reader pointed out, though, it’s quite a lot like real life. And as another pointed out, they might have reacted that way themselves. And another couldn’t understand why it could happen at all, why he would react that way. Didn’t he love her?

Yes, he loves her. But put yourself in his shoes a bit. What has he seen? Did he see the rape, or has he seen her with other men taking sexual favors? What did he see when he walked in on her that day? He has only so much information to work with.

Someone amusingly pointed out that when it comes to this life, he’s also less than a year old as well. He’s a whippersnapper, all inexperienced and wet behind the ears. Or whiskers. Or whatever it is that Celestial Dragons have.

The issue with Taus’s rape for me, the writer goes beyond that though. I didn’t want to play a Red Sonja with this event – I didn’t want it to be the catalyst for something else because doing that is a very overdone tactic. But in Taus’s situation, it was also the only plausible one to push things forward. She’s a sexual object in the eyes of many around her; she’s not even sentient. She’s a thing. Poor little thing.

It’s over now, at least, and the events that happen after this will start showing other things. But I will tell you this: for Taus, that event will always be there much in the same way it will always be there for women who experience it in real life.

Just rambling.