#but since Fellowes doesn't take her seriously as a rapist and thinks Tom *somehow* has behaved disgracefully

[eolewyn1010]

Oh, right, I forgot: After the whole thing, Edna marches up to Tom with big wet doe eyes like: "You can't treat a poor girl like this! :((( WHaT iF I'm pREgnAnT?"

He cannot treat you like this? Your rape victim keeps apologizing to you! Instead of treating you as the piece of garbage that you are!

Meanwhile, Anna, whose rape has been set up and excuted in parallel to this shitshow, decides it's the best to wreck her marriage over something another man did and her husband doesn't even know of. Fellowes is so full of shit.

I'm not sure which writing decision I hate Julian Fellowes more for: the rape of Anna at the hands of Green, which is a gruesome affair that happens only to spawn drama for a season and a half with no catharsis at the end as the plot just fizzles out after more and more and more time of Anna not looking for any help and not talking to her husband and not calling the police on Green and yet another fuck-stupid innocent-in-prison plot, and which feels like he introduced it only because thes Bates's have dared to be happy and unbothered for a few episodes...

...or the rape of Tom at the hands of Edna Braithwaite, which is never even acknowledged as a crime in-universe. In fact, while Anna got to be appropriately traumatized for long after the fact, showing me that Fellowes at least in theory understands that such a thing doesn't just blow over, in the case of Tom, it just kinda blows over. In fact, Tom gets to feel guilty about having "participated". In fact, Mrs Hughes, usually one of the most level-headed and humane characters of the show, thinks he's "also to blame" for what happened. Uh, Fellowes? TOM WAS BLACK-OUT DRUNK WHEN SHE HOPPED ON HIM! He was so damn near unconscious that he mistook her for his wife who's been dead for two years. And she made sure he would be beyond the capability of giving consent, because she saw that he was emotionally vulnerable and used the chance to get him drunk. For all I know, she roofied him. And yet this is never treated as though Edna violated Tom; it's treated as him having stepped out of line. Honestly, I find Fellowes' ability to write a female rapist combined with his complete inability to recognize a female rapist as such rather disconcerting.