Rimmer And Yvonne McGruder

[janamelie.livejournal.com]

There's a thread on TOS about the morality of Rimmer sleeping with McGruder while she was suffering from concussion.  Personally I've always assumed that if she'd been discharged from the medibay then she was sufficiently "with it" to know what she was doing.  I also accepted the "Last Human" retcon which explains a lot more about what went on that night.  (Spoilers in the thread just in case anyone hasn't read it.)

But reading some of the points brought up in this thread makes me uncomfortable.  Wondering how others interpret it.

http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/forum/messages.cfm?threadid=B9128677-1999-AFED-B439706F293BF2EA

Sorry to bring up such an unsavoury topic, but it's something that clearly had a big impact on Rimmer and is referenced quite a lot in the series.

Comments

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

While part of Rimmer certainly isn't above torture and/or rape (witness his Low self), he certainly seems to have thought it was "making love" from what he says while drunk and uninhibited in "Thanks for the Memory." If there was going to be a time he was going to think of it as an assault - in either direction - I would have sort of thought that'd be a time. So it's uncertain, but I don't think she was raped, or him.

Definitely if you go by the novels, it seems to have been consensual. Yvonne wanted him to call her back afterwards and he never did out of a misguided sense of "cool." She seemed to want her baby, and raised her son telling him what his real father's name was AND an idealized version of him, rather than what an asshole he was. And Rimmer was quick to praise her to Michael and take no credit for himself when the kid tried to latch onto him as a hero figure.

So - who knows? But I think it leans more toward the "non" side more than the "yep" side.

[janamelie.livejournal.com]

Good point about "Memory" - Rimmer was drunk and feeling pathetic. If any part of him thought McGruder only slept with him because she was concussed and mistook him for someone else, surely it would have come up then.

[kahvi.livejournal.com]

Well, it's Rimmer. The man has made repression into an art form. I'd say it's pretty obvious that he knows, deep inside, that McGruder only slept with him because she thought he was someone else, but he'd never admit that, even to himself. Even if he got himself drunk and had a long, heart-wrenching conversation with himself. :p

[kahvi.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point about Rimmer's interpretation of events - I absolutely agree that he doesn't consider it an assault in either direction. (Which, of course, doesn't mean that it couldn't have been.)

The part about Yvonne wanting him to call her back and being all, IDK, interested, never sat right with me. I loved the fleshing out of the incident itself (it's exactly how I imagined it), but the rest of it just seemed like Naylor wanting to overcompensate, as it were. IDK.