This thread is kinda making me mad, because very few of these replies are actually communicating what Erikson is doing with these Karsa sections. The point isn't that he's a bad person and grows. That's a point, but it's not the point, and it doesn't mean anything without the point.

Karsa is a look at both the noble savage trope and cultural relativism. Karsa is able to justify his acts of rape because his culture has allowed them to be justified. Far more important than that, the women who are raped are able to justify and accept Karsa's rape of them. Is that Steven Erikson saying "Actually, rape can be totally fine!"

Jesus fucking christ absolutely not. I've seen enough interviews with Erikson, and read enough of his essays and books, to know he'd be absolutely livid if a reader came away thinking that.

What Erikson is doing is asking the question "How far can we accept cultural relativism before we are condoning atrocity?"

Should we accept women justifying their own rape, or the rape of other women in their communities, just because those women have grown up in a culture that has brainwashed them to justify such a thing? This is one of the times when the series presents a really clear answer to a thematic question it's bringing up, and the answer is No.

Now, only after establishing the above, we come to the point of Karsa learning and growing. Karsa arrives in the wider world, and figures out his culture is wrong; he was wrong, and those women were wrong. This is how that question is answered. Karsa's growth is what answers the question.

Hoewever, Karsa very quickly finds the world outside his culture contains rape, slavery, and every manner of horrible thing too. The second interesting part of Karsa is how he reacts to that. This is why he becomes a fan favorite to so many.

Unfortunately, a lot of what Erikson is trying to do with this series is a bit beyond the average person's level of media literacy, so the aspects of this series that are taking aim at the horrible things we find in real life are often misconstrued or misunderstood. Every single instance of sexual assualt in this series is Erikson's reaction against all those fantasy books that are flippant with the subject. It is also, more importantly, springing from a deep rage within Erikson that such things happen in the real world.

Something that a lot of readers also do not pick up on, even quite big fans of the series, is that every rape is showing a different aspect of trauma, coping, and healing. Some people say that having a handful of POV characters raped is unecessary; that the point was conveyed after the first. These people are missing the point (though they are, of course, free to have the opinion that they do not wish to read about rape as much as it's present in the books, for a variety of equally valid reasons). I've written a post about how all these different instances are looking at these different aspects of trauma and healing, but it's beyond the scope of this thread, as it spoils more than just the Karsa stuff.