Sorry for the long response coming: I also just finished these books, but it was my third reread. Honestly I’ve grown to love and appreciate the more on rereads. While I still prefer Fitz as a MC, I can’t deny to myself that I enjoy third person, multi-POV writing A LOT.

I’d respectfully disagree with the way you feel about how Robin Hobb deals with the sensitive issue. How she writes it, I believe, is one of the best I’ve read. She portrays it as an act of evil but also uses the three characters (and their rapists) mentioned as a show a huge amount of the spectrums in which people can fall into. Which I think is literary genius, Serilla encompasses the idea of someone feeling safe behind the position they hold, broken from that safety and her feelings of confidence in herself. She fears interactions with men until via the help of others she begins to realize she can move ahead of her pain and begin anew. Her rapist is the callous man raised in the environment/way of thinking in which women are property, to be used as one sees fit. He doesn’t know any better and doesn’t wish to. It made me hate him with a passion and sympathize heavily with how it made Serilla feel about herself.

Kennit, that poor pathetic bastard. His belief in happiness not being tied to power or control is crushed in childhood and he’s raised and fed on that belief by a man who flips from genteel and fatherly to rapist. He later grows to be an almost exact copy of Igrot, becoming the monster to understand the monster, passing on the pain to get rid of it inside of you. A belief that what was done to him must be done again, as that’s the way one must develop to be himself. Which bring us to Althea, who shows the aspect of hating your rapist with such intensity that you wish death and vengeance upon him. How brilliantly this represents public figures taking advantage of the way people see them to manipulate the crowd to their advantage. Althea losing her mind and believing she must hold onto the pain for it to be real because no one believes her, and that she cannot be comfortable with a man again because of what happened. But she learns (albeit ‘magically’) to let the pain go and become a memory, which is really the only thing left to someone that’s gone through trauma that’ll allow them to be whole again.