I don’t think the scenes are necessarily rape-y, though can see there’s a case to be made and there are certainly ways the interactions can go that very much lead in that direction. For that reason, it’s vital that we are able to roleplay what we see as an appropriate response to the dreams,
This is key; I've said this before myself, and I agree very much - Shadowheart identifies that, no matter what we *actually* say or do in... I think it's the second dream... that we slept with our lover. She asserts is as known fact, and we try to claim otherwise she informs us, in full certainty, that we are fibbing, and that she knows this because they all experienced it. We don't get any further opportunity to comment (because Larian's origin PCs always have to have the last word on us in these things).
You're also right that when it comes to questions of intimacy and sexual encounters, it either must be entirely the player's choice (or something resolved through simple dialogue), or it must be out of their hands; you *cannot* invoke dice rolls on this topic. "Roll to avoid getting raped" is a non-starter at any table, and in any game.
If the PC expresses unwillingness, and later intimacy is implied to have taken place anyway -> that's character rape. The game must be aware that that is what it is doing, and it cannot act as though it is not.
If the player is *not given a choice or option* to express unwillingness with their character and later intimacy is implied to have taken place anyway -> that's also character rape. The game must be aware that that is what it is doing, and it cannot act as though it is not.
That said: If they wish to do that, that's okay. These things shouldn't be blanket banned from media, in my opinion, as long as it's handled well and carefully... as a survivor myself, I'm actually quite okay with games dealing with rape and other situations of non-consent, but, if it happens, the
most important thing about it is that we, as our characters, are given sufficient opportunity to show our companions, or otherwise
express to the game, how our character feels about it, so that how we move forward from there can be handled in a way that fits.
There are a lot of different ways a character could react, or feel about the outcome, even within each major decision branch as presented - though the main issue is that the second dream doesn't provide any, which is why it feels like more of a character violation than the others.
Actually if you're interested, Red Queen (and anyone else), I wrote a bit about this when I was examining the dreams for the halfling thread - save me typing out similar things again:
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=747874#Post747874 One of the main points to emphasise is that using the cover of "it's a dream" doesn't actually matter - imagine if you will, a character who, to this point, hasn't ever slept with anyone, and who is, let's say, courting someone in baldur's gate, whom they hope to one day do such things with; what happened here might be 'only' a dream, but they were still right there, with that other, very real, intelligence, sapient, other entity, and they still had that experience (unwillingly in this case, even if compelled to be agreeable at the time) put upon them; that event, and the memory of it cannot now be taken back, and any first experiences they may have been planning or hoping for with their special someone have been irrevocably stolen - it may not have been 'real' in their physical flesh and blood body, but it was still real in all of the ways that actually
matter.
The fact that it was within a dream does not mitigate the actions taken (actions implied and then hard confirmed as having happened by shadowheart), any more than if they were taken by means of someone sneaking into our camp and using a dominate person spell to compel us - and the game must not pretend otherwise, and it must give us due chance to express how we feel about it.
