OK, that's dark even for me. · 5:30pm Dec 23rd, 2013
Writing things out of order is always entertaining. You can't publish the middle until you write the beginning. So it'll be a bit before this sees the light of day. But I've got a lengthy section of Elements of Opposition completed that... does not pull its punches, let's put it that way.
I don't like fics that torture and then kill a victim, because to me, torturing a fictional character is about the psychological repercussions, and dead characters usually don't get to have those. Depending on the character and who they are and their life circumstances, you can write a character who is beaten and raped and more or less almost completely snaps back from it without long term consequences (that was Berg Katse, in Gatchaman, who had survived an astonishingly horrible life by being more or less immune to PTSD. Not immune to depression, which eventually killed him, but in canon this guy was beaten within an inch of his life on several occasions and the moment he was free from his attackers, he'd laugh at them maniacally. So when I did awful things to Katse in fiction, he got better *really* fast, generally speaking), or you can write a character who's cracking up from nothing "worse" than loneliness and a disability no one else even perceives *as* a disability (Q in my story "Only Human", where he never got his powers back after losing them in Deja Q.)
But sometimes in order to accurately describe the psychological repercussions and make them real... you have to show what's happening. I once threw a book across a room because a likeable, strong-willed, heroic character was kidnapped by a villain who killed his friends, and then we never saw what was happening to him, and then at the end he reappeared and he'd gone full Stockholm Syndrome and was worshipping his torturer, and the narration presented this as him, and the whole human race, being weak, pathetic and craving abuse, and I was furious. When someone breaks and starts identifying with or loving their torturer, that is not because humans are weak, pathetic and crave abuse; it's a psychological defense mechanism to protect you when you are forced to live with someone who is torturing you. I actually think the mechanism was bred into the human race because of rape and domestic abuse. Women who were kidnapped in war and forced to be "wives" to the men who had murdered their family could either commit suicide or learn to identify with and love their abuser, because killing the tormentor and escaping wasn't an option when you were in a foreign land and your family was dead anyway, and the ones that committed suicide didn't have kids. The ones that survived the unendurable by hacking their own brains so they'd be able to endure it are the ones whose genes live on in the rest of us. It's probably a protective mechanism for children with abusive parents as well.
The thing is, we don't understand it. It makes no sense. Why would someone love a torturer? Why would an archetypal Hero or Villain be broken to the point of obedience and even cooperation with their own torture? These characters are frequently defined by their strength of will or their defiance or their ability to not give a shit what you think. How does that happen? Unless we *see* how it is happening, it isn't real to us, it makes no sense. Isn't that OOC? Isn't that character who normally is strong in canon being pathetically weak? I made *Magneto* from X-Men of all characters have a hysterical panic attack at the thought of being recaptured by someone who'd been tormenting him for a month, and because I hadn't pulled my punches and I'd shown what that looked like, it was in character. If we saw Magneto behaving like that without the setup, it would have looked completely OOC.
So there are times for understatement, or non-graphic horror where you never *see* what's happening to the character, only the aftermath or what they're willing to share with you. But I feel that sometimes, that isn't enough.
Or maybe I'm just sadistic.
Anyway, I need some brain bleach now. The part that I have to write before we can get to the part that I just wrote should be much more pleasant to deal with, so that'll be fun, maybe. And I think I want to write something that takes place in the canon verse before this all goes down that is cute and sweet and totally heartbreaking because we know where it's going to go.
Can I say, I just love reading your thoughts on things? It's just so enlightening, despite the subject at hand. You have such a good set on things.
I have to admit... what you says makes sense.