Torture and other extreme situations in fiction

I don't know, to be honest, as I've wondered the same thing. Maybe it's because they've broken the seal on something that was formerly taboo in mainstream novels and on TV (except to hint at obliquely in fiction and dramatizations), and now it just has to play out until people get bored with it.

Plus, with so many of the cutting edge shows on cable networks, they're not subject to the FCC rules about what they can show. So maybe the creative people feel freer to show really dark stuff now. I'm not sure if TV is following what's in books, or what's in books is following TV. I do remember some movies with "enhanced interrogation" scenes from years before. They were R rated, of course, and most often dealing with characters who were in foreign prisons (like Midnight Express, the Falcon and the Snowman, and so on).

Maybe it's the times we live in. Torture is something we've been hearing about in the news lately, and now we know it's not *just* something that psycho terrorists and evil empires do. Unless we're an evil empire.

The thing I don't know is if this is a good thing, because it means that if we examine something that's horrible, we'll be more motivated to try and stop it, or at least to not support administrations that engage in torture. Or does it mean we'll just cynically (like some people in a thread in the politics and current events thread) shrug and say, "It's just what people do during bad times, and a lot of the victims deserve it anyway")?

Humankind seems to have had a fascination with violence since the dawn of time, and I'm sure a bit of that is biological hard-wiring. An after-effect of our evolution. Kind of like hiccups.

In this century, we are generally more removed from violence then ever before. Two centuries ago, it was acceptable for women and children to gather in town squares to watch executions. And people butchered their own food; even the wimpiest little girl was expected to be able to crack a chicken's neck. Go back further in history, and horrific violence was quite common to the every day person.

So our fascination with watching or reading about violence could be akin to a cat viciously attacking a jingly feather toy. The cat does so because he is hardwired to kill birds. Likewise, we humans are hardwired to hunt, as well as defend ourselves from other humans with extreme force when necessary. The violence in books, videogames, and TV may simply be the human version of the jingly feather toy.

Violence/torture is becoming more common. I think part of the reason is that many are becoming desensitized to the actual horror and pain involved. Violence has become cartoonish. People with horrific wounds stand up and walk away, only to be tortured/wounded again 1/2 hour later, not to mention in the next show that comes on. Video games don't help.

To create a reaction, it's necessary to up the ante. Hence ever increasing violence.

Wish I had a solution.

Brutal Mustang said:

And people butchered their own food; even the wimpiest little girl was expected to be able to crack a chicken's neck.

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Tens of thousands still do. I don't know how anyone can say we're out of touch with violence in this century? I think we're more in touch now than ever before. Don't you watch the news? What otehr century could you, in teh comfort of your own home, actually watch a decapitation, or see terrorists killed by drone strikes, or watch a Warthog destroy and enemy convoy?

Violence is everywhere, and I mean everywhere. There's so much violence that most are immune to its presence.

Take a look at how many violent crimes are committed every single day. The number is staggering.

I find only specific shows have the violence. The fact that you are expecting Game of Thrones to not have so much violence is. . . well, odd.

Then again, there are certain tropes that I largely ignore. Apocalyptic fictions typically are full of violence and I typically avoid those. The MTS genre is bound to have its violence, save for the cozies.

Jamesaritchie said:

Tens of thousands still do. I don't know how anyone can say we're out of touch with violence in this century? I think we're more in touch now than ever before. Don't you watch the news? What otehr century could you, in teh comfort of your own home, actually watch a decapitation, or see terrorists killed by drone strikes, or watch a Warthog destroy and enemy convoy?

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I don't do any of that. I don't watch the terrorist videos or search out violence on the news. I hear about it, but I don't watch it, and I certainly don't see, basically, any violence in my real life. I'm not sure I've even ever actually witnessed a fist fight outside of televised boxing.

So, yeah, in this century, people in developed, politically stable countries are out of touch with violence in the sense that it's not forced on us day-to-day. Most of us are probably not the victims of violent crimes on a daily basis. The majority of us probably have to seek out violence in order to see it (not hear about it) for the most part.


As far as the content producers, I feel like it's a combination of wanting to be authentic and wanting to be edgy.

As for why consumers seem to want it... I don't know. Morbid curiosity? I was watching one of those odd-couple animal specials a while back and it talked about how animals that normally have a prey-and-predator relationship will sometimes play together in the wild. The theory for why was that the play simulates the whole experience of the hunt and that the stimulus is necessary for some reason... the psuedo-fear keeps their reflexes sharp or something. It just speaks to a primal part of them and that's good for them in some way. Maybe it's the same with us. Maybe because a lot of us aren't getting that danger-emotion from the threat of violence, we subconsciously try to simulate it with thrill rides, extreme sports, and now violence in entertainment media.

I wonder if people who actually live with violence every day would be as entranced with it in fiction.


As for me, personally, I don't enjoy watching or reading about graphic violence. I seek out fiction for entertainment and it's really difficult for me to find entertainment in it, even for the reason I listed above. I hide my eyes sometimes when I watch Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Even then, though, I have an easier time with it when it's in a spec-fiction setting. It's harder to take when it's portrayed in a situation where it could happen (real-world political torture, frex) or actually has happened, such as in historical fiction or biographies.

And the less inherently vulnerable the victim, the easier it is to take. It's a bit hard to swallow when it's an adult... but I will quit if it's graphic violence visited on a child or animal.

I wrote a torture scene. Thing is, it's not very graphic at all. I'm a firm believer in that psychological torture can be so much worse than simply working someone over physically. I'd also heard about how, if you want to get someone to stop standing tall and start telling or doing what you want, best approach is not to go for them, but for someone they care about, a spouse or a child. It's an old rule: people are willing to stand strong and die for what they believe in, but most blanche at the prospect of making someone else pay the price for it.

Again, I remember being so proud of myself when I finally figured out how I was going to torture my protagonist. Then I felt guilty because who but a horrible sadist would brag about how they found the perfect way to torture a fictional character.

heza said:

I wonder if people who actually live with violence every day would be as entranced with it in fiction.

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I wonder this too.

And yeah, seeing violence in the news isn't the same as living it. Supposedly the world is more peaceful than it has ever been. Just doesn't seem that way because, yeah, the damn news.

Brutal Mustang said:

I wonder this too.

And yeah, seeing violence in the news isn't the same as living it. Supposedly the world is more peaceful than it has ever been. Just doesn't seem that way because, yeah, the damn news.

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This is a really important point, I think. The kind of 24-hour news coverage that surrounds us now is a relatively recent thing, and it can paint a distorted picture of what reality is like. It's easy to feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket because the news just shows us the horrors without any context or perspective about how things are compared to, say, 50 years ago. And watching that stuff can be like scratching a poison ivy rash--you know it's just making you feel worse, but it's hard to stop. I wouldn't be surprised if modern people feel more in danger than people from a half-century or century ago. But feelings aren't reality.

The Internet probably doesn't help either--people can seek out others who share their fears and stroke each other's paranoia until they're all stockpiling their basements in preparation for Armageddon.

I don't want to just say that people shouldn't watch the news, because I do think it's important to be aware of what's going on in the world. But I think it's better, when possible, to get the info from sources that simply report facts as neutrally as possible as opposed to sensationalizing the horrors.

I think once someone else has done it, or it has gone "mainstream," then if you want effect you have to up the ante. And doing it by making the torture more horrific (as opposed to going to greater lengths on character development and how one slides to this point, atmosphere, etc.) is the easy way out. So you ("they") pile it on thicker and deeper.

I also think it became more a topic of mainstream discussion thanks to BushandCheney, and we're in general coarsening and desensitizing :-(