Here is your card for Bad Things Happen Bingo. Happy writing!
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OH I AM FILLED WITH EXCITEMENT
Alright Friends! If you wish to send me a prompt, poke me with a trope and possibly a character or media, you can. Really only thinking about Malevolent or Aurora Comic, though I have like 3 ocs I could do things with mayhaps. I will likely write things as well outside of just prompts given to me.
This is fun I was just complaining about how every fic I have in progress was a longer thing (ex, I’ve just started plot point 2 of 7 for ‘your broken pride’ and I’m already at +1,200 words) ooh now I can do some shorter things perhaps.
uh oh I thought about a Character a bit too hard and now there are incomprehensible squiggles inside my chest and my head sounds like a teakettle whistle and I need to eat drywall
here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to pornbots catfishing using the same stolen photos from the same trans woman on the same trending tags page
remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags
here's tumblr staff stating that making death threats towards trans women isn't a violation of the ToS or user guidelines
type of shit you can just say to trans women on this website. same person btw
here's tumblr staff terminating me for appealing the explicit flag on a post immediately before accepting said appeal and then terminating my already terminated blog to change the termination reason to something i can't appeal when I appealed the termination for explicit content
here's tumblr staff doing the exact same thing a second time
here's tumblr staff flagging SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOGS of a year old post with 15,000 notes as sexually explicit despite it not actually showing anything
here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOG of a post with gifs of two fully nude people fucking center frame being flagged as sexually explicit and the same gifs in the trending tags thumbnails
here's tumblr letting people blaze sissy hypno captions even though anything actually mentioning trans women gets denied
here's tumblr giving my original blog of 13 years a special kind of mature flag that automatically marked every single post i made as mature content separate from the actual content label
here's one of the pictures of the PMMM gachapon toys from the photoset of them that someone reported as CSAM that tumblr terminated me for - one of the two surviving images from it, from back when they actually bothered to moderate posts instead of just hitting the nuke button without looking
here's tumblr instantly denying my appeal for these terminations before I even get the email where they assure me they will carefully review it
here's tumblr terminating me 5 times in the weeks it took them to remove a burner blog and a single post encouraging people to mass report me and harass me forever over completely fabricated claims
here's tumblr flagging my already mature-flagged blog as mature out of the blue 15 minutes before dropping the age verification shit
and here's the episode of the anime that I posted a screencap from that they flagged as sexually explicit, denied my appeal on twice, and then marked my blog mature the first time for posting - available for viewing on youtube with a TV-14 age rating
Ok u know that like. Period drama shirt. The white shirt men are always wearing in period dramas. The Colin Firth jumps into a lake shirt. Are you visualising this in your mind? Ok now imagine: a butch wearing the shirt. And she has tasteful cleavage. Do you see my vision.
Fiction makes, implicitly or explicitly, some kind of argument. A fictional portrayal of a guy simply going for a walk might make the argument that walking is a nice activity to do. This might not be a particularly earth-shattering message, but messages like this are implicit within the literary tools we use in how we portray characters, behavior, settings, and relationships. This underlying argument – a theme – is present in all of fiction. It’s why you’ll often see people make the statement that “all art is political”. And when it comes to torture – a subject which in and of itself has been the topic of political debate for millenia – how we approach the ideas and arguments made within fictional depictions of torture warrant, in my opinion, a degree of care. Torture isn’t just something that happens in movies. It is something that happens today, to real people, on a global scale. It’s not even particularly rare.
The difficulty with the subject of torture specifically is that for the past two decades, the public perception of torture has shifted on a global scale, seen most clearly in how torture is presented in contemporary media, fiction or otherwise. Everybody believes these myths. And getting indoctrinated into having reactionary takes on a topic is nobody’s fault, considering that almost every source outside of academia feeds you misinformation. But that’s, y’know, kinda why I made this blog: in the hopes that I might be able to get people to consider what ideas they’re presenting in their writing.
I want to start out by briefly reitorating some basics of how torture apologia typically works within political discussions, because this very much is relevant to how you can avoid accidentally sending the wrong message.
The first thing you need to understand is that the real-life debate surrounding torture isn’t framed in terms of whether or not torture is good or bad – everybody, including torturers themselves, will concede that it is bad. The more insidious argument is that torture is useful for achieving certain goals, and that it is therefore justified in extreme emergencies. Not only does this argument try to soften the usually rigid negative framing of torture in moral discussions, but it also seeks to poke holes in the international laws which ban the use of torture outright. It’s a moral, political and legal argument all wrapped up in one reactionary package. For this reason, having the theme of “torture is bad” doesn’t always mean a piece of writing isn’t making use of torture apologia. “Torture is useful” serves that goal just fine.
Torture is also often discussed in terms of civility – not the civility of the torturers, but the civility of the victims. It’s the argument that the people who are being tortured are bad people, and therefore don’t warrant the respect and dignity we usually offer to other human beings; they are so bad, essentially, that it’s fine for us civilized people to war crime them. Whenever I’ve encountered this argument, it has usually been presented in a way that was, shall we say, sussy as fuck – some even give up the pretense and straight up call their victims “savages” or “degenerates”. I hope I don’t need to explain why this line of thinking is insane, but in any case, it’s just my way of getting you to consider that a lot of the myths surrounding torture are rooted in broader sociopolitical issues, often racism and religious discrimination, and historically, most often within the context of colonialism.
With that in mind, let’s get into the myths, starting with the most obvious one.
"Torture for information works."
Every study I’ve read has concluded that torture is counterproductive when it comes to gathering intel from reluctant sources. Under severe pain or distress, victims are more focused on saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop, as opposed to providing accurate information. On a neurophysiological level, severe pain or distress actually interferes with the pathways of the brain relating to long- and short-term memory; this means that torture in and of itself is likely to destroy the very evidence it sets out to gather. Furthermore, victims are less likely to cooperate if subjected to physical abuse, including torture, and nothing in the infliction of pain itself works as some kind of truth serum. Lying and defiance are more likely under torture.
To a large minority of people, portraying torture as a reliable tool for gathering accurate information will make the implicit argument that torture, although usually bad, can hold utilitarian value in certain exceptional cases. I’ve written about this more in depth here.
"Under torture, everyone cooperates sooner or later."
French prosecutors used torture in the events leading up to the French revolution, as a way to gain forced confessions from suspects. Their failures and successes were jotted down, leading us with a pretty revealing insight – the highest success rate for gathering forced confessions was in Toulouse, an exceptionally high 14%. In Paris, only 3% of suspects cooperated long enough to sign their name – the rest did not. This is one of the primary reasons that the French criminal justice system eventually dropped using torture for intelligentsia. To quote Darius Rejali, who wrote The Book on torture: “Torture the clumsiest method available to organizations.”
So no, not everybody talks – in fact, rough estimate, 90% of torture victims never do. Defiance is by far the norm with torture.
"When the bad guy does it, it’s torture – when the good guy does it, it’s a tough, but morally justifiable decision."
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Heroes of stories, especially in the action genre, often engage in the use of torture for information, usually following the framework of the ticking bomb scenario, a thought experiment based on the false notion that torture works as an interrogation method. Here, torture is turned into a heroicact, one that speaks to the toughness of the person who uses it. Ask yourself if you want to frame torturers though this lens – because if you do, you are literally justifying the act torture, and, y’know, you do you, but I am gonna call you stupid and reactionary. Torture done by a “good” person is just as abhorrent as torture done by anybody else.
"Some methods of torture are less severe than others."
This myth stems from governments trying to downplay the use of certain methods of torture, and usually goes hand in hand with euphemistic redefinitions of the concept, such as the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation methods,” also known as “torture lite,” or the Israeli “coercive interrogation.” The methods that have been proposed in this supposed less severe category of torture includes stimulated drowning, also known as waterboarding, as well as caning, beatings, limbs being broken with clubs, sleep deprivation, stress positions (ex. forcing a person to crouch against a wall for extended periods of time,) mock executions, sexual assault, and more. If these things all just sound like torture to you, it’s because they are. There is zero evidence to suggest that any torture methods, including those that leave no physical mark on the body, have less severe outcomes than those that do not – on the contrary, non-physical torture methods, including mock executions, or witnessing the torture of a loved one, have been ranked by victims as causing equal amounts of psychological distress as physical torture.
"Torture only causes harm to the person who is being tortured."
This is incredibly unrealistic. Torture is an act that is destructive in all directions, causing trauma to victims, their family, witnesses, and even torturers themselves. It disintegrates the structure of the organizations that use it, it breeds resentment and hatred in the communities around it, and it radicalizes people into extremism. Pretending that consequences like this don’t exist isn’t torture apologia per se, but if your aim is to show the realistic outcomes of torture, these are some of the things you need to consider.
Torture is portrayed as “scientific”; torturers are “skilled” in the “art” of torture.
The most common methods of torture in use today are: hitting people, sleep deprivation, and starvation. These don’t require a whole lot of brain power to conjure up, in fact the infliction of intense suffering is very straightforward. Human beings are full of nerves. Stick a knife anywhere, and I’d be more impressed if it didn’t cause pain.
Not to mention, portraying torture as “scientific” or something that “requires technical skill” makes the implicit argument that torture works for its intended use, here under the condition that you should at least do it right – which brings us right back to that utilitarian fallacy.
"Torturers are expert interrogators, and possess an extraordinary ability to detect lies in their victims."
Studies have been done on the ability of police officers to detect lies for about four decades now. The average person will have a 57% accuracy rate, meaning they’re barely better at spotting deception than a coin toss. For police officers, the highest estimate is around 65% - but it might also be as low as 45%, meaning they might be less accurate than a coin toss – even though police officers tend to think of themselves as exceptional at spotting deception. The same trend is seen in torturers.
In fact, this myth in particular originated from torturers’ accounts of how they conceptualize themselves, which is not only false, but also cringe. When an interrogator starts making use of torture, their focus tends to shift away from gathering reliable information, and more towards “perfecting” the infliction of pain, which means that over time, those interrogative skills are substantially degraded – they are terrible interrogators. So torturers are no better at spotting lies than your average person; they might actually be worse. They can’t read minds, and they don’t possess some secret mystical knowledge about the psychology of their victims.
"You can train someone to resist torture."
Loads of intelligence agencies and revolutionary groups around the world have published material that supposedly serves as manuals for resisting torture, but the truth is, torture is so extreme, there really is no way to prepare or train someone to “resist” it; this is something that even the CIA has acknowledged. Everybody’s reaction to pain will be different. There is no way to predict how torture will affect anyone, much less give them instructions beforehand that will somehow magically negate those effects.
"Brainwashing through torture works."
Torturers can’t change the emotional framework of a person through the infliction of pain. They cannot change the strongly held beliefs and opinions held by their victims through the infliction of pain. They can’t erase someone’s entire personality or make them a ‘blank slate’ through the infliction of pain. They can’t predict how a victim responds to torture, much less direct that response to their own benefit. This is not how pain works.
This is not only an implicit argument for the usefulness of torture to change someone’s behavior or force religious conversions, but the myth that torturers have some form of control of their victims even after the torture has ended is also used in real life to paint survivors as dangerous or unstable, and thereby bar them from treatment and aid, and even to allow access into countries to escape the circumstances that facilitated their torture in the first place. That last point is why you often see the advocacy of refugee rights in organizations that work to prevent torture; these two branches of activism have a huge overlap.
Torture victims cannot be controlled by their torturers. Brainwashing isn’t real.
"Stockholm syndrome is real."
This is a derivative of the brainwashing myth, which means all the connotations previously mentioned remain, but as a cherry on top, Stockholm syndrome as a trope can also serve as an implicit argument for the utility of domestic abuse. So that’s cool.
If you deliberately inflict suffering on someone, that is guaranteed to make that person dislike you. In real life, torture survivors not only tend to be extremely resentful of their torturers, but they also tend to be resentful of anyone belonging to the same demographic as their torturers, whether that be ethnicity, nationality, or even gender or general appearance. Like I said, torture radicalizes people.
"Torture makes people obedient."
Any physical abuse or neglect, including bad cell conditions, access to medical aid, decent food and clean water, is likely to breed resentment in victims and makes them far more reluctant to cooperate with their aggressors. With torture, defiance is the norm, by far. You saw this on a larger scale in the war on terror, for example – turns out that carpet bombing a country to deter terrorism only radicalizes the civilian population, producing more terrorists. No form of violence exists that will make a person particularly eager to shut up and do what you want them to do. It will just make them hate you.
The notion that torture makes people obedient is also an implicit argument for the use of corporal punishment or as crime deterrence, something that along with capital punishment has repeatedly been proven false by sociological studies. People just do not function like this. If you want to create obedience in your story – violence is the last thing you should use.
"People “break” under torture."
Victims of torture sometimes make the conscious decision to do what their torturer wants them to do, and this often serves as a means to buy enough time to plan an escape, or mount up whatever act of defiance they can manage. Sometimes they simply do it to get the torture to stop – this, too, is a tough, conscious decision. If you want to consider this a form of “breaking”, by all means go ahead, but implying personal weakness or lack of willpower in torture victims rubs me the wrong way. I personally see it as a rational choice made by a person who is in an otherwise impossible situation.
"Torture survivors are “broken”."
Torture certainly can lead to extreme psychological distress, but again, the term “broken” here implicitly makes the argument that torture victims simply lacked the mental fortitude to withstand their trauma. In my opinion, there’s a certain degree of victim blaming involved with framing torture survivors in this way, and certainly, it’s a framing that inherently strips away their agency.
Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the fact “brokenness” implies a degree of permanence and rigidity to human beings that simply isn’t there, as if we are solid objects that, once shattered, can never regain the function we once had. It’s a nitpick, but I view people as organic things, capable of healing and growth – not as glassware.
Conclusion
I’d wager that while reading this, a good portion of you recognized some of these myths from depictions of torture in fiction; that’s not particularly surprising to me. These myths aren’t just widespread, they’ve been engrained in the global public perception of torture by decades of political debate and government propaganda, and as a result, have seeped into popular culture.
Torture isn’t rare, and neither is torture apologia. According to Amnesty International, 31% of the global population believes that torture is justified “in some cases”; as of 2014, AI had also reported on torture or other ill treatment in 141 different countries, despite the fact that torture is internationally recognized as a war crime.
In an ideal world, the subject of torture in fiction is treated with the same due diligence with which we have learned to portray subjects like homophobia, sexual assault, and racism; because, to be fair, all of these things have the capacity to intersect, and very often do. The first step in that regard is to spread awareness about how torture actually functions, which is what I hope to slowly start doing on this blog. At the very least, I hope I can make people more aware of how they choose to portray torture in their writing.
God sometimes I'm writing smut and I'll like, delete a sentence because I'm like, no, I can't write that. It's too indulgent. And then it's like. Girl, what the fuck are you even going to the candy store for if you're just going to buy raisins. Get real.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
I wanted to do a little something for mermay with a little monster design! She’s lightly inspired by my OC Ekānta and a very old mermaid piece I did in 2019! All around was a fun idea to revisit!
Back to regular scheduled art pile to share, then it’s artfight prep time!
If you’re talking about me, I'm not. I just find his suffering erotic and It's a damn shame we dont see more of it in canon. As for Kiwi, i don't know. @that-androgynous-lightweaver, what do you have to say ab this?
A, I'm pretty sure finding someone's suffering erotic means you're at least a little bit down bad. B, that man is not my type. Don't drag me down with you </3
