Call me Spire, Spiral, Twistings, KiY, or Carcosa
He/they/it, I am quite the creature, and fond of spirals.
Also Lab whump, Pet whump, and anything that falls under fantasy or magic or supernatural creature whump.
I have broader horizons than that but these are the things I tend to gravitate towards.
Maybe going to post writing snippets or just reblog whatever catches this entity's eye.
I am the deity of my OCs and they will suffer for my entertainment!
Welcome to my blog.
Masterlist Link:
if you're a bloodymary anti and I see you minimize the success of Iron Lung and all of Mark's efforts in producing AND DIRECTING it you don't get to call him "some youtuber" he is an ARTIST and he is a SUCCESSFUL INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER and you need to calm down about iron lungs presence in the phm fanbase. Block the tag if it's not your thing. I don't want to hear any complaining about a ship that quite literally only exists in fanfiction. That is all we have.
AND!! If I see you getting mad that people are, again, writing fanfiction in a way you don't like, or drawing art that doesn't do things the way you think they should be done, you are acting like a toddler. Specifically a toddler mad that someone is playing with your toys the wrong way. Bloodymary isnt inherently racist and misogynist, I can tell when people use actual sociological theory and bigotry for fandom wank. If there's a coffee shop you don't like, don't go there. You don't need to try and make sure the shop doesn't exist.
There's always a moment of intense cultural whiplash whenever I realize I'm talking to someone who thinks "legal" and "illegal" are meaningful categories and ascribes innate goodness to following the law. It's like meeting a space alien.
irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers
given all the rising transphobia and shit, we should remember that white trannies are still relatively safe and will be able to endure more escalation more easily, we're not at the top of any shit list even if we near if, trans women of color however are very vulnerable, and we need to remember they're our sisters, not our shields
Here's a pretty good organization that does this type of work!
The Black Trans Travel Fund is a Black trans-led collective rooted in self-advocacy and mutual aid for Black trans women globally, our mission is to provide travel support, connect communities internationally, and establish paths towards opportunities, safety, and success.
that person who drew the whitest patroculus ever is actually pissing me off for the whole 'the greeks weren't Black take'. there is are WHOLE-ASS GREEK MYTHS ABOUT KING MEMNON WHO WAS A BLACK DEMIGOD KING DATING BACK MILLENIA!!!! there are greek art pieces displaying figures with explicitly Black features (attic white-ground alabastron, janiform kantharos cups, water jar with herakles and bousiris) the greeks even had a full-on word for Black people in ancient greek, Aithiopian!!
Memnon wasn't from Greece, but the fact that his existence was noted in a core story by Greeks... or Andromeda, wife of Perseus of whose bloodline would produce Heracles, whose bloodline would produce.. wait for it.... TYNDAREUS OF SPARTA, father of Clytemnestra... was also Aethiopian... They're the important ones that got mentioned. What makes everyone think that there were no regular Black people just walking around?
No one's going to remember the vast majority of humanity; no one's going to remember that all these bigot Tumblr assholes existed either- does that mean they didn't exist in the space? That they weren't real? Didn't matter?
At this point, there's no point in continuing to argue lmao, these people don't read and they have no desire to acknowledge history or culture or the ability of people that aren't white to move around the world. They don't want to hear that their understanding of the Ancient World has been biased by a forced white western perspective, which means a hyperfocus on what became the White identity (that they simultaneously share while claiming it's a threat).
Racism isn't logical or intelligent- it's just really violent and determined to speak louder than everyone else. That's who we're dealing with, here. Willfully racist idiots.
For anyone looking an explanation of the historical and contemporary tensions between the Black and Asian American community, and how that, too, is structural and fueled to benefit white supremacy. Proximity to Whiteness will never be Whiteness!
Drugs are morally neutral. Doing or not doing drugs is not an indicator of how good a person is. There are addicts who’d give you the shirt off their back, and sober people who poison the homeless for fun.
There needs to be shorthand for "I agree with the basic good that you are defending, but your obsession with winning arguments online has caused you to warp your whole worldview and deny the complexity of reality just to make sure every aspect of the world supports the basic argument that you are defending and you need to stop."
Sometimes it sucks being a ( relatively)well passing trans person in groups of cis ( and tbh it has happened with some non cis) queer people because SOME of them think you don’t mind/ notice the transphobic bullshit they say about enbys, non passing trans people, etc; but I do and that has just lowered you in the rankings in my brain on how safe I feel around you. Fucking assholes.
Living weapon (slave in a gladiator ring trained at a young age to serve for entertainement) vs living weapon (child assassin prodigy in a secret, special military unit that deals with the goverment's dirty laundry)
#there aren't even words for how much i want a book tv show movie anything where this is the cast#the performative fighter molded to make everything a spectacle#flashy attacks and dramatic banter#silence meant punishment#living off the excitement and entertainment of the crowds#the moment they stop being popular is the moment they die#and the secret assassin is the opposite#being noticed could be deadly#firm stares and gritted teeth but never a word spoken and never a sound made#killing quickly and efficiently with a single strike and of course cleaning up after#that's their job after all#to clean up for the higher ups' mistakes#and the sapient sword oh boy#when did they become sapient? do they remember being made?#the others were born human and turned into weapons but they were created to do nothing but destroy#is being used for violence against their will or do they crave it#then there's the lab creature#lots of ways that one could fall#it might be as quiet as the assassin or it could lack volume control completely#“suffering for its creators' hubris”#it was meant to be different than it is somehow#so much could've gone wrong#imagine you're born and you've already proven worthy to be discarded#imagine you're subject to torturous experiments and tests because they're trying to figure out what went wrong with you#man#and the ways they'd interact.....#the similarities and differences............#augh via prev
It goes a little something like this: You’re a member of an intelligence agency, and you’ve caught one of the bad guys. You know this guy has planted a bomb somewhere in a crowded civilian area, and the bomb is fitted with a timer that will eventually lead to its detonation. You don’t know where the bomb is, but the guy isn’t talking, and time is quickly running out. If torturing the would-be terrorist will reveal the location of the bomb, in turn giving your agency time to diffuse it, saving the lives of countless innocent civilians… well, should you do it?
This essay isn’t going to argue as to whether or not torture works as a method of obtaining reliable information from an unwilling subject (it doesn’t). Instead I’m going to criticize the rhetorical, ethical, and political underpinnings of the ticking time bomb thought experiment and its derivatives, and on that basis, spoiler alert, eventually conclude that it has a whole lot of flaws that might be relevant to the debate on torture.
On a Surface Level
The ticking time bomb scenario, as Alex Adams points out in their 2016 book How To Justify Torture, might be posed as an open-ended question, but the conclusion which respondents are expected to reach is never really up for debate. To boil it down to its roots: if you can stop something very bad from happening by doing something that is less bad, you should do it. This thought experiment is designed, through the use of various forms of appeal, to guide participants to a predetermined conclusion, being that while torture is normally reprehensible, it can in certain special emergencies be morally justified. In effect, this makes the ticking time bomb less of a genuine thought experiment in ethics, and more of a rhetorical argument.
Because the average person typically views torture as morally repugnant, proponents of the ticking time bomb scenario need to quickly establish torture as a rational and reliable option within this pre-supposed emergency. Analyzing the ticking time bomb at a superficial, pragmatic level will quickly reveal a set of presumptions which are made to solidify this rational framing of torture.
The investigation preceding the scenario has been reliable: We definitely do have the right guy, the bomb threat is real, not acting will lead to dire consequences, etc.
No other forms of interrogation or negotiation will be effective, and neither will other forms of non-physical coercion, such as blackmail, threats, or intimidation.
Torture will not only be effective at reliably extracting the right information, but it will also achieve this in a way that is swift. Torture will save the day here.
The act of torture is assumed to have negative consequences only for the person being tortured.
None of these presumptions are particularly realistic, and in real life, scenarios like this are pretty much unheard of. Contentions about realism would significantly muddy the water as to what rational utilitarian value you can derive from the use of torture, but because you’re not actually supposed to engage critically with the ethics here, realism can be ignored. The framer might also comment that you must be fun at parties, just to drive that point home.
Let’s talk appeal
You can glean quite a bit about where an argument comes from by dissecting what it’s trying to appeal to. This essay, for example, largely appeals to reason (logos) through the use of logical arguments. It also implicitly appeals tothe character and credibility (ethos) of me as the mediator of these arguments, through the use of tone, structure, the fact that I tell you about theory, etc. Later on, I will tell you loosely about certain real-life uses of torture, which, along with tone and word choice, are both an appeal to emotion and imagination (pathos). Using appeal isn’t inherently a sign of dishonesty – in fact, it’s impossible not to use any form of appeal – but analyzing it will give you a good idea of what a the author of a text wants you to take away from it.
Which types of appeal are present within the ticking time bomb scenario? Well, let’s break it down.
The appeal to common sense and intuition, made evident in that the answer to this thought experiment seems clear-cut and obvious to participants, is one of those appeals that doesn’t take long to disentangle. A feminist finds it intuitively obvious that men and women are equal. A homophobe finds it intuitively obvious that gay people are degenerates. That should show you the inherent meaninglessness of this type of appeal.
Appeal to rationality, in that torture itself is portrayed as the rational tool for purpose. The implicit premise behind this thought experiment is that when torture is used, the result is swift, predictable, and reliable. (It is none of those things.)
There’s an appeal to fear in that this particular thought experiment deals with the threat of terrorism. Furthermore, the fear of terrorism specifically is common in right-wing political thought. Although it is never explicitly mentioned, it’s not hard to imagine that your average conservative probably pictures the terrorist in this scenario as brown-skinned. For a good chunk of participants, therefore, this thought experiment will specifically be an implicit appeal to tribalism and out-group bias.
Appeal to consequences, as inaction in this scenario will lead to the loss of innocent lives.
Appeal to urgency though the use of the “time bomb” itself – it’s ticking, remember? You have to make a quick decision. The appeal to urgency is notably quite common within reactionary thinking.
Appeal to heroism, or a savior complex in that your ultimate goal is to save the day. Torturers are made tough through this thought experiment. It is argued implicitly that they are willing to make a difficult decision for the sake of the greater good. You can go so far as to imply an appeal to the hypermasculine ideal of protecting the weak from harm.
The appeal to authority, in the ticking time bomb’s use of police/military organizations. As mentioned, the investigation preceding the thought experiment is presumed to have led to the right suspect, something that realistically wouldn’t be as clear-cut.
There is an implicit appeal to righteousness in that the person you are torturing planted a bomb with the intent to kill civilians. You might even go as far as to call it justice. This can also be interpreted as an appeal to the hypermasculine ideal of establishing dominance over others, in this case, specifically a bad guy. This is a rabbit hole of its own within torture justifications.
In fictional derivatives of the ticking time bomb scenario, the emotional appeal is often made even more personal. Now, the terrorist has specifically planted the bomb in the school of your child, or in the shopping mall where your wife works. This is another powerful appeal to emotion and urgency; the question is no longer Is torture sometimes justified?, but instead, Do you love your family?
You might notice that these appeals seem to snugly align with certain spheres of political thought. And make no mistake – this is more often than not by design. The purpose here is not to get you to think seriously about the ethics of torture; it is to lead you to a specific conclusion about torture through reactionary aesthetics.
As a participant, you are being asked to accept the use of torture in certain cases. If you’ve done some research on the topic, you’ll notice that the CIA seems to be convinced that torture works for interrogation (it doesn’t). So, regardless of the reactionary aesthetic, what if the CIA is correct? Shouldn’t we at least take this thought experiment seriously?
Well…
Utilitarianism 101
As previously mentioned, we can boil the ticking time bomb argument down to its ethical root, which is: if you can stop something very bad from happening to lots of people, by doing something that is less bad to one person, you should do it.
This in and of itself appears straightforward, but as people much smarter than me have pointed out, ‘the lesser of two evils’-type arguments invariably lead to the acceptance of some capacity of evil, which is why they should be approached very carefully. The ticking time bomb specifically makes use of utilitarian ethics – torture is given utility – and for that reason, I think it’s important to consider some basics of utilitarian ethics that the scenario and its proponents are suspiciously quiet about.
Utilitarianism is an other-focused ethical framework that states that our behavior should be aligned with the facilitation of the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.Here, the word good refers to predetermined axiomatic values, which are obviously highly subjective, and that’s a deep dive in and of itself. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to shorten the debate down to its most agreed-upon conclusion: it is bad when humans suffer: therefore, it is good to minimize human suffering.
Let’s have another classic thought experiment, the basic premise of which should sound familiar. You have a neighbor who kind of sucks. He sits around on his couch all day playing video games and drinking, he doesn’t produce anything of value to other people, he’s just kind of a bum. Coincidentally, down at the local hospital, five people are waiting for an organ transplant. If these five people don’t receive an organ transplant, they will die. Is it justifiable, in this scenario, for you to murder your neighbor so his organs can be harvested and used to save the life of the five transplant patients?
Act utilitarianism posits that any act is moral if the end result leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Here, it would conclude that murdering one person to save the lives of five others would be morally good, because one person dying is less badthan five people dying. Overall bad, it would argue, has been reduced in this scenario.
Rule utilitarianism is a direct response to act utilitarianism, and posits that you can justify most acts through edge-case exceptions, precisely like the organ murder thought experiment does (or indeed like the ticking bomb does). It posits that instead of judging each act independently, we ought to live by rules that overall lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This version of the theory is much more focused on long-term consequences of our rule of behavior, as opposed to the here-and-now short-term utility of any particular act itself. Rule utilitarianism, in this regard, is capable of acknowledging that while certain acts can have a positive outcome in the short-term, they might also have a negative outcomes in the long-term, and vice-versa. (There is an argument to be made here that rule utilitarianism eventually loops back around to just becoming act utilitarianism, but because I’m appealing to people who aren’t in the deep end, I won’t get into that in this essay.) In the case of killing your neighbor, rule utilitarianism would acknowledge that while it is true that the immediate consequence of one death for the sake of preventing five other deaths is good, the act of murder as a rule leads to much more bad than good, and should therefore not be something we accept or facilitate within our moral framework. Rule utilitarianism would argue that even if murder has utilitarian value in exceptional cases, facilitating a rule of behavior in which murder is “sometimes permissible” is in and of itself counter to our axiomatic values.
This might all sound abstract and inconsequential to you, but in praxis, it’s the difference between a government committing a war crime and not committing a war crime. It’s why I think it’s so important for people to be familiar with the basics of ethics.
According to rule utilitarianism, the ticking time bomb scenario deals with the short-term and implies that torture in this scenario is good, but it fails to consider the possible long-term consequences of permitting the use of torture into our prescriptive framework of ethics – the rules we ought to live by.
How might the use of torture on this terrorist be viewed by other like-minded people? Is it possible it might lead to further radicalization – potentially leading to even more terrorists planting even more ticking time bombs in the future?
Torture polarizes people. How will the use of torture be perceived within the state that allows it? Is it worth the further polarization of our internal political climate? This polarization has the potential in and of itself to lead to politically motivated violence, after all.
Straight tribalism appeal: if we use torture against them – wouldn’t it also be acceptable, then, for them to use torture against us? Are we willing to accept that?
Is it possible that allowing police or other government bodies to engage in torture might have a negative impact on these organizations’ interrogative efficacy down the line? Might knowledge of an organization’s use of torture discourage people from volunteering information, or make suspects less likely to cooperate in the first place? Joe Navarro, who is an expert within the FBI in regards to questioning techniques, has stated: “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don't want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.” Following this line of reasoning, is the use of torture in exception cases worth the possible risks of employing torturers?
Allowing for a government-sanctioned use of torture in and of itself has massive connotations. Is the use of torture compatible with a society that strives to uphold human dignity? Is our willingness to disregard this human dignity in “edge cases” worth the utility we could get from torture?
Even presupposing that torture works as an interrogation method (which it doesn’t), proponents the ticking time bomb scenario need to actually demonstrate that the potential short-term positive outcome of using torture outweighs the long-term negative outcomes of accepting torture into our prescriptive ethical framework. This thought experiment and its derivatives within fiction, through the use of emotional, reactionary appeal, actively seeks to discourage participants from engaging with this aspect of the discourse. The rule that might reduce overall long-term suffering is disregarded in favor of the short-term good of the act.
If you take a look at ethical committees across the world, you’ll notice they don’t engage a whole lot with the ticking time bomb thought experiment. This is because at best, it’s incredibly vapid in terms of base-level ethics – and at worst, it’s a deliberate ethical fallacy.
Hang on… if it’s an ethical fallacy, then why are we still talking about it?
Running a pedo sex trafficking island in the Caribbean is usually considered morally wrong, yes. But let’s say aliens came to earth and told you they were gonna vaporize the whole planet, unless you ran a pedo sex trafficking island in the Caribbean and then invited all your buddies, allegedly including Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton? In this hypothetical scenario, would it not be morally justifiable to do so? Well, maybe the best response to a thought experiment like this isn’t an immediate acceptance of the “lesser evil”, but instead posing a question back to the framer: why the fuck, exactly, are you asking me to accept a moral justification for pedo sex trafficking?
It's about politics. Duh.
And now that we’ve finally established that, we can criticize this “thought experiment” within its historical, material context. Because here’s the thing: governments and state leaders regularly frame the use of torture, following the ticking time bomb philosophy, as a necessary, justifiable evil in certain edge-case exceptions, which implicitly denies atrocity as a way to avoid accountability. Torture, you know – that thing that is internationally recognized as a war crime. In this way, the ticking time bomb scenario isn’t just a political argument – it is a legal argument.
Researchers will tell you that the public discourse around torture seemed to shift after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and that this shift was spearheaded by the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror.” The war on terror notably included actual on-the-ground military invasions throughout the middle east, like the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, the effectiveness of which are highly disputed by experts, to say the least. And a notable project to go along with these actual, literal wars, were the systematic propaganda campaigns that the United States government propagated alongside. You’ve probably already read about the US military’s funding of action movies, books, and video games, and probably (rightly) assume that these in part served to influence the public perception of the US’ participation in foreign invasions. And given what was brought into public awareness by the leak of a classified Red Cross inspection report from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in November 2004, it’s not so surprising that the US government would want its citizens to be more, ahem, openminded about the use of torture on enemy combatants. They did this by appealing to reactionary thinking. They turned torture into a terrible, but under certain exceptions, intuitively righteous act. And through the use of euphemisms – “enhanced interrogation methods” – the United States’ use of torture was even distinguished from the torture used by other (browner) nations, as a rational, even civilized act.
And this framing can still be seen in US politics to this day, most commonly along the republican party line. I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump for longer than I need to here. Let’s just say he’s been very outspoken about his support for the use of waterboarding – “or worse” – as an interrogation method, both before, during and after his presidency. This is one of the most powerful men in the world, who has a real chance of being re-elected this year, telling you explicitly that he intends to commit war crimes.
In reality though, justifications for the use of torture as morally permissible in edge-cases aren’t a new phenomenon, and it wasn’t invented by the United States. The reason the 9/11 shift comes up so often in research is that the US, as much as I hate to admit it, is the cultural epicenter of the world, and these ideas have gained global mainstream traction through Hollywood specifically. But you don’t need to look hard to find examples that predate the war on terror.
The ticking time bomb – not just the argument behind it, but that specific thought experiment – was actually popularized by French writer and former soldier Jean Lartéguy in his 1960 novel Les Centurions, which was set during the 1954-1962 French-Algerian war. Later on, General Marcel Bigeard claimed that the use of torture by the French military was a “necessary evil.” Another French general, Paul Aussaresses, wrote in 2001: “torture became necessary when emergency imposed itself.” The French army used a wide variety of torture against Algerians, including beatings, burning, electroshock, waterboarding, mutilation, and rape. Funny how bad ideas always trace back to colonialism.
Who else? The Nazis, the British in Kenya (at least they’ve finally officially admitted it was torture, I guess), South African Apartheid forces, Russian military in Ukraine… I feel like I’m missing someone relevant…
Oh.
The use of coercive interrogation, another euphemism for torture, was reviewed by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 and deemed “unlawful, though permissible in certain cases.” Sound familiar? Torture is practiced by Israeli forces both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the use isn’t always limited to adult detainees. Torture techniques include beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions, breaking limbs with clubs, and non-physical torture, such as endless lectures along the lines of, quote: “All Arabs are Bedouin, and Bedouin are Saudis, so Palestinians should go back to Saudi Arabia where they came from. You don’t belong here.” The fog of war sure make things foggy, but I’d imagine torture isn’t above the IDF’s paygrade in the current Israeli attempt at a Palestinian genocide. Considering that allegations of torture have been coming out steadily for months now, I feel like I’m not off base here.
Do you see how the “clear-cut” argument presented within this innocent hypothetical is used by governments to shrug off accountability? Torture is described as necessary in the case of emergency – the words necessary and emergency sure do shift quite a lot depending on who’s talking, but the basic arguments are all based on the same ethical fallacy, one that conflates useful with sometimes justified. I would argue, based on actual utilitarian ethics, that when you accept torture as sometimes justified into your ethical framework, bad shit tends to happen.
Ah, and then there’s Hollywood. Popular culture is a part of public discourse, and all art, as you might know, is inherently political. Fictional portrayals of torture in western movies and literature before 9/11 tend to come away with the conclusion that torture is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and torturers are almost always portrayed as being in the wrong. Since then, portrayals have shifted to favor various derivatives of the ticking time bomb scenario. One of the most famous examples of this is Jack Bauer from the TV-series 24, who frequently makes use of torture as an interrogation method – in fact, he uses the same techniques that the United States used during the war on terror – and the show, in turn, treats him as heroic for being willing to do this. Other examples of ticking time bomb derivatives can be found in The Dark Night trilogy, Supernatural, Stranger Things, Daredevil, Taken, Fast and the Furious, Dirty Harry… Zootopia? Yeah, um, sorry, mr. Pixar, was the torture apologia scene perhaps really necessary to include in this children’s movie?
Along with the discourse seen by lawmakers and political figures, fiction influences the opinions of regular people all the time – it all adds up, you know? And I haven’t been able to find more contemporary sources on this, but according to a poll from the Pew Research Institute from 2016, 48% of Americans believed that torture is acceptable “in some cases.” According to a 2019 poll from the nonprofit Freedom From Torture, 43% of Britons are “unsure” if torture is always wrong – 29% believe that there are “some circumstances” in which torture is acceptable. In a global survey from 2014 by Amnesty International, 74% of Chinese respondents said that torture is a “necessary and acceptable” way of gaining information. Conversely, Brazilian respondents, who scored highest in regards to the fear of being tortured, scored among the lowest favorability in the world, with only 19% saying that torture can be justified “in some cases.”
Globally, over a third (36%) of respondents said that torture can be justified “in some cases.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the debate around torture isn’t whether or not it’s good or bad - the vast majority of people will agree it’s bad, we’re all on the same page there. The really insidious idea is that torture is useful (which it isn’t), mixed with the fact that your average person doesn’t know the first thing about basic utilitarian ethics. Useful, to them, is tantamount to justifiable in some cases. As I hope to have shown you, this in and of itself is an ethical fallacy, and it is inherently reactionary.
Conclusion
I guess I wouldn’t mind if you were a bit concerned.
But my greater point, perhaps, is that you should take “thought experiments” like the ticking time bomb with a tub of salt, especially if you know your grasp of ethics isn’t particularly strong. If I want you to learn anything from this essay, it’s that reactionaries will sometimes make use of arguments that seem very convincing at first glance. They mostly do this purely on accident, to be sure, but appeals to intuition often require 4100 words at least to fully break down, and since nobody likes to read, a good chunk of people are going to take the ticking time bomb scenario at face value, and then go on to believe their opinions on torture stem from actual critical thought. Maybe don’t be like them, is my point.
And if you’re a writer, I guess I’d also like to ask you to be extremely careful of using ticking bomb derivatives in your stories. Ask yourself if your story might accidentally justify the use of torture, explicitly or implicitly. Ask yourself how the torturer and victim are portrayed – how the act itself is portrayed. Ask yourself what the scene is supposed to convey, and who you might be appealing to. Think about it, actually.
Because if you don’t, there’s a good chance that a third of your audience will walk away from your writing having learned precisely the wrong lesson from it.
