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What Would Drive a Character To Torture Their Enemy

S J Lee

Inkling
Umm.... I like some of you answers, BUT the opening post seems to assume that we are talking about "civilised modern people with a secular humanist outlook / Judaeo-Christian worldview" - FIRST you need to ask yourself - IS this the sort of character we are talking about? EG, Genghis Khan's soldiers routinely slaughtered EVERYBODY in the cities they captured, if they had not surrendered immediately. No mercy. Not turture per se, but my point is many peoples in the past do not empathise with the others. EG, owners of slaves in the deep south USA etc

Similarly, many forms of capital punishment seem like "torture" today - burning at the stake, boiled in a cauldron, impaled (Vlad Dracul or Zulus) etc....pulled apart by horses (France up until 1750?), hung drawn and quartered, etc - and this is not "torture"!

I would suggest any combination of the following:
1 it is the common practice of the times / the people on the receiving end are not "full humans" If everyone else burns people as witches / lynches black people, you will probably go along with it yourself one way or another. It takes an exceptional person to say that something is wrong when all your neighbours think it is normal. Public hangings were normal until about 1850 - 1870?
1 a - you are brutalised / from a place/time where human life is cheap. A man being raped in a tough prison is "understandable" in a way it is not in a high school. Cannibalism sets in during a famine, not during a depression
2 you are making an example, to frighten / anger others. William of Normandy burned the south of England because he wanted Harold to feel obliged to come and fight at once.
3 - you are in a gang. Gangs of men sometimes do things that they would never do as individuals (this can be for better or worse). Someone else braks a window, and you want to look like a tough guy too...
4 - the belief that you will never be caught
5 - as punishment for something
6 - the belief that you are right. If you believe we have immortal souls, and someone is stealing people's afterlife by preaching blasphemy/heresy, killing the evildoer is not only acceptable but praiseworthy
7 - just following orders ( a more formal version of 3 above) (for societies / armies, not mere gangs)
8 - to get information. Usually unreliable UNLESS you have a quick way of verifying (eg, what is the code to unlock this phone?)

THEN ask yourself - which of the above qualifies?

Be VERY careful about a "hero" doing the torturing. Batman surprises and frightens his prisoners, hoping to F--- they crack instead of calling his bluff. See the Joker interrogation scene in the Dark Knight. In fiction, having heroes as rapists and torturers usually does not work. It can be done - eg, Bester's the Stars My Destination, but to me Thomas Covenant is just crap from the rape on. The people reading this probably cannot pull it off in fiction.
 

Chinaren

Scribe
Reasons for torture. Oh, so many. However, top of the head...

Fun, sexual kicks, to extract information, to get revenge, to make a point, religion or other beliefs.

Those are my reasons anyway. In, er, books. Yes, books. :whistle:
 

Eosphorus

Dreamer
I think you pretty much covered it. The only additional reason I can think of is pure, morbid curiosity. Perhaps a character just wants to know how much torment a body or a spirit can take before it gives out. You know, in the name of science? In the name of learning the secrets of the body? Of the limits of the mind?
 
Maybe a good way to do it could be the villain finds some way to make the main character go crazy or use mind control so they torture the villain, and then the hero is exiled and abandoned, allowing the villain to rise to power. I don't even know if that makes any sense.
 

ShadeZ

Maester
Maybe a good way to do it could be the villain finds some way to make the main character go crazy or use mind control so they torture the villain, and then the hero is exiled and abandoned, allowing the villain to rise to power. I don't even know if that makes any sense.
Something like Dimitri's cracked scene in 3 houses fire emblem?
 
Or, if you had some sort of techno/steampunk world, the hero could maybe create a device that allows them to feel others pain, which gives them a sexual thrill, just like in the black mirror episode, so they start torturing people. This only really works if you're okay with them becoming a sort of villain.
 

ShadeZ

Maester
Or, if you had some sort of techno/steampunk world, the hero could maybe create a device that allows them to feel others pain, which gives them a sexual thrill, just like in the black mirror episode, so they start torturing people. This only really works if you're okay with them becoming a sort of villain.
Well I have several mains based off constellations covered at the into. One is "the bloodthirsty assassin" who is pretty much not a good or bad guy at the start. He is a species which has selective empathy, so where he can say feel the pain of a friend he can not even remotely feel the pain of a target, he also is quite sadistic and violent at times (hence the bloodthirsty) but he channels it only toward "appropriate targets" think Dexter vibe.

A common theme is people telling him dont do that it is bad and him saying he isnt trying to be bad but he also doesnt care if he is good because perception changes based on who you are. He says this most notably when he is seen torturing a guy for some information and loving every second, come to find out, he was torturing a kidnapper who had planned to kill a little girl and had left her in a well with the if you kill me she dies." Threat. He is also accused of vigilantism but since he is "doing what he wants" not neccesarily what "he thinks is justice" he gets off easy. The "I didnt torture that guy because he deserved it, I did it because I wanted too and because I wanted to hel the girl and he got in my way."

He straddles the good guy line quite a few times yet never falls over.
 
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