Oh god, the sheer uncanon of it all. She denounces all the canon 'ships right then and there. And then there's the Ron/Ginny. She really seems to love incestual shippings.

Apparently, some research shows that keeping it to cousins is usually not as risky, but this author does not grasp that sibling incest+offspring=higher chance of genetic malformation=bad. I'm hoping she never writes a pregnancy fic.

I'm going to have disagree with that one. Torture porn doesn't work but it doesn't work that way in real life. As someone who's been on a very thorough tour of Tuol Sleng/S-21, I can tell you that real torture techniques would make even the most die-hard S&M fan recoil. Actual torture is not about arousal-it's about breaking people. As a result, it depends on raw physical pain, and more importantly, fear. For example, waterboarding depends entirely on primal fear. Sure, it's also painful, but the main point is to overload your mind with the fear of drowning. All this stuff with nipple clamps and whatnot is just pointless, really.

The reason that it worked in, to use Trojie's example, "War Stories", was that it was actually a fairly realistic depiction of torture.

Sorry to rant about this, but this is something of a sore spot for me.

I've seen it done well in the BBC Merlin fandom as well.

Apart from anything else, torture!fic, if handled delicately and done well, can, like any other kind of fic, show up aspects of character we wouldn't ordinarily see.

I mean, you seen the Firefly episode 'War Stories'? *That's* the kind of thing torture scenarios can bring out.