Subject: Ditto - there's no such thing as a bad genre
Author:
Posted on: 2009-06-13 23:58:00 UTC
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.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3246830/1/IHateYou
I found this today. My inner Zuko fangirl screams for bloody vengeance.
Zuko is Azula's sex slave.
That's... really all there is to it.
Zuko can breathe fire.
He can BREATHE FIRE.
FIRE.
Why didn't he toast her FACE when she kissed him?!
And throat, among other things. Really, perfect opportunity to kill her and melt the chains, since she didn't have the foresight to make them short.
Wait, what>
okay, KILLL!!!!
Agreed with WikiMaster - Incest between close relatives is bad, because of the pregnancy risk. Don't know too much about Avatar, but I'm sure Zuko's OOC to its logical extremes, and I'm fairly sure Azula is too. If I hadn't resolved to not feel squick at anything short of Agony in Pink-level extra-graphic torture, tentacle pr0n art, or more than ten minutes on /b/, I would be squicked. As it is, I just want to kill it with... something that isn't fire, actually.
On an unrelated note, the author has something in his/her profile that says every single Mary Sue-type character in existence is bad. Cue massive amounts of headdesk.
Based on the profile, she also ships pretty much every stereotypical "obnoxious fangirl" pairing there is.
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.
Chiming in with the Word of Science here:
One of Darwin's many points of pondering was the possibility of cousin-marriages seriously screwing things up - they were rife in his family, and he married his own cousin, and of his kids that survived most had genetic defects of varying severity. a one-off with a cousin is probably fine, unless you've something nasty lurking in your genes, but prolonged inter-cousin marrying in a family = Very Bad News.
*removes Science hat*
What if Azula (or Zuko, If the author isn't above MPreg) gets pregnant? Inbreeding is bad for kids, you know. Also, Squick!
Eeew! Ew, ew, ew! What do they find good about this pairing? My mental CAD vaporized about four paragraphs through. The reviewers think this is good writing? Gross.
The day I find good torture porn is the day I stand upside-down with my head in a bucket of piranha fish.
Also, more canon violations than I care to count. I doubt Zuko hates Azula, and he certainly wouldn't RAPE her, even if she did like it. Which she wouldn't, because she always tries to control HIM.
And what's with the "baby brother?" So she's older now? Boo.
Not all torture porn is bad. There's a pretty good Gundam 00 AU that spawned off a prompt on the fandom's kinkmeme where one of the pairings is extremely sadomasochistic. The most recent installment of the series had the masochistic partner kidnapped and tortured and it was good. It was also left on an Everest-sized cliffhanger so in my opinion the next part can't come soon enough. With my luck though the next part to be posted won't be the conclusion.
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.
What pisses ME off is that every other word is the F-bomb.