#every time someone doesn’t include that in fanwork i’m like ok you’re not technically wrong but liiiike

[goldensunset]

sometimes something is strictly speaking only interpretive fanon but at the same time it is so core to your understanding of the thing that you cannot imagine seeing it any other way

[scripttorture]

So, I’m writing a fanfic and in the show, people with powers are forced to join a Mafia. One character talks about helping to torture enemies. Eventually, they stop torturing and do see what they did as wrong (among other crimes they committed before defecting from crime). How might someone differ if they’d been forced to harm others as opposed to starting it on their own? And eventually they see violence as necessary in the Mafia but don’t thrive on it. How would I make this realistic?

I’ll help as much as I can, but I think sometimes source materials canleave fans in a pretty awkward position.

 Ifeel like that review of the use of torture in Captain America: The WinterSoldier is relevant here.

 By which I mean that sometimes, if we’re choosing to write fanfiction orcreate fanworks, we need to engage with and deal with problematic elements inthe source material. I can cover that in more depth if I know the sourcematerial (it’s worth mentioning a name but also giving details of the situationin case it’s something I haven’t seen).

 There are elements of this canon that seem…if not unrealistic then‘dubious’. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that there might not be a wayto make this totally realistic because of the canon you’re working within. Butthat’s really not on you. How you engage with it in your own work is.

 I don’t think there’s necessarily one ‘right’ way to approachproblematic canons. As with any writing it depends on the story.

 Some people just ignore or rewrite the canon for their story. Somepeople stick to it and change their story around the canon. Some peopletechnically stick to it but twist it as much as possible to support the storythey want to tell.

 None of those are ‘bad’ approaches in and of themselves though I thinkthey can be ‘bad’ for particular stories.

 The thing that’s standing out for me is the idea of someone being forcedto torture. Because from the details you’ve given……..it sounds like a narrativecop out. It gives me the impression that the creators wanted people tosympathise with this character andhave them do horrible things so they wrote a very lazy abuse narrative where thecharacter doesn’t have moral responsibility because they ‘had to’.

 I don’t think attempting a cheap sympathy grab for a torturer is ever a good idea.

 No ever has to.

 The idea that this character needed to be forced but at the same time didn’t regard tortureas wrong seems especially off kilter to me. It seems to come with theimplication that participating in torture ‘made them’ think it was OK. Andthat’s not how torture works.

 You really can’t force someone to change their mind. We can’t be forcedto think that something we find abhorrent is ‘alright’.

 People can be pressured but ultimately they make a choice. That choicetells you something about what they value. Some of those choices might be moreunderstandable to society at large: a great many would probably empathise witha character who choose to do something horrible because their own life or thelife of someone they loved was threatened.

 Do attacks like that happen? Yesbut they’re usually one off incidents within a larger context of torture, abuseand genocide.

 That’s because this is a really badway to have an organisation operate. If you need to threaten or torture yourtorturer every single time you want them to do something you may as well lockthem up and just employ the person you usedto threaten them.

 There’s leeway here, though it partly depends on the character andhow…wedded you are to the idea that they’re a good person ‘really’.

 The first thing that comes to mind is removing the element of force.This doesn’t necessarily mean the character decided they wanted to torturepeople. They were put in an environment where torture occurred regularly. Theysaw this and they realised that theythought they were less likely to end up as a victim if they became a torturertoo. (In reality this isn’t really the case but that’s another subject-)

 The character then managed to escape from that environment- defectingfrom crime. They’re no longer in such a threatening situation and suddenlytheir past actions might be a problem. What previously kept them ‘safe’ nowputs them in danger. So they twist the truth and say they ‘had to’, they wereforced.

 It’s not their fault ‘because’ they were afraid too.

 You could also probably write it as them making a conscious choice, notout of fear but because they thought joining the torturers would allow them toescape more quickly. That’s a smart and ruthless decision which, if it fits thecharacter, could also easily be tied into them outright lying about their rolein this ‘Mafia’.

 Another possibility is using the idea that they were threatened or hurtthemselves before attacking others. That they chose to torture to avoid beingtortured. But I think then you should stress just how useless that would be.The character would be less physically capable of torturing because of theirown injuries. Other character would have to ‘waste time’ doing this repeatedly.It would take a massive toll on the character’s physical and mental health-

 I wish I could come up with more scenarios but I feel as if the canonhas hobbled you in that regard.

 As for the effects- well this does come back to issue of ‘force’.Because realistically the more likely scenario isn’t ‘forced’ but ‘pressured’.

 There’s less scientific study of torturers generally. And torturersaren’t, as a rule, ‘forced’ to do what they do.

 If there are differences I don’t have any sources that cover them.

 I suspect that there wouldn’t be a lot of differences though. Theunderlying mechanism that we think causes symptoms in torturers would act regardlessof whether the torturer wanted to torture. It would act on someone who wasn’ttorturing but had to stand in the same room while the torturers were there.

 We think that torturers areaffected for the same reasons that people who witness traumatic eventssometimes are. Witnessing violence against human beings repeatedly istraumatic. It creates an automatic response in our brains that we can neithercontrol nor reduce. And no amount of belief changes the way we’re wired.

 So- perhaps predictably- the effects are going to be exactlythe same ones discussed in the Masterpost here.

 And looking at the Masterpost again has actually given me one finalidea.

 Memory problems are incredibly common in torture victims. They’re rarelyportrayed in fiction and when they are portrayed they’re not usually used accurately.

 Victims often have trouble remembering new information in an everydaycontext (forgetting appointments, keys, tasks at work etc). They sometimes havememory loss surrounding their torture (this is not commonly of the tortureitself but events immediately before and after though forgetting the tortureitself can happen). They often have intrusive memories, very vivid memories ofbeing tortured that are triggered by everyday things causing great distress.

 But the last major category of memory problems they experience is false memories.

 One of the experiments I’ve read on pain and memory really highlightedthis. They had a ‘high stress’ interrogation group who were asked to identifytheir interrogator the next day. Between 51-68% of them identified the wrongperson (the variation is down to which methods was used to id the interrogator).

 They were pointing to the wrong person and completely convinced theywere correct.

 In a torture context this effect can cause a lot of problems forprosecutors. Victims are oftenconfused about timings and about who exactly did what. They might also givecontradictory accounts of things like the rooms they were held in or really anydetails surrounding torture.

 So my suggestion is this- if this character chose to torture and was thenabused by someone within this organisation it’s perfectly possible that theymight come away believing their abuser ‘forced’ them to do it.

 It would be unusual, but this sort of memory problem can operate in thisway.

 You could suggest it in your writing by having the character giveinconsistent accounts of what happened to them, or by having what they saycontradicted by other people who were there.

 Discovering that they have false memories would be incrediblydistressing and the character might insist that their memories are all accurateand that other people are lying, or that video evidence etc ‘didn’t happen’.

 Whichever option you chose to go with (including just accepting thecanon, which is not particularly realistic but is a valid choice for fan fiction) the character would havesymptoms associated with being a torturer.

 Pick somewhere between 3-5 from the Masterpost and try to show themconsistently throughout the story. The character would probably learn to copewith and navigate their symptoms over time but that’s not the same thing as thesymptoms vanishing.

 For a fanfic I’d look to the canon to see if there’s any suggestion ofparticular trauma symptoms, however poorly handled. For instance if I waswriting a Marvel fanfic I’d probably choose to give Tony Stark addictionproblems because multiple canons have him struggling with alcoholism. If I waswriting Voltron I might choose to give Keith mood swings and show Shirodissociating, because again that seems to fit what the canon shows of thecharacter’s reactions.

 Beyond that my advice is the same as for any other fiction: choosesymptoms that you feel add something to the story or character. Things thatfurther the narrative and provide interesting challenges.

 I hope that helps. And if you’d like to discuss this story in moredetail feel free to send in more questions when the ask box reopens. :)

Disclaimer