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One reason I was unprepared for in Gushing Over Magical Girls is that I’m used to “villain protagonists” who’re basically heroic edgelords. Like the stuff that Writing Prompts blog keeps going for. This series goes down a lot better when you recognize that Baiser is supposed to be a terrible person.

(Yeah, I watched Dexter, but Dexter’s got some weird shit going on narratively that makes it hard to call him a “villain” even when he tortures people to death.)

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I’ve found something worse than the Arknights ads. There’s an ad for a tower defense gacha called Path to Nowhere that asks whether you want to torture a woman or pat her on the head. I looked up a review of it on Pocket Gamer, and it didn’t say anything about torture, which seems like it would come up if it was in the game. (Also no word on whether it has headpats.)
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For that one mutual who asked what the hell Euphoria was, and why just reading a two-sentence description of a scene made me feel like I was gonna throw up. This sounds fascinating and terrifying.
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People be like “you shouldn’t like this character because they did awful things” and then like a character who tortures people.
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A person putting on a metal helmet. Blood leaks out of the helmet and onto their clothes.

"Let me grieve, let me suffer
For one wound on me is one less on you

Let me bleed, let me feel
For a cut on me is a caress for you

Let me cry, let me moan
As all of my tears are only for me."


I find it jarring how many reviews of Blasphemous deny that it has any meaning or message. The general impression seems to be that the purpose of the game is to be violent and gruesome, and all the stuff about religion is a way of tying the violence together. To the contrary, I see Blasphemous as discussing worship of objects, worship of suffering, and the ways in which those two things tie together.

Read more... )
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This just beat Majora's Mask, Oxenfree, AND The Sexy Brutale for best time-loop game I've ever played. (I've yet to play Outer Wilds.)

A woman standing in a graveyard, holding a skull

In four days, almost everyone in Elsinore will die, and you're the only one who remembers. They don't respect you, but they also don't notice you, skulking around in the shadows and overhearing their secrets. Can you make them listen, or will they dismiss you--for your race, your sex, your status, or their certainty that they know what they're doing? Which lives can you save? Which horrors can you prevent? And where do you want this story to end?

(I told my mother this is a game about having all the information and none of the power to get people to act on it. She said that sounded like her life.)
SPOILERS )
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 In fiction inspired by Lovecraft, there are books you can read that will drive you insane.

In our world, there are videos you can watch that will cause you mental trauma. Facebook, Youtube, etc. have teams of employees to remove these videos, and these employees frequently suffer burnout from having to see such horrific things.

The people who make and distribute these videos presumably are not traumatized by them, and even enjoy them.

The weak hypothesis: the people who distribute videos of horrific torture would not be driven mad if they encountered Cthulhu.

The strong hypothesis: these people would worship Cthulhu.
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image

When I was a child, Greek mythology confused me. Human heroes tried to be like the gods, and they were cast down for their hubris. But gods acted like gods all the time. Why wasn’t it hubris when they did it? Thalia’s Musings is the first story I’ve read that examines that question.

Read more... )

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 “Your baby is tied to a timebomb. You have the terrorist. He tells you you have 1 hour. Do you #torture him to find your baby or let it die?”–Lee Hurst

This is known as the ticking time bomb scenario. The most common formulation is that the bomb will destroy a city, which is less personal and easier to evaluate. If Hurst has no objections, let’s work with that instead. (If Hurst does have objections, let’s work with that anyway.)

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud torturing a terrorist to prevent a bomb from destroying a city. Lee Hurst can have that one.

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud torturing a terrorist’s young child to prevent a bomb from destroying a city. Let’s give Hurst that one, too.

Assuming I’m certain of success and there’s no other solution, I would laud killing half a city to prevent a bomb from destroying the whole city. Let’s throw that in Hurst’s face.

This is what you get when you draw your moral dilemmas too narrowly. In the world we actually live and act in, you’re not certain you can torture anything out of this person in the span of one hour. In the real world, you also don’t know that there’s no other way you or anyone else could possibly find the bomb. And from past history, there’s a very high chance that real-world you doesn’t even know if the person you’re torturing has any information about where the bomb is located! Real-world you doesn’t know if, once they tell you where the bomb is, they’re lying to bait you into wasting time and resources. Real-world you doesn’t know if they’re making up the first location that comes to mind so you’ll stop torturing them for at least a little while. Odds are that when real-world you is arguing about whether folks over at Guantanamo should be allowed to torture people, real-world you has never been present at a torture session and never seen what torturers actually do

So if you’re going to argue for torture, don’t pretend this is an episode of 24. Talk about what’s actually happening in the world we live in, because that’s where prisoners in many countries are currently being tortured while you argue your hypotheticals.

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