feotakahari

 Written in response to this post about torture porn.

I managed to publish a book once. I wanted it to feel like there were physical stakes in the fights, so both male and female characters got pretty well brutalized. Ear cut off, set on fire, run over by a forklift, etc.

I later found a callout post for the publisher. He served prison time for doing horrible things to a little girl. The post noted that he wrote and published an awful lot of stories about strong violence against young women and female children.

The violence isn’t one of the things I regret about that book. I feel like it served the story I was telling. But I can’t help but feel a little sickened when I think of what the publisher might have felt while he was reading.

When the game Bully first came out, there was a lot of controversy over playing as a student who beats the living crap out of other students. I saw a news article arguing that the controversy was overblown. I specifically remember it saying that the game never gives you any weapons more lethal than a baseball bat.

A few months later, a student at the local high school was hospitalized after someone beat him with a baseball bat.

I’m not sure what my point is. That’s just something that always bothered me.