Minions!

I’m sure most people can think of a story where the heroes are captured and about to be tortured.  Sometimes they don’t escape in time, so pain gets inflicted.  I did that several times in my two series.  Didn’t even think twice though, which now strikes me as odd since torture is horrible.  Yet, it’s so common in fiction.

There are three reasons that I can think of for this:

1. The villain is shown to be ruthless and evil.  Most people see torture as one of the worst things you can do, so it solidifies the villain’s reputation.  It’s makes cheering for them much more difficult because you have to rationalize these actions.  So, authors can do this later in a series if they feel like the villain is becoming more popular than the hero while still being evil.
2. A hero who withstands torture gets a boost to their toughness.  Even if they were proven to be durable and strong before, the readers now see that they can hold up to extreme pain.  Think about how we feel about real soldiers who were captured, tortured, and survived without breaking.  They are rightfully called heroes and gain respect.  So, a watered down version of this happens for the hero.
3. The opposite can happen as well if you want your hero to break or a supporting character to ‘betray’ without turning villain.  For the hero, you now have a recovery arc while they try to regain their courage.  It helps if they’ve become so strong and brave that you can’t reasonable write them losing.  Now, they’re back to the start.  With the supporting character, they may have already been seen as weaker, so them giving in to torture isn’t surprising.  It garners sympathy though and allows the villain to get an advantage without sacrificing another character.

So, there is definitely a use for torture in terms of story and character development.  It’s still a difficult tool to use because it can be triggering.  People who have trouble seeing others in pain might have a hard time with such scenes or turn off to the book entirely.  I think this makes the use of torture a gamble and should be considered very carefully before being added.  There are other ways to have a villain come off as evil without going this route.

As stated, I’ve used torture before in my books.  The champions in Legends of Windemere seemed to find themselves in such situations a lot.  Probably the roughest torture scene I wrote was with Luke Callindor, which made me feel gross afterwards.  I still stand by it because I needed him to go through a trauma for the rest of his story to make sense, but it’s rough.  Taught me that empathy for my characters could make such things tricky, so I had to turn it off for a bit.

So, what do other people think about the use of these scenes?  I know many won’t want to go near them, especially if you don’t like specific genres.