I Needed to Keep the Wall Wet!

Three in a day (mostly to keep the front of the blog from saying that a Highly Acclaimed Writer (Peace be upon Her) is illiterate, even though she cannot read, at least for comprehension).

So I was thinking about the "A Song of Rape and Torture" school of fantasy, and the correct treatment of such matters in fiction. And you know, I think I have it.

You can show gore, but not degradation, in the context of combat. You can, in other words, show people being hacked apart, even gutted, but you don't dwell on, say, the specific anatomical features of disembowelment, or the fact corpses lose continence.

Any torture happens off-screen: it may be necessary to the plot (and it's somewhat more permissable for characterization than rape is, see below), but you're not to use it to titillate.

You can discuss rape as strictly necessary to the plot, and it must occur "off-screen", too. And you can't use it merely to add drama to a character's backstory, nor to show "how bad things were for women back then" (especially since "back then" never means "World War II", which had the most rapes committed, even relative to population, of any war in Western history—mostly because of the Soviet army, who were basically the largest force of bashibozuks ever assembled). "Back then" also covers "fantasy analogue cultures".

And not quite as strict a canon but a valuable piece of advice, consider how people plan to get away with shit—I don't care how evil they are, they still have to be able to do their banking. Apparently in one of the later Song of Rape and Torture books, the only halfway-decent person in the setting is murdered at his own wedding, by his inlaws. And the culprits not only don't appear to know why that might be a bad idea (absolutely nobody will ever ally with them again), it isn't a bad idea. Does Martin even understand the definition of "political marriage"? It seems not.

As was said in a discussion of the issue over on Tom Simon's Livejournal, while everything in those books has historical precedent, no society ever did, or could, have all that nonsense at once.

Then again you people think Aliens is a science-fiction movie.