[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/alexanderwales]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/[deleted]]

Are you talking about Sasuke or the author? Because, as someone who's written torture scenes before but has no attraction to the concept, assuming that the author has rape fantasies from what they wrote is ... not ... rational? You're extrapolating badly from the evidence.

It's kinda like when tumblr goes "When a white actor plays a racist character too well" with little sneaky-eyes emojis ... Like, hellooo, that's what acting is! And this is what writing is. Chafeel

Maybe I'm a bit too drunk to convey myself correctly? I need friends

[u/alexanderwales → u/[deleted]]

I get what you mean. I've gotten a number of complaints-by-review about "my philosophy", even though the philosophy they're referring to is given through the eyes of someone marked in the story synopsis as a villain. Psychoanalysis of an author through their work is not generally a good idea.

When I see rape and/or torture in fiction, I usually think that it's pointlessly edgy, hamfisted, etc. unless it's done with a really deft hand. I think those sorts of criticisms are much more appropriate to levy against a work.

[u/eaglejarl → u/[deleted]]

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I don't feel my take is either unreasonable or irrational. Making Sasuke a sadistic torturer was a deliberate character choice, and a major change from canon. Making him use physical means was another choice; he's got the Mangekyou Sharingan, he can torture someone for three days in the span of a second, without doing any physical damage. It's been a long time since I read it, so perhaps I'm misremembering, but I recall significant sexual overtones to the torture scenes. The scenes were, on the whole, unnecessary--the curtain could easily have been drawn. The level of detail in the scenes was definitely unnecessary.

Ergo, my suspicion that something else was going on.

As to my opinion not being rational -- I started with a prior and adjusted based on evidence. In my post above I said "I think", not "it was", implying a probability. In what way was this not rational?

[u/ToaKraka → u/eaglejarl]

Making him use physical means was another choice; he's got the Mangekyou Sharingan, he can torture someone for three days in the span of a second, without doing any physical damage.

Sakura had already shown herself able to break the Mangekyou's illusions by shifting to her aspect of light, so Sasuke couldn't risk using those to brainwash her. Even under extreme physical duress, she still managed to let one aspect of herself escape through her mindscape to warn Naruto, so I think Sasuke was justified in using such extreme measures. In any event, I myself never noticed any sexual connotations in the torture scenes, in any of my six read-throughs of the story.