#he became possessive and controlling and definitely not the person i've known for 5 years

[scorpion-flower]

Okay, confession time that's gonna make me sound like a shitty person, but on my trip from Catania back to Athens, I sat next to that lovely Canadian woman and her mother and we were chatting during the whole trip and we went out last night, and we went out tonight again (I was supposed to meet them for dinner, but I got to the wrong place and didn't get to meet the mother, but I still got to meet the young woman). There's a slight chance that we will meet tomorrow as well because she's leaving on Thursday, but I don't want to be that creepy person that always invites themselves.

And she's cute, funny and kind and I didn't know what got over me, but I didn't mention that I have a boyfriend, but I also assumed that she would not be interested anyway, because she mentioned past boyfriends and men she flirted with on her trip to Italy, and she's not gonna stay here for long anyway.

And because there was a miscommunication between the two of us and didn't meet her at the place she originally invited me to, and the messenger app wasn't working on my phone, I gave my FB password to my boyfriend and asked him to tell her to text me because I didn't have her number and couldn't reach her any other way. The boyfriend knows about her and how we met btw (he doesn't know that I think she's cute and hadn't tell her that I'm in a relationship tho, I know, shitty me.) It felt kinda weird asking him to log on my FB and text her, and he of course mentioned that he's my boyfriend, but I couldn't do anything else.

And when we actually saw each other tonight, one of the things the woman told me was "I thought that was weird because you didn't mention a boyfriend." but she said it in a way that I couldn't make sense of. I wonder if she was trying to figure out whether I wouldn't have made mention of it because the relationship is bad or because I had other things in mind. And then I thought "But what if she was actually interested? Now she'll never tell me."

I know I am a shitty person because I shouldn't be thinking this way. It's not fair for my boyfriend. I am probably overthinking things anyway and again, she'll be leaving on Thursday, so...

I don't know, I hope we stay in contact even as friends anyway because I really like her and feel that I want to preserve that personal relationship. I asked her if it's okay to message her on FB just to casually chat, and she said she's okay with it.

Yup, I'm definitely an idiot.

[kogo-dogo]

I looked at your favorite character top 5 thing and there's the one character you said was your ''problematic fave''. And I've heard of that game before because I saw somebody play it on Youtube once, I think the second one, and I was just curious about the character. Torque?? Because it seems like such a bad game and he didn't seem to have much personality but you seem very attacked so I was wondering if maybe it was worth looking into the series or something. I like old games.

I am so sorry that I said a week ago I’d answer this, Anon. I have so many thoughts about this probably-actually-one-dimensional character because I’ve had sixteen years to pick apart every scrap of info that exists about him. And overanalysis of fictional men is, at this point, my primary hobby.

First of all… eh. I won’t say to definitively not look into the series, but I would encourage you not look into the series. It’s one of those things that’s aged like an open bottle of two-buck chuck and I can tell you right now that it wouldn’t be as palatable in 2020 as it was in 2004. As much as I love Prison is Hell (the first game) and as much as I get what they were trying to do, they messed a lot of things up and it wouldn’t translate well to modern times. This is especially true for Ties That Bind. Oh my god, do NOT play Ties That Bind if you’re easily offended.

It’s fascinating to pick apart, though, even if it seems extremely basic on the surface level, and part of the reason I like Torque so much is because he’s a very interesting character to crack open and inspect. I know he probably Isn’t That Deep, but he’s interesting, figuring him out is a puzzle because of the way storytelling is carried out, and if he’d been handled better, would probably still be remembered beyond “quiet dude in a game Youtubers occasionally play on Halloween.” He’s really an unfortunate casualty of that era of gaming. It’s surprising he was handled with any dignity at all.

Spoilers are to follow, but it’s for the best. Now you don’t have to play the game.

First, a disclaimer: The Suffering games do work on a morality system, where you can get good or bad endings based on how you treat other people. The game is heavily designed to favor the good ending, and most people I’ve spoken to have agreed the good endings are likely canonical considering how much you’d miss while playing neutral/evil. So, we’re going with the “Good Aligned Torque is Canon” angle.

Okay. Now.

- Who is Torque? 

This guy.

Torque is, in essence, what happens when you take every tired trope of a horror movie villain and flip it around on its head. He’s a severely mentally ill inmate convicted of murder (while it’s never outright stated what mental illnesses he has, it’s pretty obviously a mixture of DID and schizophrenia), he never speaks (at least not in the present; he does have scant dialogue in flashbacks in the second game; it amounts to maybe eight words total), and he is… freakishly strong. Beyond that, there’s very heavy evidence that he’s somehow supernaturally inclined. 

The difference is that, instead of being presented as the villain, he’s the hero. He’s not just the hero, he’s basically one of the very few competent people in the games. Nobody treats him any different than they would anyone else, the game doesn’t go out of its way to underline that he’s some kind of “monster,” and even when the most monstrous of his alters presents itself (The Creature, who we’ll discuss later), people are just kind of like, “Oh, well that was different” and then move on with their lives.

He is a character who could very easily take the place of Jason Voorhees, and instead of being given a machete and told to kill everyone he comes across, he’s given a fire ax and a voice in his head that tells him to take care to think about how much other people are struggling and that maybe, being that he is probably stronger than them, he should put forth the effort to get them someplace safe. 

- Okay, but, like… WHO is he? Character-wise?

If you want his backstory, it’s actually one of the best parts about him and one of the few things that Ties That Bind expands upon correctly. To summarize, he’s a victim of the state that fell through the cracks, pieced his life back together, and then ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

To be more long-winded: He was a troubled child with psychiatric problems who lost both of his parents in a car accident. With no living relatives beyond his parents, he was placed into the Garvey Children’s Home, where the conditions were less than ideal. A mixture of strain, trauma, loneliness, and desperation prompted his brain to divide up into three: himself, Blackmore, and The Creature. Then, left to navigate life and his own mental health on his own, he ended up falling in with some very bad crowds.

He became a drug dealer. He got in a lot of altercations. He was in and out of prison. This only stopped when he met his wife and became a family man, and began to consciously put forth the effort to right himself. He had two sons, had everything under control… and then ended up in prison again when the guy he used to work for on the streets hired a man to come pay him a visit at his friend’s bar and press every last one of his buttons until he snapped. He wound up in prison, his wife divorced him, and everyone assumed he’d end up back to his old tricks.

Except… he didn’t go back to being a drug dealer. He got a job at a gym instead. He stayed on the right track. He started reconciling with his ex-wife who, right before the events of the first game, moved back in with him. 

This didn’t sit well with the men Torque used to run with, especially not the guy he used to work for… so a hit was ordered on him and his family. He wasn’t home when it was carried out. He walked in, found his wife and kids dead, and passed out in his apartment from the shock, where the police found him after receiving a tip.

He was bloody. He was disoriented. He was known to be a repeat offender. They pinned the whole thing on him and, after a very unfair trial, he was sentenced to death.

The first day he arrives in prison--located on scenic Carnate Island--the ground opens up and monsters begin sweeping over the land. Convenient.

- Wait, this bitch has alters?

Yeah. This… isn’t really a part of the game that’s handled well, but it’s interesting. There’s a lot of weirdness going on with Torque (remember that supernatural bend I mentioned?), and one of the two is… well, I’m not sure he’s an alter at all.

First, there’s Torque himself who is just a short-tempered, easily frustrated, but generally reasonable guy who really just wanted to keep his head above water. Secondly, there’s The Creature, a defense mechanism and literal monster that is incapable of communication and rears its head whenever he feels threatened. Physically threatened, generally, which resulted in The Creature being a bit violent. Torque has a pretty extensive arrest record and most of his arrests seem to revolve around “punched a guy at an inopportune time.”

Blackmore is more complicated, because he isn’t really clear. You see, there’s a snippet of dialogue in the second game and a lot of environmental storytelling that indicates that Torque is supernaturally gifted somehow (something he likely inherited from his mother), and that some of his mental illnesses are actually paranormal interference. Blackmore is the biggest gray area, because while he is presented as an alter, he… very much defies that. 

He’s presented as a presence that Torque experiences externally and that only he can see (not really uncommon; Torque hallucinates pretty frequently throughout the game), but he also seems to be aware and consciously trying to control Torque. When that fails, he settles for trying to find a way to take over Torque’s body permanently. He’s capable of actually getting in physical altercations with Torque, but at the same time can hijack his body to do things he wouldn’t normally be able to do. He honestly smacks more of something Torque is possessed by instead of something his brain came up with itself, made all the more obvious by the fact that the final battle in the second game is literally Torque and Blackmore beating the everloving hell out of each other after Torque consciously realizes that nobody can perceive Blackmore but him.

But at the same time, that guy that Torque worked for that ordered the hit on his family? That’s Blackmore. There’s a lot of talk about how nobody has ever seen Blackmore (indicating he only communicated via writing or phone or what have you), and it’s all… very, very stupid. It’s one of those things in TTB that made me throw up my hands and go, “Well, sure. Okay. Let’s just do that, then. That makes perfect sense thanks.”

(I do not like most of Ties That Bind.)

- Okay, so he’s supernatural somehow?

Mm-hm. Again, it’s never explicitly stated, but heavily implied through some dialogue from my second favorite character in the game (DR. Q.L. KILLJOY, MOTHERFUCKER) and just the way the story plays out. 

Carnate Island erupts with a bad case of monsters the second Torque sets foot on the island. A prologue you unlock after you beat the game once reveals that Torque actually hallucinated the first game’s end boss before he even saw it, indicating he has some precognitive abilities. The sentient spirits of both games know who Torque is and take a special interest in him, and plenty make allusions that they’re “more alike” than he thinks. Blackmore is very clearly paranormal in origin and seems to even be able to command the monsters in some way. 

Hell, Dr. Killjoy even implies at the end of the first game that Torque is somehow making all of this happen and, only by tackling the root of his problems, can he make everything stop.

While there’s never been an active fandom for this game, I used to associate with a small group of fans, and there was actually a lot of discussion/disagreements about whether Torque actually had any form of psychosis or if maybe he had latent psychic abilities he couldn’t control. Seeing things all the time, causing things to accidentally happen that nobody would believe; it’d be easy to be chalked up with a disorder when there’s no way to know or prove what you’re experiencing is Real Shit.

- Why do you hate Ties That Bind so much?

Because of the way it improperly handles a bunch of mental health stuff that the first game wisely didn’t actually touch on much beyond acknowledging the fact that This Guy Are Sick.

Prison is Hell makes it very evident that Torque has psychiatric problems but never dwells on it overmuch. There’s even an entire chapter of the game that takes place in an old asylum with an early 1900s alienist ghost (DR. KILLJOY) trying to diagnose and “treat” Torque, and it still is mostly hinged on the horrors of old-timey treatment of mentally ill patients than anything about Torque. That and Dr. Killjoy’s misguided good intent (that dude deserves a whole essay of his own, to be honest).

Instead of hammering it home that he has Issues and deciding to talk too much about Issues, it just treats Torque like a human being. Your main goal is getting off the island and saving stragglers along the way, all of which react to Torque just the same way they would to anyone. COs will either be authoritative or condescending. Fellow inmates will be suspicious but more likely to work with him. Everyone is always gracious for his help, and nobody makes any odd remarks about anything weird he does (barring when The Creature shows up; then, they just remark on, “DUDE HOW IN THE FUCK?” because you find out, later on, that all they see is Torque getting in fist fights with things twice his size and winning).

Torque is just Torque. He just do what Torque do.

Ties That Bind then goes barreling into a bunch of tired tropes and tries to make a convoluted twist ending, and then there’s the whole matter of the secret underground organization that wants to capture Torque and have been working with Blackmore and you end up fighting a helicopter and some SWAT-looking motherfuckers and… they try so much harder to be edgy and gritty and it’s really fucking stupid.

The only good things you get out of it are some further snippets into Torque’s backstory (appreciated), the return of Dr. Q.L. Killjoy (always welcome), and a set of monsters known as Gorgers (they make purr-gle sounds when they eat and I love them).

Oh, and Consuela. She is mentioned in the first game and actually shows up in the second, and I can respect any woman who gets captured by an evil paramilitary organization and, immediately upon being rescued, takes the biggest gun she can find, looks you dead in the eye, and says, “I’m going to steal a fucking boat, drive it straight into a warzone, and rescue my goddamn husband. You with me or not?”

She is literally some female parallel to Torque and my headcanon is they are bros.

- Anything else?

Yeah. The soundtrack for the game is pretty awesome and ended up inspiring some other music in a couple of other video games of the time (Mortal Kombat: Armageddon immediately comes to mind). They actually rigged up some pretty cool contraptions to make unique sounds and ambience using shit like scrap metal and garbage, and the results are pretty fucking cool.

Favorites of mine are the boss themes for Hermes, and Dr. Killjoy, with Dr. Killjoy’s being my absolute favorite of all of them. The main theme of the game is pretty great, too, and is probably the most iconic of all of the songs on the OST. I’ve even heard it used in stuff where I doubt people knew what the hell The Suffering was, lol.