#wacraft loooooves being an unintentional social experiment

[daydreamingtomatos]

as per this post's analysis of supernatural's presentation of torture and the jacob geller call of duty torture analysis, i think my personal favorite instance of media playing with the audience's expectations of torture is in the World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King quest How To Win Friends And Influence Enemies. it's in the death knight starting zone and it's old WoW. you're clad in evil enchanted armor with your evil sword and you're in the village to kill some innocents. awesome. but suddenly your unambiguously evil lord needs information. you're equipped with two hot pokers labeled "Persuader"s and you have to run around the village slowly hitting random peasants until one of them can tell you where a boat is going. so far so normal. the problem is that the RNG is often insanely low. its not uncommon to go through dozens of NPCs just to have them die when you get close to them answering.

your actual attacks as a death knight are so powerful that you just have to rely on melee hits to very slowly try and get anything out of an NPC who might not even have what you need. and they usually die. the linked WoWhead forum is full of people from 2009 frustrated about how torture doesnt work. i think its so rare to see media (mainstreamish even) position the audience on the side of unambiguous evil and make them empathize with how frustrating and useless of a process torture is. you're not even the one receiving it and you probably don't have any sympathy for the NPC victims. just from a purely utilitarian and evil standpoint, it sucks.