#which again - why I see Mobius as a more accurate depiction of a torturer than Thanos...

[tori-artemis]

... honestly I'm a little nervous about reblogging this, cause I'm not sure if I'm being rude by responding or if I should just not say anything. I guess I should start by saying that I genuinely don't want to cause any discourse/arguments from this (and I know you don't want to take part in any discourse, and honestly - I don't want you to be dogpiled either, especially after certain incidents). I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't mean for this to be an attack or anything like that, I really respect you, but I just... can't help but feel kind of upset by something you mentioned.

And yeah - honestly I feel bad about feeling upset cause I don't want to be the reason you feel like you can't ever say anything on your own blog - that'd really fucking suck, and I don't want to do that. If anything maybe I'm being kinda whiny here.

Basically it's the whole torture being diluted thing that I actually feel upset by. Let me first get this out of the way: this isn't me trying to harp about how bad Mobius is. Look I absolutely hate the guy's guts, and I find him intolerable, but that's not what I want to focus on. Loathe as I am to admit it, he was presented as "grayish" (despite his villainous actions and despite the hero coding - or perhaps because of both, depending on your viewpoint) so there's an argument to be had that he isn't evil (I don't agree, but I can agree to disagree).

What actually upset me is just the statement alone - that 'by calling what Mobius does to Loki "torture" - that you're diluting the actual meaning of the word'. And I just... I'm sorry but I wholeheartedly disagree. Not only do I disagree - it's objectively wrong. Here's the thing, torture, like actual torture... it's not what so many people think it is. It's not a word to just throw in whenever someone is brutally attacked. Jeffrey Dahmer never tortured anyone - I know that sounds insane but hear me out. He abused people in the most sadistic of ways, and he was absolute garbage for doing so... but he's not a torturer. That's because to torture someone, you have to be a govt official - a cop who beats a prisoner is a torturer but once he goes home and takes off his badge, he's no longer an active officer. So when he beats his wife he's not torturing her - he's abusing her. That's literally the only difference between the two - that and scale but I'm not going to get into that cause tbh I'm not the most educated when it comes to legitimate torture. Everything I know is from this amazing blog @scripttorture which teaches writers how to write authentic torture scenes, and the person who runs the blog does extensive research into real-life torture, it's psychological and physical effects it has on victims, etc. It's really in-depth stuff, but I don't recommend it to anyone who might be sensitive cause it covers some deeply upsetting and potentially triggering shit, but I digress.

One of the things I learned from that blog is - modern torture looks very different to how we might imagine torture to look like. They're called 'clean tortures' and the reason why is because they're not meant to leave scars - so anything from slapping to kicking, to solitary confinement, to sleep deprivation, to forcing victims into stress positions - those are all real, legitimate torture methods, and they're the most common ones used nowadays. And the negative effects they leave on a person - is physical. People have literally died from some of these methods. You'll hardly see many real-life incidents where people are having their body parts removed - that does happen, but it's far less common and far more extreme than the "clean torture" methods.

The point I'm trying to make by all this: when it comes to depictions of actual torture, what Mobius does is far far disturbingly closer to real life torture than anything Thanos ever did. That's not me pulling that out of my ass and trying to win an argument, nor is it me saying how much Mobius sucks or how he's worse than Thanos or whatever - I'm literally just going by the depictions of their actions alone.

Tbh I kinda felt stung when I read your post cause I never even read any other posts comparing Mobius to Thanos at all, and tbh I don't think it's fair to downplay the harm caused by one character cause the other was far worse - that feels way too much like trauma Olympics to me and I've always hated the idea of trauma being a goddamn competition.

If I can use an example - I recently watched a film called Irreversible, which revolves around a woman who is brutally raped in a subway underpass. She's repeatedly punched, kicked, and has her face smashed into the concrete floor. It's so bad that by the time an ambulance finds her, she's slipped into a coma. This is an extremely brutal rape - it's also not nearly as common.

Now I've also seen 13 Reasons Why (insert laugh track). Yes I know it's a meme, but bear with me. Two characters end up getting raped - one was passed out, the other wasn't physically beaten, but was still forced. And then you have Jessica Jones, and her experience of being raped. Now I think we can agree that it would be seriously fucked up and wrong to say "well only in Irreversible a woman was actually raped - by comparing those other characters (they just had "unwanted sex" or their boyfriends were "just being mean") you're diluting the word." We know it'd be wrong cause so many victims have been raped in those ways, that the most common form of rape is the non-excessively-brutal kind. No one's diluting the meaning of rape if they say they (or a character) was raped when they were passed out drunk, etc.

The truth is... real torture does not look like sadistic-ass Thanos pulling body parts out of his abducted child daughter or whatever extreme shit he's done to Loki, real torture is... locking someone in a room for an indefinite time and repeatedly hitting them in the same spot over and over and over again. Which is literally what Mobius does to Loki. Yes - he never laid a hand on him. He doesn't have to. All he has to do - just like real-life torturers do - is make the order.

Here's the thing - if this had just solely been about Mobius' interrogation (which while highly shady and questionable isn't really considered torture - at least not according to scripttorture anyway), if episode four had never happened... I would've agreed with you. I might've still felt upset with Mobius, but I would never have called him a torturer. But episode four did happen, Mobius actually did put Loki in a time cell where he's repeatedly struck in the crotch over and over again - just because Sif is technically the one doing it doesn't mean the TVA and Mobius aren't the ones inflicting it. That - that is actual torture, strip away the sci-fi aspects and that is some real-life depiction of what victims have actually gone through. And by saying that "calling what Mobius did torture is diluting the meaning of what torture is"... not only does that leave a bad taste of "trauma Olympics" in my mouth... it's so objectively wrong, and probably even harmful to someone who's actually been tortured. It feeds into torture apologia, and the myth of "for it to be torture it must always be scarring" - nevermind that torture victims have literally died with little to no marks on them.

I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you're a bad person, or that you're intentionally feeding into that myth - the fucked up thing about torture apologia is that it is so deeply ingrained into our media and society in general (just like anti-blackness, just like rape-culture and queerphobia) that half the time, most of us don't even know we're perpetuating it in the first place. (Like my nephew literally once saw that rape scene in 13 Reasons and he turned to me and asked "Is that actual rape? Cause it doesn't look like rape..." - and he said that cause he literally had no idea what rape actually was, and he bought into the myth that for it to be rape it must always be brutal.)

So like I get it; I get why it's not easy to recognize what torture is, it used to be hard for me too. Cause let's be real - not many people are going to take the time to research this shit because it is fucking soul-crushing and emotionally draining to read through all that and unless you're a morbid fuck like me chances are, people aren't going to want to spend their free time doing that.

Again, I'm not saying this cause I'm trying to make you hate Mobius or anything. I'm not saying he's worse than Thanos or whatever - I think he is, sure, but others don't and that's okay - cause at the end of the day he's just a fictional character and it's okay to like/dislike him for whatever reason. But I think it's actually important to try to recognize the actions of characters - whether it's abuse or torture, or rape, etc. And whether we like said characters or not.

People argue about what even is canon in the first place anyway. Even the starting point can't be agreed upon.

Including the 2nd ask bc I'm assuming they're from the same nonny? (pfft like more than one person would send me asks in one day lmao)

Anyway ... I mean, I'm mostly ambivalent on the first point re: people disagreeing over canon, bc ... like, idek where to start on all the shit that I could say about fans' relationship to and interaction with canon or even what canon technically is, like, by definition (and therefore what even qualifies as canon).

But I did want to address the second point bc I think it's a good opportunity to just sort of toss this hot take into the void: "Stating that fiction is subjective will ruffle some people's feathers at the minute" - so what? So. What. Fiction is subjective, all art is subjective, and that's something that is true, has been true, and will be true regardless of some fans' decision to just decide that things don't work that way.

They can get their feathers ruffled as much as they like, but people need to learn that their personal emotions and feelings about A Thing don't mean that they can just decide that That Thing is suddenly something else (or decide something else is suddenly That Thing). It's just like how words like gaslighting and narcissistic and abusive and torture and trigger have become so diluted bc people a) don't actually understand what gaslighting, for example, is, and therefore cannot possibly call it out with any real degree of accuracy, so they just end up throwing a really weighted term at something as basic, human, and everyday as telling a lie. Or an emotional argument becomes abuse, or being squicked by something makes it a trigger.

OR, on the opposite side of the coin, b) maybe they actually do know what gaslighting or abuse is, but then they will categorize anything that remotely falls within the realm of the same definition as being gaslighting or abuse. I, personally, for example, really hate the way that some people claim Mobius tortures and enslaves Loki. It drives me up the wall when I see those takes because - okay, are these terms technically correct? Yeah, technically, which is what they use to justify it - "Well, this source defines "torture" as xyz, and Mobius is clearly doing z, so Mobius is a torturer." But words mean shit, so are you really asking me to accept that Mobius tortured Loki just as Thanos tortured Loki? Yes? Okay, how? No? Okay, why not?

Here's the thing - Mobius never laid a hand on Loki, nor did he sadistically, literally play with Loki's mind. Remember, Loki was being influenced by the mind stone in Avengers and the Other had a constant connection to Loki's consciousness. Thanos (and the Other) tortured Loki. Mobius ... was mean to him during an interrogation and also lied about Loki being responsible for Frigga's death (and I've said it before, Mobius was being an unreliable narrator in this scene and anyone who believes - because of Mobius - that Loki actually killed Frigga is both factually wrong and also an idiot). Like, Mobius is shitty to Loki but Thanos is torturous to Loki. The two are not the same, regardless of how they may technically be defined. By calling the former torture, consistently, bc his behavior meets some arbitrary technical definition, you're actively diluting the word bc you feel like its weight lends credibility to your argument that Mobius sucks.

... I got off-topic for a second there, I'm sorry. But back to my point: fiction is subjective and I don't care whose feathers I ruffle by saying that. It's true, and acting like it's not so that you can feel like you have the "right" interpretation of the character (thus giving you personal validation which, I'm sorry to say, the Emperor thought that he was wearing fabulous new clothes but that didn't change the reality that he was butt ass naked) is just ... *gesticulates wildly bc words fail me* shitty.