The Pretty Knight

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.

further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture

That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now

now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.

That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.

But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up

That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?

The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing

A few years later, in the early '70s, I started watching Star Trek -- both the original, in syndication, and the animated series in its network run. I was already a science fiction fan, and I was immediately hooked. I owned all of the Trek-related reference books at the time, including Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance. I attended my first fan convention when I was in middle school. I watched all of the episodes multiple times, memorizing trivia, and by the time I got to college, I could identify any TOS episode by title after glancing at the screen for thirty seconds.

Despite all this, at no point did The Premise ever occur to me, and when I first heard about it -- I was attending Star Trek conventions in the 1970s, after all -- I found it implausible. I was, alas, a product of my times, and while I don't think I was ever actively homophobic, I was far from Woke in those days.

Fast-forward to 2020 or so. I'd been actively involved in the furry fandom since the mid-1990s. I'd survived a marriage and a divorce. I'd become much more comfortable with both my own (a)sexuality and sexuality in general. I'd gotten more sympathetic to fanfic over the years (in large measure to the fanworks and cogent blogging of @paulgadzikowski).

COVID had hit, and the nation was in lockdown. My job already allowed us to work from home one or two days a week, so changing to a full-time WFH schedule took very little adjustment -- and suddenly, I not only had the two and a half hours of commute time back, I had a lunch hour in my own living room with my TV right there. With the announcement of Lower Decks, I succumbed to temptation of three new Star Trek series, and subscribed to Paramount+.

With every episode of every series at my fingertips, I sat down and started watching The Original Series again. It had been a long while since I'd seen more than an occasional episode, and I'd never sat down and watched them all in the original airing order.

And this time around -- Holy SHIT.

The Premise was RIGHT THERE. I couldn't NOT see it.

This morning, it hit me.

It was a paradigm shift. It was Copernican.