Oh hey, and remember MCU fics and the woobie!Tony trope? Especially where it comes to Steve/Tony fics post-Civil-War? Yeah.
Sure, torturing a character that one likes is a common thing, because that's where the sympathies are. I understand the urge to want to show people how your favorite is suffering because you feel like they've been wronged somehow. Especially in the MCU example where Tony fans are convinced that Tony was right and Steve was in the wrong. So a huge chunk of the woobie!Tony fic is written with for the purpose of getting Steve to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
Or in the example of romance novels:
most BG romance novels I've read are written by women, and you'd think both writers and readers would identify more with the female main character. But, a great majority of them, when needing to torture someone in the story for angst, will end up torturing the woman
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that the majority of these types of stories end up making the dude/romantic interest apologize. Because the audience sympathies are supposed to be with the woman and thus the emotional satisfaction comes from the guy finally getting his comeuppance (either through having to grovel for forgiveness or through the girl falling in love with someone else who treats her better). Or the person causing the torture is the Bad Guy, so the audience will feel emotional satisfaction when the Bad Guy finally gets felled by the hero coming in to save the heroine.
But in the case of torturing Jing Yuan, I've noticed a strong strain of apologia for Dan Feng/Dan Heng. The reason Jing Yuan is the one to suffer unrequited romance (because no one seems to think he was ever physically hurt for some reason) is usually the result of him being either a) not old enough to understand that Dan Feng can't see him as anything more than a kid or b) too caught up in the past and neglected Dan Heng's emotions so now he has to be stuck in Luofu pining while Dan Heng gets to be free.
And when it comes to physically hurting Jing Yuan, it's pretty much because Dan Feng is a child predator and hurts him during sex, but the writing is more concerned with Dan Feng's sadness than the physical abuse Jing Yuan is going through. Because Jing Yuan's "innocent seduction" makes Dan Feng soooo jealous, so he's actually hurting him out of love. Also no one's worried about Jing Yuan's physical well-being after getting his various orifices ripped apart, because he'll recover or something. As if being able to physically recover somehow makes the physical abuse not traumatic.
(Again, I'm restricting this to the most popular fics. Obviously there are Jing Yuan fans who torture him because they're sympathetic to Jing Yuan's suffering, but those types of fics aren't nearly as popular.)
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Sure, torturing a character that one likes is a common thing, because that's where the sympathies are. I understand the urge to want to show people how your favorite is suffering because you feel like they've been wronged somehow. Especially in the MCU example where Tony fans are convinced that Tony was right and Steve was in the wrong. So a huge chunk of the woobie!Tony fic is written with for the purpose of getting Steve to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
Or in the example of romance novels:
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that the majority of these types of stories end up making the dude/romantic interest apologize. Because the audience sympathies are supposed to be with the woman and thus the emotional satisfaction comes from the guy finally getting his comeuppance (either through having to grovel for forgiveness or through the girl falling in love with someone else who treats her better). Or the person causing the torture is the Bad Guy, so the audience will feel emotional satisfaction when the Bad Guy finally gets felled by the hero coming in to save the heroine.
But in the case of torturing Jing Yuan, I've noticed a strong strain of apologia for Dan Feng/Dan Heng. The reason Jing Yuan is the one to suffer unrequited romance (because no one seems to think he was ever physically hurt for some reason) is usually the result of him being either a) not old enough to understand that Dan Feng can't see him as anything more than a kid or b) too caught up in the past and neglected Dan Heng's emotions so now he has to be stuck in Luofu pining while Dan Heng gets to be free.
And when it comes to physically hurting Jing Yuan, it's pretty much because Dan Feng is a child predator and hurts him during sex, but the writing is more concerned with Dan Feng's sadness than the physical abuse Jing Yuan is going through. Because Jing Yuan's "innocent seduction" makes Dan Feng soooo jealous, so he's actually hurting him out of love. Also no one's worried about Jing Yuan's physical well-being after getting his various orifices ripped apart, because he'll recover or something. As if being able to physically recover somehow makes the physical abuse not traumatic.
(Again, I'm restricting this to the most popular fics. Obviously there are Jing Yuan fans who torture him because they're sympathetic to Jing Yuan's suffering, but those types of fics aren't nearly as popular.)