u/SkubEnjoyer

The protagonist torturing a henchman or the antagonist themselves for vital information is an extremely common trope in media, especially in the post-9/11 landscape. Torture in this context is often depicted on the screen at best as a desperate "necessary evil" and at worst as completely natural and logical for the heroes to do.

Roughly half of the US population thinks torture can be justified in the use of counter-terrorism, and one can only wonder how the prevalence of this trope has directly impacted that number. In reality, "enhanced interrogation" is not only a horrific breach against basic human rights, but is widely considered to be an unreliable and counter-productive way of extracting useful information.

Examples:

1. The Dark Knight - Batman mercilessly beats The Joker while he's held in police custody, attempting to force him to give up the locations of the kidnapped Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes. While there is some ambiguity over how effective this is (since the Joker was apparently going to tell him regardless), the act itself is seen as justified and necessary, and even has the police condoning it. Okay I get it this was a bad example and I'm media illiterate, please stop calling me an idiot.
2. Zootopia - Torture is disturbingly common in kids media, and Zootopia is a good example of how it's often depicted. In this scene, our heroes gets their local mob boss to help them extract information from one of the antagonist's henchmen by holding him over a hole in iced-over water, threatening to "ice him" if he doesn't comply. While this might seem like a standard scene in a kids movie, it essentially normalizes the use of torture by depicting it as both effective and something the good guys just have to do sometimes.

https://thedeepdive.ca/sorry-andrew-tate-is-not-a-legitimate-military-target-ukraines-drone-forces-explain/

So much contemporary poetry seems like they are just writing a sentence or two and then breaking them up at random. Where is the flow? Where is the rhythm? Poets above like Atticus and Rupi Kaur are some of the worst offenders, and I feel like they give poetry a bad name. It just feels so lazy and pretentious.