I'm the Eclipse Phase type. Forget killing trauma, dramatic psychoaugmentation is very much in the cards.
With regards to rape in fiction...
....Mm. There's two sides to this, and they both stem from the same thing: there's really two horrible things
left in the modern world that people are reasonably personally acquainted with, and that is rape and torture.
Nobody knows someone who's been murdered anymore, and even before that was true violence was just... we've built up such a culture around it from our millenia of militant societies that beating someone up or killing someone outright isn't such a big deal. We don't get people sacking villages, in civilized countries (not necessarily counting America, mind you...) even a homeless person can get enough food and water to not starve to death...
... Like, if you want to show that someone is really, truly cruel, your options are the slow torture kind of killer, or the serial rapist. And ... well, there are some very clear reasons why a (usually male) writer would feel okay with writing rape, but not torture. >.>
And that pretty much necessarily means it's overused. Sometimes you just don't need someone that viscerally cruel; if it's poorly executed, aside from feeling disrespectful it's also just
tacky. Someone who goes around killing people won't have the same tone, it's true - but do you really need that tone?
... Not to call you out in particular
@James D. Fawkes, since I haven't actually
read your fic, but I kinda doubt Halkeginia needs it? Death is plenty bad enough when played up in the right ways. The problem comes up with a KnK cross, though, because... um, hello, Mystic Eyes. The audience gets used to "death" being a callsign for "the character is about to do something awesome," not "the character is about to do something horrible." You can try to explore death being itself horrible but then you come off with your character feeling like a dark antihero at best (though even there Nasu managed to pull off something pretty impressive, with Ryougi "You can only murder one person" Shiki).
Honestly, I'm withholding judgement for now - though as a final note, I will note that rapists are, unfortunately, rather more common than torturers, in large part because of rape culture and the general problem that mental harm is so much less visible and so much easier to ignore than the physical. It would be much easier to find a rapist in the ABB than to find a torturer. At any rate, the scene itself was done respectfully (i.e. not played for eroticism) and well, so I don't necessarily have a problem with it - but we'll see if it was necessary in the long run.
. As someone who HAS made a point of reading the entire story MULTIPLE times, I can say you've done a difficult task to perfection. Personally I wouldn't take his comment to heart, as he's basically told us he's not got any interest in actually knowing anything about the story. Which is his loss.
