I probably should have phrased my original comment differently, I admit. I do not see an equivalency between the OP and torturous murder. I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole, probably becasue I’m tired of this morally superior “outrage” garbage.
How would my wife react to that? It probably depends on how well written I managed to make it.
I can tell you that none of her reactions would resemble even in the tiniest detail the way she would react if I *actually * seduced the cashier at the local supermarket. Writing about doing someone else would *not * be on the same continuum as *doing * someone else.
On Preview, and seeing your second post: fair enough. That particular rhetorical trick - “Wow, you’re saying you’d like to do X to Mr. Murderer, that makes you as bad as he is” - is used a lot, both on these boards and elsewhere, and it’s become one of my own pet peeves.
I guess I’m also not sure I see a sense of “moral superiority” in the OP or in these threads in general. I know I’m in the minority in that regard, though.
With those shoes? Puh-leeze.
Regards,
Shodan
When it comes to torture? Yes.
the man does know how to accessorize.
[Bolding mine.]
It seems we could use more adherence to such a simple and useful practice. Perhaps it would make the pit more harmonious in its different outrages. 
Looked to me like he was going for the ahtsy-fahtsy effect, and I thought it was actually pretty well done, as outraged OPs go.
But it’s the hopeful smile on that sweet boy’s face in the linked article that breaks my heart.
You’re comparing what I wrote (quoting a particularly terrible piece of the whole of the article) to that of a money shot in porn? What the fuck kind of porn have you been watching?
I thought it was kind of brilliant, but I’m not one to toot my own horn. 
You guys are supposed to be smarter than this. When Storyteller0910 and others have to come in here and explain what I meant by a post full of hyperbole in a forum that is rife with hyperbole…
Forget all that.
Look, my posts in the pit are generally filled with outrageous passages meant to illustrate an indescribable anger towards a particularly deplorable person, place or thing. Sometimes I write about a particularly horrible Pepsi product that just hit the market, or an ex-girlfriend that has lost her mind in the bottom of a bottle. My first post on this board was a thoughtful piece on morality without God. Usually these posts are filled with anger as well as comedy, and members of the Dope are typically entertained. In this instance, I see no way to inject comedy and I was upset by what happened in my own neighborhood.
That I have to come in here after the fact and explain to you fucking morons that it is hyperbole and intentional exaggerations and that I am not, in fact, planning to set in motion a series of mind numbingly awful things to these shit bags is just stupid. That some of you can compare what I wrote (as venomous yet creative as it may have been) to that of porn and I am somehow getting off on it…
What a bunch of dumbasses.
[hijack]The anatomical and biological inaccuracies in that story pretty much blew it for me. It was closer to eyeroll material after that.[/hijack]
Speaking as a vegetarian, I can say I sure as hell wouldn’t. I’m also a woman who was raped who never joins in on the “omg I hope that rapist gets reamed up the ass in prison!!” threads, so maybe it’s just me.
I’m fine with your feeling outrage; I understand the feeling of “who’d have thought sick fuckers could do something horrible in my beloved hometown” (and welcome to the always-growing club). I just don’t think that wallowing down in the dirt is productive. Oh, and maybe I’m still a dumbass but no, I don’t think you planned on killing him or that you wank to the thought. It’s just… beyond what I would have expected. Hyperbolic for hyperbole, if you will. Like gilding the lily but in reverse; it’s not like anyone needed to be convinced that child murder for sexual purposes is a bad thing, after all.
No, I’m comparing your creepy repetition with someone rewinding a money shot over and over. Reading it, I pictured you drooling and sweating while you repeated the detail, breathing heavily, so viscerally connected with it that you had to not just paste it, but paste it over and over and over, breaking it down into smaller pieces each time, slavishly adoring how much you hated this horrible fact. It seemed masturbatory itself – not literally, but triggering a very similar process which has nothing whatsoever to do with empathy or compassion and everything to do with your need to wallow in this filth. There’s a long, long distance between staying aware of the realities of modern life or discussing such with other people and this bizarrely fetishistic hyperfocus on certain details.
This says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about me.
While I was writing and quoting those passages, I was envisioning a common element in film and books, where a character is haunted over and over again by a terrible part of a traumatic event. The purpose was to express how haunted I was by it.
Get it? Haunted.
If you honestly pictured me as you described above, then seriously, look into getting a boost on your meds. That goes for the lot of you.
Yeah, you’re not the one who’s crazy, it’s everyone else! That does sound sane.
Look at the first couple of posts right after the OP. They interpreted the OP correctly. There are others throughout this thread that saw the post for what it was as well. I submit that the fact that you and the handful of other knee jerk, Sling Blade, SSRI-abusing ass bags couldn’t draw a similar conclusion is due to problems rattling around in your heads, not mine.
You have no idea how much it relieves me to know that elements of that story were anatomically and/or biologically inaccurate. Having relatively little training in those areas, I found it all to be plausible enough to be really freaking gross.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked August, above, modified to reflect his reply:
If I write a graphic short story in which I cheat on my wife, but never for a moment contemplate acting it out for realsies, am I an adulterer? Am I similar to an adulterer?
In one of the other Pit threads going right now, someone has linked to Cervaise’s oldie-but-goodie thread on telemarketers. It’s brilliant writing, really, but it’s quite over-the-top in terms of the vitriol directed at the recipient, whose crime is obviously a bit less significant than those of rapists and murders. Is Cervaise fucked up in the head, or was he engaging in skillfully written hyperbole designed to illustrate how annoyed he was?
Look, if you want to engage in a bit of literary criticism here, and tell Euthanasist that what he wrote doesn’t, in your opinion, reflect his intent, that’s one thing. But he has been accused in this thread of being a psycho taking semi-erotic pleasure out of the idea of torturing someone, and even of “wallowing in child porn.” He has specifically disavowed this intent, and absent evidence outside of that contained in this thread, continuing to insist that it was, too seems to be awfully presumptuous. Telling someone that they’re crazy - or that they enjoy child porn - is a pretty significant accusation, and one not to be made on such a flimsy basis.
Oh. I get it now. It’s art.
Specifically, it’s – well, it isn’t narrative or essay or verse or prose poem or drama, but there’s no question that it’s a concatenation of imagery chosen purposefully to provoke an emotional, if not an intellectual, response. So let’s think about the OP in those terms.
In this work, the artist expresses his feelings by repetitively interpolating a sentence from a news report graphically describing the sexual abuse of a young boy with his own home-grown fantasies of violent revenge against the boy’s abusers. Such repitition can sometimes be impressive but the effect is spoiled here because (1) it is so overused as to suggest, not so much a burning obsession, as some kind of attention deficit disorder; and (2) the author’s own imagined savagery easily meets or exceeds even the viciousness of the original crime, robbing it of its power.
Thematically, the work is a mess. To aid our interpretation, the artist has taken pains to assure us that the lurid but wildly impractical acts depicted are not a sincere statement of his intent but merely a creative explosion of outrage in eidetic hyperbole. Okay, but hyperbole isn’t irony or satire – it exists to make the underlying point (in this case, the desire for horrific violent vigilantism) stronger, not to soften or mitigate it. As noted, the grotesque punishments suggested actually manage to outdo the villains in their villainy, effectively turning the abusers into victims. This device serves the work badly, unless the artist’s intent is to inspire sympathy for child-murderers. It may be that the artist wants to make the point that horrors like the one perpetrated have a ripple effect, prompting the urge to violence even in those far removed from the original act. Unfortunately, the piece is even more ill-suited to that thesis – first, because accepting it exculpates the criminals (if violence is a communicable disease, its practicioners aren’t really responsible) and makes the idea of punishment senseless; and second, because the artist has explicitly disavowed any impulse to act on the gory fantasy he has crafted.
So we’re left with just the images in situ, graphic depictions of torture and pain presented to stimulate whatever aesthetic sensibility responds to such. Just as some pornography, however extreme and hyperbolic, is designed to appeal to the erotic sense, so the work here is targeted at the impulse for sadistic violence, and will likely be enjoyed by its receivers in proportion to how strong that impulse is in them.
It is perfectly possible to create something in response to even the most horrific events that is an honest and sincere expression of one’s feelings, and rises to the level of art. Guernica and All Quiet on the Western Front come to mind. Most such works tend to promote compassion by inviting the receiver to identify with the victims; a few insert us into the position of the victimizer and try to make us realize what a frightening and alien place that is. What’s on display here is a different approach entirely. The artist pushes the victimizers into second place and the victim almost entirely off stage, so that he and the ugliest parts of his psyche can parade around for a while (and I’m not really buying that the violent ideation on display was either fleeting or entirely inspired by one particular event – it sounds too well-rehearsed, for one thing). As sickening as the images are in themselves, though, the really nauseating thing is that to justify them, the artist is exploiting a real tragedy, using a real boy’s corpse as a prop.
Plus, it don’t even rhyme.
Wow. That whole post was excellent, but this part is spot-on in explaining why this OP seems so wrong. And to a lesser extent, explains the same feeling of most RO threads of this type.
That really was well written King. I knew those art appreciation classes had some goal, but I never realized it was that
Fucking awesome, King of Soup.
Are you sure you get it?
From the OP:
“My main concern right now is that I’m beginning to believe it has turned me into a boogieman as well. I feel the small snap of my sanity break, like a muffled cough in the dark. I smell the ozone aroma of lightnings-to-come…”
He is also a victim of what was done to this child by these people. They not only assaulted the child, but in a way him as well. He feels his sanity leaving him and thus we see him act like the very creatures he despises.
But that’s just the way I see it. I’ve been wrong before. I’m still interested in finding out how these people manage to find each other in the first place.
The King of Soup is the King of Exegesis. Great writing, sir. Phrases like “eidetic hyperbole” roll well both off the tongue and through the mind.