Forced To Watch / Literature

• In The Algebraist, by Iain Banks, a Galactic Conqueror wants the cooperation of an alien species, so he summons their ambassadors and proceeds to space hundreds of men, women, and children from the human colony he's just conquered, immobilized yet fully conscious. Unfortunately, the aliens have Blue-and-Orange Morality so their response amounts to: "Yes, and what does this have to do with us?" So he then makes the mistake of threatening them directly — the ambassadors instantly teleport away and activate their military, destroying most of the invading fleet.
• Adventure Hunters: This is how Marcus secures Regina's cooperation chaining her to a wall so she has to watch him torture Golon.
• Alex Rider is tied down and forced to watch as Razim kills Jack in Scorpia Rising.
• In Asian Saga: Shogun, the Japanese are surprised to learn that Blackthorne isn't vulnerable to personal humiliation, and even more surprised to learn that he is vulnerable to this trope. Abusing and mistreating him to the limit won't break him down, but if one of his companions is abused and tortured instead... i.e., Blackthorne's famous attempt commit seppuku came from a group of samurai threatening to crucify everyone in the village he lived in.
• In The Ask and the Answer, Mayor-turned-President Prentiss tortures Viola while a horrified Todd watches on behind a soundproof one-way mirror. Todd breaks first and gives Prentiss information about the upcoming invasion by the Answer.
• The Crooked Man's favorite method of torture in The Book of Lost Things.
• In his autobiography Boy, Roald Dahl recalls how when he and his friends pranked the horrible sweetshop owner Mrs Pratchett by putting a dead mouse in a sweet jar, he and his friends were caned in turn by the headmaster, with Mrs Pratchett gleefully cheering him on. Dahl recalls the horror of being made to watch this, especially as he himself was last in the line, and he himself had the idea for the prank, and carried it out himself.
• In A Brother's Price, one of the Porter sisters turned Cira's lover against her years ago. When she's kidnapped while trying to save Jerin, Jerin says he'll do anything they want forever if they don't kill her. So they don't. Instead, they tie them to a bed, Jerin on it, Cira at the foot and gag her so she's there while one of them "rapes his mouth".
• This turns out to be behind the plot of The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach: the previous Emperor puts a defeated rival king on life support and forces him to watch how all life on his home planet gets killed off, to be replaced by carpets.
• In Coda (2013), Ell makes Anthem watch Alpha and Omega track.
• In an indirect example, Captain Red Wegener from a Coast Guard ship investigating the rape and murder of a family aboard a ship in the Tom Clancy book Clear and Present Danger realizes that the suspects they have for the crime forced the owner of the ship to watch as they raped his wife and daughter before they killed him.
• In John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton, Larz mentions modifications so illegal that they kill your entire family out to cousins, and first, making you watch.
• Dexter's "yodeling potato," having your limbs removed and your tongue cut out. In front of a mirror. Starting at the fingers/hands/feet and working up slowly. Additionally, the eyelids and lips are removed.
• Dust Devils: After Cody starts to mess with him, Adam Price decides out of spite that he's going to capture Cody's father and stepmother and mutilate and murder them in front of him.
• In Goblin Slayer, such an event is what drives the protagonist. As a child, his rural village was attacked by a goblin horde and no Adventurers came to save them. His sister locked him in a storage area beneath the floorboards, saving him from the creatures at the cost of him having a front-row seat to the horrors she endured in her final hours. The experience broke him completely and drives him on his endless quest to exterminate goblins wherever he can find them.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Bellatrix Lestrange, unable to torture Harry because he's carrying a delicate MacGuffin of the Death Eaters, tells her colleagues to torture his best friend's little sister and local Cute Witch Ginny Weasley in front of him instead. She later tortures Harry's good friend Neville Longbottom in front of Harry as well but is interrupted a moment before he gives in.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Ron Weasley listens from his basement prison as Hermione, his soon-to-be girlfriend is tortured by Bellatrix above.
• According to Herodotus, one Median prince was actually forced to eat his son by his king. Later, he supposedly ended up commanding a large part of the same monarch's army at a critical battle with Cyrus the Great. Figure out what happened next.
• In Horus Heresy, this is one of the ways in which Curze tortures Vulkan — he ties him to a table with rich feast on top, along with twenty other people who have been blinded and deafened, and tied as well. Vulkan, superhuman, has to watch them all die slow, agonizing deaths of hunger.
• How to Build a Dungeon: Book of the Demon King: Villain Protagonist Aur against Alan, a Warrior that went against him and lost. Aur had already fully corrupted two of Alan's female companions, but makes Alan watch as he seduces/rapes the last companion, Wikia, who then declares her loyalty to Aur.
• How to Fly with Broken Wings: Finn, jealous of the time Sasha is spending with Willem, tricks Willem into jumping off the roof of the Beckham Estates. He has some of his friends hold Sasha on the ground so she can watch.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Peeta reveals that he was forced to watch the execution-by-torture of Darius and Lavinia.
  • The Hunger Games themselves are a nationwide version of this for the districts. Each one is made to watch, on television, as two of their adolescent citizens engage in a weeks-long fight to the death with 22 other kids, and only one survives. Katniss sums up their message herself:
    "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do."
  • In Catching Fire Katniss is forced to watch Cinna being severely beaten and dragged away to his implied execution.
  • In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel novel set in the time of the 10th Hunger Games, it's mentioned several times that most residents of the Districts don't watch the Hunger Games because they don't have televisions, and even most residents of the Capitol don't watch because they find them repulsive. Brainstorming ways to get more people to watch is one of the assignments of the students assigned to the new Mentor program and compulsory viewing is brought up as a possiblity.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, the villains capture Ward and his younger brother, Tosten. They want information that Ward can give them, and torture Tosten, in the correct assumption that this will get Ward talking much faster than torturing Ward himself. When he hears his brother cry in pain, he talks. It is not clear whether he is really made to watch as the torture is not described in detail, only the inside of Ward's mind as he remembers several things from the past that are interesting for the villain. Magic may be involved.
• Labyrinths of Echo: In one of the sequels, the hero happened to witness things too overwhelmingly weird, even for a Cosmic Plaything like him. He closes his eyes, but oops — he's still forced to see it all. Eyelids do nothing.
• The Mental State is kick-started when Zachary State's girlfriend, Rose, is brutally raped by a gang of street thugs. To add to their cruelty, they make him watch the entire event against his will. This is ultimately what triggers his sociopathy, which drives most of the plot.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, an Inquisitor mentions casually to Vin that when he tortured her brother, he died before spilling the secret they were after. Thus, this time, he was going to use a different tactic: torturing her friend Sazed instead. (He doesn't get the chance.)
• The Naturals: As a child, Dean was made to watch helplessly as his father tortured and murdered countless women.
• In Neverwhere, in order to get information out of Door, the bad guys decide that instead of torturing her, they'll torture Richard instead while she watches.
• Nightfall (Series): Myra is forced to watch Bastien's torture, after Vladimir tells the Farm humans that she is the one responsible.
• The Night Shift short story "Quitters, Inc." is about the ultimate anti-smoking program, operated by The Mafia (adapted into a segment of the film Cat's Eye). Their method? They put their clients under constant surveillance, and if they smoke, they torture their loved ones and force them to watch it.
• In the climax of Nighttime Is My Time, the Owl intends to force Jean to watch him slowly suffocate her daughter and Laura; he says Jean will die last and that he thinks it'll probably be a mercy by that point. Luckily, Jean is able to distract him long enough for the police to get there.
• Of Fire and Stars: Mare can only watch in anguish as her best friend Nils is killed before her eyes as she's held back, preventing her from coming to help him.
• The Pendragon Adventure: In The Quillan Games, Bobby is forced to watch as Mr. Pop, Quillan's last hope, is incinerated by BLOK, thus making Quillan the second territory lost to Saint Dane.
• Prelude to Dune: In Dune: House Harkonnen, a teenaged Guerney Halleck is forced to watch as his sister, who has just spent a year as a Sex Slave for Harkonnen soldiers, is brutally gang-raped before Rabban finally strangles her.
• Turned sideways in The Problem of Susan, where Susan is eaten first, but her (conscious) severed head is left behind so she can watch further horrors unfold regarding her siblings and what Aslan and the White Witch do. Mercifully, It Was All A Dream.
• In The Rising of the Shield Hero Tact's execution is delayed so he can watch as every one of his comrades, friends, and family members is executed before him. The fact that every one of them begs him to save them only makes it worse.
• In the Rizzoli & Isles novel The Apprentice, the cops are investigating the murder of a wealthy doctor and the disappearance of his wife. When they find the husband's body tied to a chair propped up in the middle of the bedroom, the cops are horrified to realize that the killer forced the helpless man to watch as he raped and murdered his wife before slashing his throat.
• Safehold:
  • One Inquisition tactic to get a confession is to make their primary target watch the torture of his wife and children.
  • In Through Fiery Trials, a minor Harchongese nobleman isn't able to flee the peasant uprising fast enough. When his family is captured by the rebels, he manages to Mercy Kill his wife but is forced to watch his daughter's gang-rape and murder before being tortured to death himself.
• The Saga of Darren Shan: The second-to-last book gives us this between Steve and Darren. "I dare you to do this." Different in that Steve is essentially doing it For the Evulz at this point, and if Darren also does it, it'd keep Steve from actually realizing and becoming truly evil, and if Darren doesn't, Stevewould go absolutely batshit crazy. Ultimately it's Steve killing Darren's godson and son-of-best-friend Shancus, that is Steve's crossing the Moral Event Horizon and he dares Darren to do it as well. And Darren almost does kill the kid he's holding, Steve's son Darius. What keeps him from doing it? Steve telling his boy to tell Darren his mom's name. His mom's name? Annie Shan, Darren's sister. Woah.
• In The Schoolmouse by Dick King-Smith, since the headmistress of the school isn't aware that one of the local mice, Flora, has learned to read and therefore knows that the blue stuff left for the mice is poison. Flora survives and manages to convince her parents not to touch the poison, however, she is too late to do anything for her brother and is forced to listen to his horrible dying groans. She is plagued by the memory for a long while afterwards.
• Skin Game:
  • Nicodemus organizes a gambit around this and the fact that Karrin is a Violently Protective Girlfriend to Harry. He surrenders to her when she wields the Sword of Faith, but not before ordering the Genowska to kill Harry. The Genowska slowly starts crushing Harry's skull, while Karrin is helpless to stop it. In a rage, she strikes at Nicodemus with the Sword, breaking her word and unmaking the Sword. Nicodemus is a real bastard.
  • He does it again later in the same book, having Charity captured and intends to burn down her house with her children inside before killing her.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Tyrion reveals that he'd been forced to watch his beloved new wife Tysha gang-raped, and then forced to participate himself, when he was thirteen. The whole thing was orchestrated by his father (with his older brother Jaime also in it).
  • Theon Greyjoy is also forced to watch and participate as Ramsay rapes and abuses Jeyne Poole. It's implied that this doesn't happen just once either.
  • In the backstory (and detailed in Fire & Blood), the future King Aegon III Targaryen was forced to watch his mother be eaten alive by his uncle's pet dragon at the conclusion of the civil war between his mother and uncle over the Iron Throne.
  • Lord Humfrey Hewett is tied down, muzzled, and forced to watch his wife and trueborn daughters serve Euron Greyjoy and his captains as they celebrate their conquest of the Shield Islands in the former lord's castle. Euron eventually has the Hewett women stripped naked after his new lover, Falia (who is also Lord Hewett's bastard daughter), suggests it.
• The Speed of Sound: In The Sound of Echoes, the American Heritage Foundation realizes that Eddie has reprogrammed the echo box to not work in order to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. They take Skylar prisoner, send Eddie a video stream of her Bound and Gagged and tell him that they'll torture her if he doesn't fix the box. Eddie responds with violent Self-Harm, making the torture mutual, as Skylar can also see him. Then he gets to work.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, Bane kills a man's two sons and forces him to watch. Justified in that Bane then used the father's anguish to fuel his dark side powers.
  • In The Courtship of Princess Leia, Gethzerion, one of the two big bads, wants to convince Han Solo to surrender himself to her so she can exchange him for a way off the planet. She does this by gathering harmless prisoners in a room and ordering them all shot down, while using her Force powers so Han sees the whole scene through her eyes.
  • In Black Fleet Crisis, the Republic's opponents try to force the Republic's hand by sending them a video of Chief of State Leia's husband Han being beaten nearly to death. It backfires: Leia shows the video to the Republic Senate, destroying any goodwill the Yevetha had earned and letting her make a case for the Republic to declare war.
• Sword Art Online:
  • During the climax of the Fairy Dance arc, after Sugou/Oberon stabs him through his back and spine, he goes out of his way to torture Kirito by chaining up Asuna, ripping her clothes off, and groping and licking her, all right in front of him. He gets his just desserts when Akihiko Kayaba overrides Sugou's control of the game and gives Kirito admin privileges, which Kirito takes full advantage of, turning off Sugou's pain inhibitor and killing his in-game avatar so brutally that Sugou is left permanently injured in real life.
  • Raios and Humbert do this to Eugeo (as well as Kirito, although he wasn't there at the start) in the Alicization arc. When Eugeo and Kirito's pages, Ronie and Teise, confront Raios and Humbert over Humbert's treatment of his page Frenica(who happens to be friends with Teise), Raios and Humbert use their authority as nobles to force Ronie and Teise to submit to their "punishment." Said punishment involves being tied up with ropes and being raped by Raios and Humbert, and it's implied that the perpetrators' goal is to force Eugeo and Kirito to violate the Taboo Index. They get more than they bargained for when Eugeo summons the Heroic Willpower to slice off Humbert's arms, and Kirito cuts off both of Raios' hands, thereby causing his death.
• In The Sword-Edged Blonde, this is part of Eddie's Back Story: when he was sixteen, he and his girlfriend were attacked by bandits, who held him down and made him watch as they raped and killed her. Even worse, it was kind of his fault the bandits attacked them in the first place.
• In Sword of Truth, it is mentioned that part of the Mord-Sith training involves them being forced to watch their mothers tortured to death. The protagonist is threatened in the first book that if he won't help the Big Bad, he'll be forced to see his love tortured for a very long time (not killed — the Big Bad wanted an heir from her). In another book, knowing that Zedd and Adie won't give in to torture, the Big Bad assures their cooperation by threatening to torture children in front of them instead. A few more examples are present throughout the series.
• Talion: Revenant: Nolan had to watch (somehow-it isn't clear how he saw this) and listen while his family was murdered. His mother and sister, it's indicated, were raped first.
• King Jacob of Tennis Shoes Adventure Series tries to get Garth to reveal the location of a treasure by forcing him to watch as Garth's niece, Melody, is killed. Too bad he doesn't know. (While Garth has a Heroic BSoD, Mel gets better.)
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In The Children of Húrin, Morgoth captures Húrin and forces him to watch his homeland overrun by the Easterlings and his son and daughter subjected to a terrible curse and eventually Driven to Suicide. All through Morgoth's chosen lens, which hid all that was good and showed Húrin only bad things. However, Húrin never asked for mercy, for himself or for any of his kin.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: As Gondolin is being destroyed by Morgoth's army, Maeglin tries to drag Idril, the woman who turned him down, and her son Ëarendil to the battlements because he wants her to see how he throws her child off the wall and into the fire.
    Now then Meglin had Idril by the hair and sought to drag her to the battlements out of cruelty of heart, that she might see the fall of Eärendel to the flames
• In The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, Cree Bega forces Woobie Ahren Elessedil to watch as The Morgawr devours the minds and Life Energy of an entire crew of men. He later threatens to make Ahren watch as they torture his friend, Ryer Ord Star as well.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Tigerstar, after taking control of ShadowClan and RiverClan, organizes an attack on WindClan. Once the Curb-Stomp Battle is over, he rounds up all the prisoners and forces them to watch as he brutally kills a young apprentice, as a "warning" as to what will happen if any of them try to defy him again.
  • In the Warrior Cats: Power of Three series, Ashfur tries to burn Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf alive and force their adoptive mother to watch as "vengeance" for her choosing another mate instead of him two years ago. Her quick thinking gets them out of it, but at the cost of her adopted kits' love.
  • Zig-zagged in Warrior Cats: A Vision of Shadows. Darktail initially forces Violetpaw to watch as her friend Needletail is slowly drowned in the lake, as punishment for the former's attempt to slip poppyseed into his prey. Violetpaw pleads with him, and he relents, allowing Needletail to live, but only if she was willing to kill Violetpaw herself. Needletail feigns an attack, before attempting to protect Violetpaw against multiple rogues at once. She goes out in a Heroic Sacrifice, while Violetpaw watches in horror. Violetpaw flees before Needletail actually dies, but it's made clear what happened.
• In The Witcher saga, a Psycho for Hire Bounty Hunter makes Ciri watch as he cuts off the heads of her killed friends to collect the bounty on them. He later suggests to his master, a deranged Evil Sorcerer with delusions of attaining godhood, that they force Ciri's surrogate mother Yennefer to watch Ciri be raped, impregnated, and vivisected as part of their plan to get their hands on her unique powers.
• In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, things play out differently from the film. The witch does this because she can't physically harm Dorothy thanks to the protective charms of the slippers and the North Witch's protection spell. Didn't stop the Witch with a Capital "B" from trying to get Dorothy's cooperation by torturing the Lion, threatening Toto, and leaving Nick (the Tin Man) and the Scarecrow as ruined heaps at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Baum had his moments...
• In A World Less Visible, Zeke is forced to watch as Tobias is tortured by his own homophobic and white supremacist brother. Then in an additional Kick the Dog moment, Zeke is the one who ends up convicted of the assault.
• In one of the epilogues of Worm, two-bit villain Nero is attempting to establish his own small empire. Dealing with some people who were unable to get a meal-chit but ate anyway, one of them dares Nero to "Do your worst". Nero points out what a phenomenally bad idea that was and grabs the man's niece and nephew, ordering his minions to tattoo them with "Property of Nero" and inject them with enough drugs to get them hopelessly hooked. Fortunately for everyone but Nero, Imp was already there to investigate him for being connected to Teacher and for riffing off Skitter's style of management. And she brought Heartbreaker's kids along. Things go rapidly downhill for Nero from there.

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