Agreed – you can definitely write about a character being tortured without woobifying, in the same way that a character can be a prodigy without being a Mary Sue (*cough* Vernestra Rwoh *cough*). "Woobie", as I understand it, implies that the character is perceived as out of character relative to the canon depiction.
This can be tricky, though, because a person can say "oh this is out of character because this character is a Total Badass and could never be helpless/would get over this right away" even though (a) the character was never in a similar situation in canon and (b) it kind of implies that when people are helpless it is Their Own Fault. So I imagine woobification – or characterization being perceived as woobifying – would tend to be a bigger issue in fandoms that don't have a high level of graphic violence in canon but whose fanwriters do write those sorts of fics, though I don't have any statistics to support that.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2021-08-20 05:38 pm (UTC)This can be tricky, though, because a person can say "oh this is out of character because this character is a Total Badass and could never be helpless/would get over this right away" even though (a) the character was never in a similar situation in canon and (b) it kind of implies that when people are helpless it is Their Own Fault. So I imagine woobification – or characterization being perceived as woobifying – would tend to be a bigger issue in fandoms that don't have a high level of graphic violence in canon but whose fanwriters do write those sorts of fics, though I don't have any statistics to support that.