Dear Avengers Fandom,

I have a fairly high tolerance for woobie!Loki - in fact I am pretty easy to convince that he spent most of that movie in over his head and wishing he was anywhere else - and I get that it can be difficult, with a near-godlike character, to hurt him sufficiently to do the good hurt/comfort -

But can you fucking stop having SHIELD torture him for information? PLEASE? Nothing throws me out of an Avengers fic faster than Fury torturing somebody for information.

...because Fury, above all else, is good at his job, and therefore he knows that TORTURE DOESN'T WORK to get information. Torture is good for two things: hurting people, and getting them to tell you whatever you want to hear. (if you're really good at it, you can sometimes break them entirely to your will, but that requires substantially more finesse than just hurting them a lot - and still won't necessarily get them telling you the truth rather than what you want to hear.) There are much, much better ways to get information from people. Several of them were demonstrated by Natasha in the movie!

And Tony, of all people, knows that torture doesn't work. Because hey! He was tortured! At length! And what happened? He told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and then did the opposite! And his fellow prisoner did the same thing! The lying under torture wasn't even the hard part!

So STOP setting up false moral conflict by having Tony reluctantly acquiesce to Fury torturing people for information, okay? THEY ARE BOTH SMARTER THAN THAT.

If you want Fury to use morally questionable methods of educing information, there are some of these that might actually give useful results; peeling someone's skin off is not one of them. If you just want to see your favorite character tortured, there are plenty of ways to manage that without requiring all of SHIELD and the Avengers to be bad at their jobs.

kisses, melannen.

PS: I just want to read one Tony/Loki longfic that doesn't involve Tony rescuing him from a SHIELD torture chamber. Is that so much to ask? At the very least, can I have one where he breaks into Loki's 'enhanced interrogation chamber' in a rage only to find Loki having cookies and milk with Natasha? (Cookies and milk being an interrogation method that is known to actually work on hardened terrorists. UNLIKE TORTURE.)

ETA: Here, fandom, have five reasons why Fury might decide it's a good idea to torture Loki: 1) In order to manipulate Thor or Asgard into doing something; 2) In order to manipulate the Avengers into rescuing him so he'll trust them enough to talk; 3) because he actively doesn't want intel from Loki, but he has to be seen to be doing something or he'll lose custody; 4) because Loki has already voluntarily given him information, but they need some way to make it look coerced, and the two of them have pre-agreed that torture is the best way to do this; 5) because Loki clearly let himself be captured because he wanted to be tortured, and Fury decided going along with it was the fastest way to find out why. (Notice that none of these are because "torture is a good way to get reliable intel from someone.")

ETA2: AUGH I WAS JUST READING SOME PERFECTLY lovely Clint/Bruce BDSM and suddenly "If I were torturing him for real I would have all the information I needed by now!" NO. NO. BAD FANDOM, NO COOKIES, DAMMIT THAT WAS THE MIDDLE OF A SCENE WHERE ELSE AM I GOING TO FIND CLINT/BRUCE KINKFIC??