After skirting around The Company Man a dozen times, suppressing a gagging reflex at the beginning of The Origami Men, and finally receiving a LessWrong notification about a gwern comment to Penny’s Hands, I decided to give Tòmas B stories a try. Still repulsed by the notion of having to read a story designed to fuck with me by locking me inside the chain of thought of an unreliable and morally disgusting narrator, I opted to, and with profuse apologies to the LLM, feed the stories into Claude Sonnet 4.5—which of course cheerfully ate them up and laid out the general gists of the stories in detail.

Nano-banana-generated image of Claude Sonnet 4.5 flexing his arms and saying “Sure! I’ll rip through this for you!” in the style of thebes / Theia Vogel from vgel.me or x.com/voooooogel, surrounded by a dozen flying sheets of printed-out LessWrong pages of the Tomas B. short story _Penny’s Hands_

Uncomfortable asymmetry

And the plot points were… interesting! Clever! Funny, even! The irony of horror as far as I’m concerned is that it’s fun to write, where it’s uncomfortable to read. I got excited about the ideas Tomàs played with, desirous to see where my mind could go with them, leaping ahead to different variations of horror and imagining even cooler (yet often more horrible) extrapolations of his ideas. You see, on this side of the veil, there are no shadows: we puppet every horror, know perfectly well that nothing is beyond the human capacity to understand given we’re the ones understanding it! The beyondness is an illusion, you see!1 As authors, the light hits every square inch of the things-others-find-terrifying, because we are its creator.

Is it unethical to inflict unpleasant circumstances onto characters?

Insofar as the pain might not be cathartic and doesn’t make some kind of clever point where the pain is load-bearing, to inflict pain onto the characters and expect the reader to empathize with the characters creates unnecessary pain in the world.2

  1. I suspect in e.g. H.P. Lovecraft’s case or Allan Poe’s, the “beyondness” is not an illusion. But having met Tòmas B., it is certainly a (rather funny) illusion in his case. E.g. Stephen King or Stanley Kubrick strike me as much the same.

    Compare Lovecraft’s tale, involving a life sequestered in Providence, Rhode Island because of his profound terror and disgust for the outside world, combined with downright absurd fears and the following quote to his pulp magazine editor: “all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” to Stephen King’s own life and demeanor, for instance. (The difference between horror-author-demeanors is stark enough that it has elicited internet jokes.) ↩

  2. There are three conditionals in this sentence: the first is that the pain mustn’t be cathartic in that it doesn’t get resolved; doesn’t leave the character stronger than he was before; doesn’t make him better about himself. And these are all valid reasons to make a character suffer! In worlds where fictional-character-welfare matters, it might still be a valid reason! 3 But especially in our world, where readers experience things vicariously through the character, this form of suffering can provide a lot of value. It is vastly better if the human reader learns something through catharsis-in-fictional-characters rather than through actual nerve endings in the three dimensional world. “The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”

    Second, that the suffering doesn’t make some kind of clever point. Sometimes what cynical narratives do to all their characters (as is the case in some Tomàs B. stories) but most often seen by narratives attempting to point out what happens to villains who don’t follow the moral of the story. Captain Hook pursued by bear for his misdeeds, everyone dying in a railway car accident in Atlas Shrugged, multiple episodes of Breaking Bad.

    Third, that the suffering isn’t expected to be vicariously shared. Unlike a proper catharsis story, clever-point-suffering will often get away with the suffering occurring “offscreen”, detail-barren, because the mere knowledge of its existence is sufficient. Clever-point-stories do this with positive endings too: rarely is “and they lived happily ever after” explored in particular detail, even when one could write whole volumes about it! ↩

  3. For more discussion on worlds where the suffering of fictional characters might matter intrinsically, see Bostrom’s Deep Utopia. ↩