Can my character specialize in torture ; but physically be not that strong?
My question is, is this even realistic?
She's a woman in her early twenties who specializes in torture, only working on her victims when they're tightly strapped down and confined so she can go about without disruption. Another thing that I want to be central to her character is that she's physically weak, like she tires easily if she lifts heavy objects, comes short of breath and such.
Is this considered realistic? For her to be a professional torturer and lacking in physical durability at the same time?
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I don't see that this is a conflict.
A torturer is almost never in a position where the person they are torturing has the option of fighting back in anyway. The fact that the victim is physically (or possibly mentally) constrained is pretty much a pre-requisite of it being torture, and not just a fight.
In fact you could certainly develop it to become part of this character's personality. Presumably you know why she is physically weak - does she have an illness? Is it something she was born with? It shouldn't just be that she's averagely weak - interesting characters deal with extremes.
So perhaps she's had to deal with this frustrating physical disadvantage her whole life and that's what has led her to become a torturer - to give her the feeling of physical superiority that she usually lacks.
As an aside, other questions I'm curious about are whether she does this for fun / money / the government or what. I assume you know the answer to this already, but if not that's the next thing I'd pin down.
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Yes, this is plausible.
There are many ways to work around the lack of physical prowess of the torturer, with many of those solutions also serving to highlight their skill, or cruelty, and the overall horror of the act.
I'll focus my answer around a particular example, Sand dan Glokta from The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. Minor spoilers follow. He is one of the main characters of those books, and his primary calling is that of a torturer. What makes him interesting is that he himself is a cripple as result of being captured and tortured by the enemy in the past. His left leg is useless, he is missing half his teeth in a way that the ones above do not line up with the ones below, and he is in constant agony as a result of his scars. He is an absolute terror to look at, which makes his character all the more potent when he shambles out of the dark corner of the room during a torture sequence, and then leans over the victim to smile with his half empty mouth.
His appearance adds to the feeling of powerlessness that the victim is depicted in. Any healthy person would easily be able to over power Glokta if they were freed, but when they are bound, this disparity in physical ability only highlights their own weakness. The backstory also adds a nice touch, since Glokta is never shy about explaining his appearance to his victims. He himself has experienced many of the tortures he inflicts upon his subjects. He knows exactly what it feels like, and he does it anyway. And this is noticed by both the characters and the readers, adding an extra level of mental horror to the actions.
Of course, as a physical cripple he cannot work alone. He uses a number of physically imposing goons to capture and restrain his prey before he begins his work. Your character will need some similar construct to explain how they get past the capture part of the process. Perhaps they are very devious, and lure people into traps. Or use some poison to render their target unable to resist. But once the person is in their control, physical strength matters little in the process.
The character I described above works nicely in the role of a torturer, because he subverts the audience's expectation of what a torturer should be and what they should look like. Your character has the same potential. No one would expect a twenty something woman to whip out the torture implements and know how to use them, yet that is exactly what occurs. Let your character use this expectation in their work. Play up her weakness, implement it into the scene, and just run with it. You want her to be frail and often short of breath after a physical task? Stick a comfy chair in the middle of the torture room for her to retire to for rest, while the poor soul she was working on gets to stare at her from wherever they're restrained.
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Your physically weak character doesn't need to do the "actual" torturing. All she needs to do is to direct her assistants, "stick this instrument in there," and "twist it that way," etc. What she mostly needs is a knowledge of human anatomy, e.g. where the most sensitive nerve endings are, and the best ways to attack them.
If she is working with the actual torture implements, her physical weakness may actually be an asset in prolonging, or dragging out the torture. It took two blows of the axe to kill Mary Queen of Scots because the executioner was "too weak" to chop off her head the first time.
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Torturers don't need to be fit or strong, they need to be possibly scary, knowledgeable, and competent at what they do. There are a lot of kinds of torture and "beating someone senseless" is just one of them, maybe the simplest.
You don't need to be strong to break a finger of someone - you just have to bend it in the wrong direction or use an hammer. After all there are a wide variety of tools that can allow you to inflict pain, or terror, with little effort (pincers, nails, fire ...).
Torture is mostly dealing a controlled amount of pain, be it physical or psychological. The psychological part is maybe more important, if your character does this not out of pure sadism but to get some kind of information. The sooner she can get a mental breakdown from their subjects, the sooner she can question them.
As reference, there are forms of torture that doesn't deal with strenght at all: Chinese water torture, sleep deprivation.
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