Basic Trope: A person who tortures other people.
- Straight: Bob's job is to interrogate people through torture.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is unable to ask any mundane question without threatening people with violence.
- Even those who love pain are mortally afraid being tortured by Bob.
- Downplayed: Bob manhandles defeated goons shaking them down for information but with no persistence.
- Justified:
- Bob lives in a dark and edgy setting, and must use torture to interrogate bad guys to protect innocent lives.
- Bob is a Psycho for Hire.
- Bob is recruited into a political party or cult that uses torture, and is unable to refuse the commands of the Big Bad.
- Bob lives in a setting where forensic science is still in it's infancy and thus confessions are NEEDED for convictions. Well, someone has to do the dirty work of extracting these confessions, of people who would not talk against their own interests nor the one of their family.
- Inverted:
- A doctor specialized in pain management.
- A torturer who specializes in pain management.
- It's Bob's job to be tortured to help assess his agency's interrogation effectiveness.
- Bob acts polite to his prisoners doing thing like casually chatting him them, offering them good food, and accommodating their wishes and needs. All the while he records anything important information they slip out, and quietly reports it to his superiors.
- Subverted: Bob is a very skilled interrogator who is able to trick prisoners into revealing any information he wants through clever psychology without causing any physical or emotional harm to them.
- Double Subverted: After he used the harmless psychological method, he proceeds to torture the prisoners to verify the information.
- Parodied:
- The torture techniques Bob uses are highly ineffective. Poke her with the Soft Cushions!
- Bob is frequently shown trying to interrogate somebody who is Too Kinky to Torture.
- Bob tortures himself in front of his "victims" to get information.
- Zig Zagged: Bob tortures people, but he uses very innocuous methods to keep from harming them physically and emotionally, but this is to wear down their psyche to break them more thoroughly and to sate Bob's subtly sadistic tastes, although he genuinely does want to see his victims returned home and to their families relatively unharmed.
- Averted: Bob doesn't torture people, and isn't a torturer.
- Enforced: Bob is the main character in a production meant to cater to the S&M demographic.
- Lampshaded: "You know that Bob is not such a bad guy. Even though he tortures people. He just loves him some torturing people..."
- Invoked: Alice hates Charley, so she frames him for a crime which is patrolled by Bob's agency, knowing that the "interrogation" is inevitable.
- Exploited: Alice, interrogating Charley, says she's getting tired of no progress, and implies that she will hand the interrogation over to Bob. Charlie cracks immediately at the thought of being in Bob's torture chamber.
- Defied: The Police Commissioner knows that the crime plot will need to be solved, but sends Alice after criminal mastermind Charlie instead of Bob. The reasoning being that the department can't take another news exposè revealing another incident of Bob's police torture.
- Discussed: "Ugh! Again with the bastard who tortures people!"
- Conversed: "This guy just won't talk, Bob. We're going to need your... skills." "Great, I could use the practice."
- Implied: They leave Bob alone with the mooks who are never seen on screen again and he comes out with the information. The methods are ambiguous but others accuse him of being a twisted creep.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob isn't the sadist everyone thinks he is. He feels pity for his victims and remorse for the horrible things he has to do to them as part of his job. Because of his gruesome profession, everyone is afraid of Bob, including his teammates. No one wants to have anything to do with him. Bob is a very lonely and depressed man.
- Bob brags about his "craftsmanship" but really he is a clumsy bully who only knows how to beat people who are tied up.
- Reconstructed:
- At the end of the story, Bob finally comes to terms with his troubled psyche, knowing that those few hours of torture had saved thousands of lives. His friends stop fearing him when they realize the he did what he had to do, or continue to reach out to him despite being afraid of him.
- Bob isn't trained to fight people who aren't bound because, in the setting, people who have this training are a dime a dozen or otherwise easy to recruit. His boasts add an element of psychological torture as possible victims contemplate what he might do to gain information, possibly resulting in receiving it without injuring anyone. Finally, Bob learns to use the minimum violence necessary, abstain from gratuitous methods of torture in favour of more practical ones and take advantage of medical knowledge to mitigate permanent injury. Ultimately, though his job is grim, Bob is professional and sophisticated in his own way.
- Played For Laughs: Alice tortures Bob by... tickling him with feathers. And he's not ticklish.
- Played For Drama: The torture traumatizes Bob's victims, leading to PTSD plots.
Tell me what I want to know, and I'll let you go back to Torture Technician unharmed.
