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Alicorn comments on Luminosity (Twilight Fanfic) Discussion Thread 3 - Less Wrong
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Order of operations matters. When Chelsea's on the ball and has a seed, she can sprout that seed, coax it to arbitrary levels of growth, and keep pulling it back when it shrivels up a bit. Sure, the plant she grows will wilt whenever it occurs to the victim "hey, my friend here tortured me for several years", but unless this goes on unchecked long enough to leave no seed at all, Chelsea can just haul back the liking again. Eventually, I think somebody who finds that no amount of dwelling on the torture bit can let them stop liking the torturer will find a way to excuse or ignore the torture. On the other hand, if you like someone to begin with and then they torture you the sense of betrayal might be immediate and dreadful enough to completely obliterate the sort of seeds Chelsea needs to function.
Fortunately I have never been tortured (or had loved ones tortured/raped/murdered), but I imagine that the practical limit of how much you can hate someone is a lot higher than how much you can like someone (not so sure about love, but that doesn't seem to be what Chelsea's doing), and if you both liked and hated the same person as much as possible the hate would dominate.
To amend the example: First you are tortured for a long time by a masked person for selfish reasons, then the torture ends and you become close friends with someone, and finally that friend turns out to have been the masked person. I think I would see them mostly as the masked person, and the most the friendship would be worth would be giving them a chance to demonstrate how bitterly they regretted the torture, how much they have become a different person, how hard they worked on making amends etc. If that was less than completely convincing the friendship might as well never have happened, and even if it was completely convincing I still don't think I could stomach their company any time soon.