SquashMonster
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I think a lot of fantasy tropes have a great deal of merit from a fun-theory standpoint. You are right that being magically transported to a world of magic and dragons would lose its novelty after six months for most people, but the novelty is not the only improvement. Dragons provide a greater challenge to kill than lions (not that fights to the death with lions are currently all that available) so if someone's idea of fun is hunting lions with a spear, dragons ensure they have something to do after they get too skillful. Floating rocks and twisting crystal spires can be harder to climb than any earthly... (read more)
I think we have to take this as motivation for war with the aliens, rather than giving into or ignoring their demands. Assume that the torturers try this sort of thing with more than one set of victims. If any of the victims successfully defeats the torturers, that spares the would-be subsequent victims from the dilemma. Assume that there are multiple species of aliens that would try this torture technique, and some will concoct more persuasive versions of their threat. If none are stopped, we receive a series of alien torture threats that continues until we run into one with a threat so horrible we decide to kill ourselves. So we need to stop them, to the best of our ability, because we need other threatened aliens to try to stop the torturers they encounter, so the torturers who would successfully threaten us into extinction get killed off before they encounter us.