Quote Originally Posted by israfel420 View Post
First of all, cruelty can be defined as barbarous tortures or brutal beatings or a desire and will to inflict such pain and suffering upon others. And this is why I can see how it is easy to associate Wanda with cruelty since she seems to enjoy beating the snot out of Jillian and also it is one of here favorite "hobbies".

BUt as was mentioned earlier, torture and beatings in Erfworld don't have the lasting sense of finality that they do here in the real world. In other words it is extremely temporary in Ef.
I'm afraid I have to strenuously disagree with this. Please note that the following is not a comment on whether Wanda is evil or not, but rather a comment about the nature of torture.

Torture leaves scars far beyond the merely physical ones. There is a reason that 'abusiveness' is coming to the fore of people's awareness in this way. Abuse is a non-physical way of tormenting others, and it is possible to severely harm or even break people without ever using physical force at any point, merely by talking to them. Many forms of 'brainwashing' or behavior modification work in precisely this way. It may occur in certain pseudo-religious organisations, during military training of conscripts, in political 're-education' or even inside peer groups in grade school. It is a sad fact that words can hurt you, even in the absence of sticks and stones.

Now, given the above, I consider it somewhat overly optimistic to simply assume that even though wounds heal all at once at the beginning of Turn, all their aftereffects vanish at the same time. It would be roughly the same as assuming that the effects of abuse vanish as soon as the words no longer resonate in the air that carried them.

Also, Wanda herself more or less confirms this here. "In some ways, your wounds have healed. In other ways, you are only just feeling them now."

I could go on with this, but it is a very uncomfortable subject to discuss in what is supposed to be a comic forum for fun. I'd rather assume that I have at least raised a question as to whether one can simply dismiss the aftereffects of physical damage in Erfworld.

~H.