I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet.
When I was little (8-13) I was obsessed with torture. My favorite magazine was Voice of the Martyrs. My favorite book was Buried Alive for Christ. We didn't have a copy of Foxe's book of Martyrs, but when my dad got a copy of the Martyr's mirror I devoured it like candy. The spanish inquisition was one of my favorite periods in history, my sister and I played all sorts of games that involved our characters getting tortured, we invented or recreated torture implements, we were creepy little kids.
I grew out of it, eventually, and my dad's long list of Holocaust and reformation martyr movies we watched one winter gave our whole family a big enough dose of martyrdom we didn't even want to talk about the subject for months after. Now I approach the subject with hesitancy and a little fear, and a little worry.
Where does torture fall on the moral/violence/graphic/evil scale? How do you deal with it? Notice, my source of reading material was all Christian. It is a real thing. But how do you deal with it in fiction? Do you avoid it all together? Do you just skip around it lightly?
). I have been accused by several people as being brutal to my characters and while I know this is necessary to the story and is not specifically torture, I think I might have a version of your ... obsession (as Shawn put it elsewhere), Janin.
He wouldn't talk to me for at least a week afterward.