I strongly suspect that "ability to withstand fictional suffering" often ebbs as one grows older: there are things I tore through as a teenager that I'm now like "Damn, that's dark! That's so dark! ....no seriously it's too dark for me. My younger self was so tough."

Having said that, Exiled from Camelot has that fanfic feeling where it doesn't feel like the suffering is *really* happening, if that makes sense. You'd feel bad for Kay if this happened to him in canon, as it were, insofar as canon and non-canon is a distinction that even makes sense for Arthuriana... but this is clearly happening in a pocket universe.

It's like the woobie counterpart of those characters who kill people, but it's supposed to be a fun cute character trait? I'm not sure I'm explaining that well. In both cases the characters' suffering/murdering is not meant to be taken literally.