There's been some very interesting discussion of violence in fiction recently, in Militarism, pacifism, fandom naraht has some links and very interesting thoughts about pacifism.

My issue I guess with these posts is with the dichotomy between pro-military and pacifist. Because I love stories about violence, but my gut sympathies are very anti-military and while this is sometimes problematic, I think it's not inherently self-contradictory. This came up in the comments to naraht's post but I'd like to poke at it some more.
( And now some examples )