Tough Dykes Cry Too

I made this blog because I find butch and sapphic characters are really underrepresented in whump. I love whump as a genre because it allows exploration of vulnerability and loss that not weakness/failure, and that dovetails well with how butches are so often expected to be stoic defenders who don’t experience fear, pain etc.

This blog will contain primarily physical & emotional whump and hurt/comfort scenarios, all where the subject is explicitly butch.

What this blog is for:

Me posting ideas/concepts about butch whump. Anyone is free to use the prompts; tag me if you post to tumblr!

Followers/lurkers submitting their ideas/concepts or prompts. By submitting you acknowledge that someone may use them.

Reblogs of art and writing I’m tagged in or linked to. Gender bends and butch headcanons are fine in recs and will be tagged #genderbend.

Media recommendations for whump with butch & gnc women.

Interaction Notes:

I default to using she/her pronouns in posts because of the prevalence of default he/him & male characters on whumpblr, but feel free to send a scenario, prompt, etc with a butch character who uses other specified pronouns!

This blog is explicitly welcoming of writers and writing about trans butches, whether trans women, transmascs, or any nonbinary folks. Prompts or requests specific to all butch identities welcome!

Lesbian, bi, ace and aro butch writers & characters are all welcome; again just specify if it’s relevant to your ask in some way

I am a general blog; I won’t be doing asks about specific fandoms or others’ OCs outside of fic/fan art reblogs and media recs, sorry!

I don’t write in the format of narratives with [insert character] type names or tags in-universe, so posts will be in a plotting/brainstorming style, not a flash-fiction one. I’m just not any good at that style of writing without a specific setting and characters.

Stuff I Like

Butch-specific tropes: butches and sapphics saving each other (butches who get saved by femmes or by other butches); mean women doing the whump (especially if they’re older/there’s an imbalanced power dynamic underlying—including in relationships); butchphobia or stereotypes as a cover for getting away with whump (manipulation/victim-blaming for harm, assumptions that butch characters ‘can’t be’ hurt in the same way/by x kind of person, and so on); absolutely refusing to compromise and conform; getting back up on her feet no matter how many times she’s kicked down, even when she can’t totally get there; stone butches, literally in any scenario, put them in everything always.

Favorite whump tropes: Hiding pain/injury/PTSD and hitting a breaking point; ‘playing along’ to outsmart or trick a villain and suffering along the way; drugs and poisoning; kidnapping/imprisonment; social circumstances concealing whump (eg having to hide domestic whump); fainting/collapse; slow/rocky recoveries; hallucinations/delirium; addiction or withdrawal; disability and chronic pain - especially being pushed over the edge where it’s no longer possible to mask, and others being forced to acknowledge there’s something wrong; acquired disability from whump with happy/cathartic endings.

Favorite genres: Horror writing my beloved. Where are my butch horror protagonists/Final Butches/butch monsters at. Historical, Fantasy and SciFi settings are excellent too! Worldbuilding/prompts for worlds which have differing relationships to butchness, gender or sexuality in general are totally welcome here :)

Content note:

Posts are tagged with trope names (#whipping, #escape attempt)

Whump involving or implying homophobia, butchphobia, transphobia or sexism will be tagged (#homophobia cw, #misogyny cw, etc). This includes lateral queerphobia, internalized butchphobia, etc. Other forms of bigotry will be tagged #[thing] cw. Compulsory heterosexuality & related topics like straight marriage/dating will be tagged #comphet cw

Some whump may involve domestic violence in sapphic relationships or families (tagged #domestic whump cw).

Anything with sexual coercion will be tagged #noncon cw and #noncon whump even if they don’t involve overt physical violence but use threats/manipulation etc.

Posts & asks about consensual sex (eg, a character’s relationship to it changing post-whump or recovery; discussions of stone dynamics) will be tagged #nsft

I use content-warning tags which are names for fiction writing about certain subjects rather than the names of those events described in real life to try to avoid fictional content overlapping with survivor-centric spaces (this is why I tag things “noncon” rather than “rape” and “domestic whump” rather than “domestic violence” or “abuse”)—I don’t want fiction-posting turning up in those tags by mistake since it’s not fair for survivors looking for IRL support to then be hit with fictional stuff!

Please check the following stuff (boundaries/squicks/limits) before sending asks.

TL;DR there’s a couple of topics/tropes I don’t answer asks about; I’m not a kink blog; and I don’t do fiction or IRL discourse.

Yall this is CRAZY! Thank you so much!

I had no expectation that this blog would take off the way that it has; I thought my interests were niche and maybe a dozen people would be into it. I was also nervous starting that I might get blowback or negativity.

Instead the opposite has been true. It turned out there were a bunch of people who had been feeling the lack of this kind of content quietly just like I had.

So I’m making this post to say: make that thing you want to.

The thing that seems “too small”, that you think nobody’s interested in, that you’re nervous to put out there.

(Theyre some type of resistance fighters/rebels idk)

The way I thought of two ships in different fandoms immediately lol

I hesitate to say “cute” but. Honestly, pretty cute!

Noncon situation where a butch who’s usually very much capable of fighting off an attacker gets caught off guard and before she knows it, she’s being threatened into staying still as someone pushes long-nailed fingers inside her. It stings, but it doesn’t hurt too terribly—not yet. But she’s instantly aware of the vulnerability, both from the act itself and the lack of protection against the nails.

The attacker whispers that her victim gets to choose exactly how painful this is going to be. She (perpetrator) will be very careful and gentle with her, even make it feel good, as long as they both play nice. No struggling or trying to get away, no refusals, unless she wants it to turn bloody. If she gets hurt, it’s her own fault for not complying.

Ooh this is really good, because while I hate a narrative in which women are Doomed Forever by misogyny, I really appreciate ones in which, if someone has been scraping by on exceptiona/like the favor of one or a few people (or alternately being born to a lot of other types of privilege) it’s at least acknowledged as possible that that position could collapse, or that it’s one of precarity and danger. There’s real risks a trying to work around an oppressive system by sucking up to the people in charge of it.

I also like the idea of knighthood specifically as a potential outlet/excuse for concealing nonconformity of gender and orientation. Did she reassure people that oh, it’s not that she doesn’t want a husband, but you see, serving her liege on the field is just too important and it’s sadly just incompatible because she’d be needed around the home if she was wed to this or that lord like she was meant to be? The loyalty-as-disguise trope is excellent, and could also make the fall harder if her fighting the change in status makes it clear that she is actively resisting doing what she “should” and not merely submitting to her lord in a different way.

I’m thinking of a scene where a butch has to fight a femme (for some reason I keep thinking of a secret agent situation) but she goes easy on her thinking damn she’s pretty, and she doesn’t look like much of a fighter, I need to pull my punches so I don’t hurt her. perfectly manicured nails, heels, long hair. But then she ends up getting her ass kicked by the femme. I imagine a little bit of taunting/ flirting between the two.

The butch is like "Look, sweetheart, I don't really want to mess up that pretty face of yours. Why don't you just step down?"

And the femme smiles, adjusting a ring, "Oh, don't worry about my face. Worry about your guard. It's wide open."

The immediate shift in dynamic after the butch loses… The respect (and the spike in attraction) that comes from realizing, “Oh, she could completely destroy me and I love that.”

Oooh, yeah. Authority structures are an excellent context for covert abuse-related whump (whether it’s bullying/emotional abuse or physical or sexual (comments or acts)). Any/all of those can be such a blow to one’s confidence even when it’s starting from a place of apparent cockiness.

Even worse if the abuser justifies it by saying the abuse is her fault for acting like that—that she clearly has a big head, she needs to be taken down a peg and reminded of her place. But it’s a catch-22 if she’s in an environment where “showing weakness” will attract disdain and maybe bullying or loss of respect from others too. And now her sense of what’s the “right amount” of confidence to perform in order to be safe and respected has been thrown out of whack by the abuse.

(Thanks for the ask! Because of the pronouns for the butch in your ask, I wanted to check - would you prefer to have this tagged as lady whump, nonbinary whump, or just not include gender-tags and stick to "butch whump" entirely? I only tag gender related terms at all because some people search for or filter posts using them).

Okay but, since my first thought was obviously "how do I make this whumpy"— what if it was a much higher-stakes thing than just like general social interaction?

Negotiation where they need absolutely to keep their cool around a scary/intimidating/outright evil person or else they won't get something they desperately need (or be able to save a loved one...)

Blowing or nearly blowing their own cover in a situation where they have no choice but to spy/infiltrate a hostile environment because they can't keep up the calm mask they need to.

Trying not to crack under an interrogation when put in a position of having no choice but to talk... while there's no such thing as a 'truth serum', it's certainly common enough to see people use drugs to lower inhibitions and make it hard to shut up, even if it doesn't make people tell the truth. So consider, they're being interrogated while drugged and can't keep their mouth shut, but are practically stuttering through it and desperately trying to restrain themself.

Or the opposite (without the drugs) - they just completely shut down while being berated, become unable to speak at all temporarily and have a silent panic attack.

Having trouble alerting someone to their own dangerous circumstance in a covert whump scenario (like that they are where they are under duress) due to fear of retaliation overwhelming them, and having the person causing said duress brush off any concerns with "Oh don't worry about them, they're just shy."

Worse, someone who knows them misses that covert duress because they independently assume their friend is just anxious.

Being caught without defiant words after something awful is said to them, but in a moment where they're incapacitated or restrained; usually they'd answer by fighting the person who dared say it, but right now they can't do anything more than talk back.

The whumper taking pleasure in and credit for their apparent fear—gloating that they don't even need to gag them.

That fancy-clothing ask was so great, it reminded me that there was another post with a sort of flip of the concept - playing the trope of "Girl who is a tomboy has to dress up Pretty" as just like, bad. Because usually whe I see it, it's either A) A miracle!! or B) a hilarious joke that she's forced into femininity, when for example the first time I watched Miss Congeniality I got kinda nauseous around the way she was talked about when she first "transforms" while everyone I was watching with found it at worst kinda 'cringe' and old-fashioned.

I would love to see being dressed up in a standardly-feminine way played as a nasty thing for her to have to do, as uncomfortable at best, stomach-churning at worst, as it being a real difficulty factor for a disguise because trying to "act normal" like that is hard! And there's so many reasons the whumper is dressing her up to begin with.

It could just be about making her stick out less—maybe she's just in some kind of nice but understated clothing that will make her less likely to be remembered distinctly later

Or the opposite, where she's known in some way and it's meant to highlight that she looks different in order to portray her as having changed in some way voluntarily (like she's shifted allegiances potentially)