Ent from the Dawn of Time

mensah has witnessed friends be eaten, been sabotaged, forced to murder a person, blown up, attacked by secunits, held captive, blown up more, thought her friend was dying, dealt with the corporate rim, forced to buy her friend and be its owner, kidnapped, held hostage, subjected to mind games at the least if not tortured, held for ransom, treated like an object, develops claustrophobia, shot at, witnessed her friend sacrifice itself for her twice in an hour, nearly died, subjected to anxiety and PTSD, assassination attempts, blackmailed, had her daughter and brother-in-law kidnapped, had her friends kidnapped...

my takes on this trope rarely if ever have anything to do with the character being "special" or being studied for powers they innately have, if they are special its something that was done to them

it's about the medical trauma

it's about the violation and lack of bodily autonomy

the "living weapon" trope, but the key characteristic is catastrophic functionality

i love, love, love the concept of "catastrophic functionality" in a person: character that can tank ludicrous amounts of damage and just Keep Going in virtually all circumstances barring outright dismemberment. They can keep going, so do they "deserve" rest and/or pain relief?

after a lifetime of having their distress treated as whiny and unreasonable, they have what would be a dangerously high tolerance to pain and exhaustion.

another key function of the Science Facility is to fix the damage Character takes, maybe using enhanced healing technologies or 3D printed organs or something. this leads to Character's body being treated as relatively disposable cause "we can just fix them"

extreme version of this: Character can't die even if they wanted to

people who work with Character are informed that they're dangerous and arbitrarily violent, and their fear of Character makes it easier to justify restricting autonomy

It is TRUE, cause Character does not have tools to set boundaries or protect their body other than violence. vicious cycle of being perceived as dangerous and therefore denied autonomy, and being forced to use violence to defend autonomy

the restraints used to hold Character look like major overkill, which underscores how dangerous they are. LOVE this trope

character being desexualized to the point that their non-consent to touch, to being stripped down and examined, or to procedures is trivialized. There is no non-clinical context for their body, and the "clinical" framework eclipses any possibility for bodily violation to be understood as violent.

types of uncanniness: Character looks human but has some subtle inhuman traits or characteristics. (I'm obsessed with reflective eye shine, personally.) OR Character looks like they've been taken apart and put back together, like flesh pulled over a much more unforgiving and indestructible metal scaffold. OR Character gives off "undead" vibes; they're just not quite alive in a way that sets off air raid sirens in people's brains

Often, Character is dead and Came Back Wrong (varying levels of literalness)

-searing

-burning

-shooting (along with burning, these are often neuropathic)

-stabbing

-gnawing

-stinging

-aching

-pain can radiate from on place

-numbing

-tingling

-throbbing

-constricting/cramping

You can also have severities such as

-paralyzing

-debilitating

-distracting (maybe one worse pain is making whumpee ignore the rest)

-psychosomatic—other stressors are making whumpee think they’re in physical pain. This also works for limps or injuries

Here are some more description words:

-piercing

-pulsing

-squeezing

-thrumming

-buzzing

-suffocating

Think about the guilt and self-blame. "I let it happen", "It was my fault after all", "Well, I just agreed to it".

And the reason why you could agree to this. Maybe it's some illness that will get you killed, maybe you wanted to be something great, maybe you wanted to reach your potential, maybe you wanted to serve a greater good. Or maybe you were convinced that you need some sort of cure to your condition. Maybe you were conditioned to believe that you are a monster and supposed to be treated like one.

Welcome to Whumptober 2024 — Seventh Time's a Charm!

Please make sure to read the Event Info and FAQ below carefully, as most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else, you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.

This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.

This year's playlist can be found here.

The 'Anatomy of a Whumptober Prompt' post can be found here.

And our 'Resources for Writing Sensitive Topics' post is here.

We’re very excited to see the community come together for another year of Whumptober! Go wild with the prompts, and support your fellow creators - we wish you all the fun!

Best of luck and happy whumping,

Mods Vanne, Yenn, Kitty and Surro

(Text versions of the prompts, as well as event information, rules and FAQ are posted below the cut!)

Bleeding:

Blood is warm. if blood is cold, you’re really fucking feverish or the person is dead. it’s only sticky after it coagulates.

It smells! like iron, obv, but very metallic. heavy blood loss has a really potent smell, someone will notice.

Unless in a state of shock or fight-flight mode, a character will know they’re bleeding. stop with the ‘i didn’t even feel it’ yeah you did. drowsiness, confusion, pale complexion, nausea, clumsiness, and memory loss are symptoms to include.

blood flow ebbs. sometimes it’s really gushin’, other times it’s a trickle. could be the same wound at different points.

it’s slow. use this to your advantage! more sad writer times hehehe.

Stab wounds:

I have been mildly impaled with rebar on an occasion, so let me explain from experience. being stabbed is bizarre af. your body is soft. you can squish it, feel it jiggle when you move. whatever just stabbed you? not jiggly. it feels stiff and numb after the pain fades. often, stab wounds lead to nerve damage. hands, arms, feet, neck, all have more motor nerve clusters than the torso. fingers may go numb or useless if a tendon is nicked.

also, bleeding takes FOREVER to stop, as mentioned above.

if the wound has an exit wound, like a bullet clean through or a spear through the whole limb, DONT REMOVE THE OBJECT. character will die. leave it, bandage around it. could be a good opportunity for some touchy touchy :)

whump writers - good opportunity for caretaker angst and fluff w/ trying to manhandle whumpee into a good position to access both sites

Concussion:

despite the amnesia and confusion, people ain’t that articulate. even if they’re mumbling about how much they love (person) - if that’s ur trope - or a secret, it’s gonna make no sense. garbled nonsense, no full sentences, just a coupla words here and there.

if the concussion is mild, they’re gonna feel fine. until….bam! out like a light. kinda funny to witness, but also a good time for some caretaking fluff.

Fever:

you die at 110F. no 'oh no his fever is 120F!! ahhh!“ no his fever is 0F because he’s fucking dead. you lose consciousness around 103, sometimes less if it’s a child. brain damage occurs at over 104.

ACTUAL SYMPTOMS:

sluggishness

seizures (severe)

inability to speak clearly

feeling chilly/shivering

nausea

pain

delirium

symptoms increase as fever rises. slow build that secret sickness! feverish people can be irritable, maybe a bit of sass followed by some hurt/comfort. never hurt anybody.

ALSO about fevers - they absolutely can cause hallucinations. Sometimes these alter memory and future memory processing. they're scary shit guys.

fevers are a big deal! bad shit can happen! milk that till its dry (chill out) and get some good hurt/comfort whumpee shit.

keep writing u sadistic nerds xox love you

ALSO I FORGOT LEMME ADD ON:

YOU DIE AT 85F

sorry I forgot. at that point for a sustained period of time you're too cold to survive.

Hi, you might know me from stories like Behind The Masks. Here's some of my art:

The bad news is that I have lost my blog. I have had it for nearly half a decade, and one accidental click and it's deleted forever. (I had meant to delete a sideblog I wasn't using anymore. I didn't realize it would nuke ALL my blogs.)

So I guess there's nothing to do but start over from scratch. I'm going put this in the whump tags, in the hopes of letting people know what happened. I would like to ask people to reblog this, so as many of my old followers can see this as possible.

All my posts are perma deleted. They only exist in reblogs now, not even in the tags. Thank god I have all my writing, even the drabbles that were in response to asks, on my computer! Reposting it will take a long while, though. I might be able to use the internet archive, but I'm not sure.

CW: Conditioned silence/kneeling, trauma recovery, recovering whumpee, references to pet whump

“Hey, there.” 

Nat has twenty years of this, more or less, under her belt. Twenty years of time since she walked away from creating this mess and dedicated herself to trying to mitigate the damage, one rescue at a time. It feels like saving a single honeybee while whole colonies are fed into a woodchipper, some days, but she tells herself the same platitudes she tells all of them, too:

Even one life saved is worth the risk, and worth the effort.

She doesn’t use terms like value or cost, with the rescues. They know they exist to be exchanged for money, it’s teaching them that they exist outside of what they can produce or perform for an owner that’s the hard part. 

Twenty years of keeping her voice low, just like this, and still every single rescue is a whole person, and it always feels a little bit new.

“Do you need some help?”

The newest rescue in their house, the teenage Romantic that only rarely moves out from behind the bed and then retreats right back into his room as soon as he’s spooked, pauses where he stands in the doorway. It’s not right to say he pauses - he freezes, there, like a deer caught in headlights midway through flashing the white tail that signifies it wants to run.

His eyes are wide, and so very green. A smattering of pale freckles across his pale skin, sickly from being kept indoors so often, pulls at Nat’s heartstrings in a very particular way. Strawberry blond hair that flirts with copper is clipped just so, to hang into his eyes just a little bit. 

It kills Nat, but she can see why it was cut that way. It makes his expressions seem even more plaintive. 

“Um.” The boy’s voice is low, soft and uncertain, and his hands close tightly around the sides of the doorframe he leans against, as though using it to hold himself up. “I’m. Um. I’m, I’m... I, I, I was, I did-” He flinches, winces back away from her. “Um. N-Never, I’m, I’m, I’m sorry, never-... never mind-”

Shifting back on his feet, ready to flee, torn between the carefully conditioned obedience that tries to hold him until he’s dismissed and the fear that pushes him to run. She’s seen it a hundred times, by now. 

Nat doesn’t get up or try to go after him - she’d be a threat, if she did that. Instead, she only folds her hands in her lap, in plain view, and gives him a slight, soothing smile. 

“You’re okay,” She says, gently. “You’re okay. Jake said you ate some chicken on Thursday, did you feel better after that?”

The boy watches her, and slowly nods. His shoulders hunch up a little towards his chin. 

“Good. That’s good, kiddo.”

There might be a flicker - the slightest hint - of a smile at the nickname. All the boy’s expressions happen in the faintest shades of themselves. He’s not the first one to have learned to regulate even the twitch of an eyebrow, the shift of a muscle near the corner of his mouth.

“So. That’s a plate of fried chicken, and then... have you eaten anything since?”

Another hesitation. Then a slight shake of the head.

“Did you come here to tell me you might be hungry?”

No response this time, except for his knuckles going white where he clings to the dark wooden doorframe, one of the beautiful parts of living in such an old house. His eyes are locked on her face, trying to read danger there, a threat, anger that he dared ask for anything that hadn’t been offered. She can read it all. She’d read this book before, of course, but every single time the story unfolds a little differently. 

“Well. I’m hungry, and I was about to head over into the kitchen and make a couple of turkey and swiss sandwiches with extra mustard and some barbecue potato chips. Because I, for one, am starving.

The boy bounces, just once, on the balls of his feet and then goes carefully back to still again. He’s like some kind of carved statue, everywhere he manages to go - hidden behind the bed or standing in the doorway to the home office, he looks like he’s been carved from stone by some outstanding sculptor, brought only halfway to life.

“I... like... turkey sandwiches,” He offers, his voice low and tentative. “Ma’am.”

“Oh, please.” Nat waves one hand. “Where I come from, you only ma’am old people, and don’t you listen to Jake saying that they ma’am and sir everybody in the south, we live by Midwest rules around here.”

The boy, who no longer understands those kinds of regional differences, continues simply to stare at her. 

She smiles and moves slowly to her feet - even as slow as she can possibly go, he still flinches back at first, his hands dropping to twist into the hem of the oversized shirt he’s wearing with a pair of mesh basketball shorts he’d found in the back of the bedroom closet, abandoned by some prior rescue. 

He backs up for her to move past him towards the kitchen, then follows her on silent bare feet, a teenage ghost wandering the halls of a house full of them all, deposited here as shades and told to find their way back to life.

Words aren’t worth much, in the grand scheme of things. What helps a rescue isn’t words - most of them have had reassurance and comfort twisted and spun and turned into the very phrases used to most wound them. 

What helps a rescue is a simple action, repeated without expectation of repayment. Nat makes a sandwich, and then another. She puts more potato chips on his plate than hers. And she doesn’t try to make him sit at the table. They’ve already learned he wasn’t allowed to do that. Instead, she carries both plates into the living room and sets his down on the coffee table.

He sinks to his knees with a perfect, practiced motion Nat has seen nearly every day since she walked away from WRU and started her first safehouse. They teach them all to kneel, no matter their designation. 

They all know how to kneel more than they are allowed to remember how to breathe.

He watches her for permission, and she knows it will take time before she can stop giving it. 

“Go ahead, kiddo.”

His hands raise to pick up the sandwich, gentle as can be. “Thank... thank, thank-...” He winces, pressing his fingers into the sandwich even harder, leaving divots in the soft white bread, little impressions like a man pushing his hand into clay. “Thank you, m-... Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, kiddo. You can sit with me on the couch, if you’d like.”

His eyes flicker to the couch and then back to her, trying to decide what she wants him to do. “I like the floor,” He says, finally. His voice is strangely flat, each word drops like a carefully chosen stone when he speaks like this. “Pets belong-”

“Sssshhh, you don’t have to say that stuff here. Do whatever makes you comfortable.” Nat sits herself down, takes a bite, and then carefully peels up the sandwich to slide a few potato chips between the top layer of swiss and the bread. She hums, and catches the boy watching her, looking at his own chips, then back up at her. She grins. “Childhood habit.”

He blinks, and then echoes her motion, his fingers long and thin. “Child... childhood?”

They’re always fascinated by stories about childhoods and families, all the things they must have had in some form, and lost, and can’t remember.

“I grew up a farm kid, did I ever tell you that? No, of course not, you’ve been here four days. Anyway, my dad was a farmer...”

He starts to eat the sandwich as she speaks, in careful bites that are gradually distracted by her words into larger ones. By the time she runs out of stories, he’s eaten every bite on his plate, and shifted from his knee to sitting cross-legged on the floor.

His eyes are still locked on her, but she can see that there is something new his expression.

---

This was originally a reply to @straight-to-the-pain's lovely post, but I felt like what I wanted to say should be its own thing.

As a disclaimer, I want to say that triggers surrounding lady whump are understandable and valid. You are not being demonized for being uncomfortable with a topic or having trauma surrounding it. However, that does not excuse the demonization and harassment of those who write it or choose not to tag it.

-----------------------------

The best example for whump being exposed to purity culture (as mentioned here) is the lady whump dilemma, and it's upsetting that people are afraid to address it or just don't see it happening.

I've seen people imply/outright state that because "women get abused more" means that lady whump is shady and "immoral" to write.

Not only does that completely invalidate men going through abuse but it's also a complete and utter bullshit reason to discourage freedom of creativity.

This is the whump community. We write about abusive relationships, noncon, violence and torture. Just because it isn't a male character does not mean any of this changes.

Saying that the gender of a character makes any of these acts "more severe" implies that if it happens to a male irl, it's less of a big deal.

This is untrue, and harmful.

If a man suffers from any of the aforementioned acts, they should be taken just as seriously as a woman. Men can be abused, sexually assaulted, and harmed just as much as a woman can. This is not news.

It's like we're taking steps BACK in equality via censorship and it's absolutely ridiculous.

Implying that a woman cannot go through the above experiences is also incredibly disrespectful to victims who have suffered from abuse. Implying that they cannot write about it is censorship.

People write to cope.

The fact people genuinely go after writers for not putting a warning about pronouns and for not promoting the "male only" whump stereotype is unacceptable.

You create your online experience. If you don't enjoy a certain trope, don't read it. I completely understand that tagging content helps potential readers avoid triggering content but when it comes down to the character's pronouns, I believe that if it impacts someone that much simply being in the whump community itself is harmful. Characters have different genders. It is inevitable. That being said, there is nothing wrong with asking someone to tag content, just be prepared if they say no. Do not harass someone for not tagging something specific to you.

Just block them, or walk away.

It also grosses me out that people genuinely think that women only belong in a caretaker/supportive role instead of the main character. This enforces negative stereotypes of female characters.

This isn't the 50's anymore. Women have left the kitchen.

I'm sorry my character that goes through a rough experience just so happens to be female or uses she/her pronouns. Go touch grass.

Another thing that irks me is the promotion of people saying that they like male whump because they're attracted to men, but when it's the other way around somehow it's disgusting.

It's kind of homophobic to go after a saphic writer and preach that them writing lady whump isn't ok while also accepting someone writing male whump because they're attracted to men.

Double standards are harmful. Women can be attracted to women.

To quote an unnamed anon, "They clearly have a 'normalize misogyny and everyone should get off to the pain of women' agenda."

As if that isn't the case with male whumpees.

People here celebrate men being beaten up, bloodied and bruised. Yet somehow, when the tables are turned, everyone clutches their pearls as if a sin against nature has been committed-- claiming that men deserve to be objectified.

Not only is that a horrifically toxic response but it also puts lady whump writers in an extremely difficult spot when defending their work.

Honestly, the entire concept of lady whump being a separate community is disturbing in and of itself. We are not bad people just because we have female characters. We are not misogynists. We are not fetishists.

We simply write a gender that isn't male.

This community is definitely not as welcoming towards people with female characters, no matter what anyone here says about how "kind" and "friendly" this part of tumblr is. People are afraid to introduce their female characters due to the risk of harassment.

That's not okay.

This is supposed to be a community for enjoying torturing characters, regardless of how they identify.

The quality of whump should not be determined by the character's gender.

The fact that this is even a debate or source of drama is honestly sad.

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