Ozymandias, king of hyperfixations

In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”

It’s very honest. It’s very clear. It’s very kind. It presents you with a lot of information and a lot of understanding and lets you take it all in like the autonomous human you are, and make decisions from an informed place. It goes over the reality of suicide attempts, pain involved, likelihoods of survival, after effects of attempts, and how to get help if you want it after reading all of that and learning about the reality of suicide attempts.

You can read it for free here: https://qprinstitute.com/pdfs/Forever_Decision.pdf

secret wizards control the government > [wizard equivalent] are an oppressed visible minority

white British monoculture > Star Trek style multicultural pluralism that treats "being Black" and "being an elf" as basically interchangeable

Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.

They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).

And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.

I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.

They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.

It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.

They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.

This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.

It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.

Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.

So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.

These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.

After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?

Turns out, not so much.

Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”

And maybe it was obvious to them.

I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.

But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!

It has been one year since I randomly became obsessed with the character Bucky Barnes and read an absolutely massive amount of fanfiction about him, becoming introduced to fanfiction as an art medium in the process.

After reading so many great fanfictions I had to take a crack at it myself, and i am an exit is what resulted.

Summary

A broken, disillusioned Steve Rogers is afflicted by a delusion that the mysterious assassin who nearly killed him is actually his best friend, who died 70 years ago. SHIELD wants to lock him up and return him to being a perfect, sparkling nationalist symbol as quickly as possible. Sam Wilson, who has wrestled with his own disillusionment and his own ghosts, knows that Steve needs compassion and the support of a true friend, not a forced regime of recovery that takes away what is left of his shattered autonomy. Meanwhile, as Natasha tries to track down the Winter Soldier, her discoveries get more and more disturbing. She uncovers footage of the Soldier being subjected to, and forced to commit, horrific acts to maintain Hydra's cruel hierarchy. What's more, his resemblance to Steve's dead friend is too close to be coincidence. Sam and Natasha grow determined to stop the Soldier from being recaptured by his abusers, but how will Steve react when he learns the true extent of the Soldier's torture, and the true horror of what he was twisted into? Is the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes? Or is he a thing wearing Bucky Barnes's face? Which of those things is worse?

What it was like to write it

This fic is almost 200k words long. I wrote it in four months. Wow!

I'm convinced that writing this fic was what made all the difference for my final(ish) semester of college. To put it bluntly this was the first semester where I didn't feel like I was dying all the time. It put an end to the longest creative drought of my life and everyone's lovely comments gave me enough joy to carry me through.

I feel like I learned a ton about POV, plotting, and characterization while writing this fic. I'll probably talk about that more in the coming days.

My guiding questions/ideas

I don't really give a fuck about the MCU, but I do give a LOT of fucks about the fanfictional universe that has built around Bucky, and I had several ideas or questions that kept needling at me about this story and what people had done with it.

The whole story of Captain America, where a disabled kid in the 1930's is turned into a physically perfect superhuman, has "eugenics" written all over it. What if I explored that?

It doesn't really make sense that, in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it seems plausible to everyone that the Winter Soldier is Bucky. I mean, as far as anyone knows he died 70 years ago. What if the other characters assumed Steve was delusional out of grief?

I also really wanted to lean into Bucky/the Winter Soldier as an undead, uncanny-valley monster. A lot of Bucky fics deal with him being dehumanized and treated as a creature or a thing rather than a human, and I wanted to really dig into that, exploring the ways he is a machine and a reanimated corpse and a feral, terrified animal.

I had a craving for more medical horror. Bucky is the perfect character for it but not enough had been written about it thus far that really hit the spot for me.

I read a LOT of fanfictions that portrayed Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence and that compelled me a lot. I wanted to explore this as messily overlapping and entwined with all the other ways his body was invaded and taken away from him (as a lab experiment, living weapon, etc). I also wanted to explore what it would mean if Bucky was forced to commit sexual violence as the Winter Soldier.

What kind of story this is

The most common adjective I get on i am an exit is probably "visceral." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.

I do a lot of getting down and dirty with the Horrible Nasty. I went elbow deep digging in the back of my head for the things I don't want to think about.

BUT. I am also really intentional about satisfying softness and healing. The final 1/3 of the fic is the healing/comfort arc and I wrote a lot of self-indulgent fluff. Well, fluff doesn't seem right, because fluff implies something light, and every word is heavy with the horrors, but the healing is real. I was really, really serious about fully and sensitively acknowledging every part of the trauma the characters go through. Think hurt/comfort where both the hurt and the comfort are turned all the way up to the max.

I didn't feel confident writing about any of the canon locations in MCU so I basically sent all my characters to Kentucky.

Due to the person that I am, this fic is full of plants, and the plants are relevant to and intertwined with the plot and characterization. The Appalachian ecology is extremely detailed and realistic and thematically relevant.

Also, Bucky gets a horse.

The MCU doesn't have a lot of female characters, and I got mad about that, so Hawkeye, Thor, and Nick Fury are women in this fic.

I took heavy inspiration from a lot of the common themes and tropes of Bucky fanfiction. The way the narration reflects Bucky's dehumanization is indeed cool, but I can't fully take credit for it because it's a device a lot of fics use.

On content warnings

Each chapter has its own individual content warnings in the beginning notes. There is gore, there is fascism, ableism, and eugenics, there is a lot of medical horror, and there is sexual abuse and rape.

This fic does NOT use the Hydra Trash Party main tag, because the sexual violence is (mostly) "offscreen"/in flashbacks or memories instead of happening in the present in the characters' POV, but the sexual abuse themes are heavy and recurring. I think there are more individual chapters that have a warning for rape, than chapters that don't have that warning.

There is comfort and healing and ultimately a happy ending, but the warnings aren't fucking around.

Conclusion

Okay, so.

It would take an eternity to completely re-narrate my Bucky fanfic journey, so here's some links to my post threads from last year as I was getting into the Bucky fanfic world myself, where I discuss and recommend the fics I was reading. Part 1, part 2.

Part 1 has a lentil soup recipe in it as well if you're into that.

However, the rec list in these posts is my path exploring a lush, tangled, complex ecosystem of stories, and it would not be accurate as a description of everything the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem is.

A narrative of one walk through a forest does not capture everything about that ecosystem. I have learned that you can walk through the same forest a hundred times and see a hundred different forests. Living, breathing systems are labyrinthine. They are endlessly new with each path you follow through them, each change in the clouds and each shift in the slant of the light...

anyways. in the 12 years since Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released, stories have emerged and evolved and exchanged ideas and developed and refined new tropes and concepts and dug deeper into many fascinating themes.

Part of the reason the story-ecosystem is so well developed is just that it's huge; MCU being a massive mainstream franchise that, in the years of 2012-2018, most people had some contact with whether they cared for it or not, there were just a LOT of people into it at once.

and it reaches this point where the fanfiction is not just a work someone wrote based off of a blockbuster movie, it starts to become fanfiction of fanfiction, storytelling emerging from a seethe of ideas and themes tangled in this call and response between tellers and listeners who exchange places and read each other's work and create new stuff and pull new people in and pass the stories on.

I'm making it sound very grand and magical. It is, and it isn't. I go through Bucky's tag on ao3 and scroll past 20 fanfics in a row that make me think "You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to read that."

And it's easy to get caught up in just...the sheer glut of it all, the heaps and heaps of formulaic and generic fanfics that erase anything distinct about the characters to plug them into standard tropes. But that's what abundance looks like. Art that isn't necessary or even good, art that isn't cream skimmed off of the top, art that hasn't been judged or approved or selected or granted value by anyone. But it's part of that ecosystem, and it's a sign that the ecosystem is thriving.

So. I meandered my way aimlessly through Bucky fanfiction, through these entangling vines of context and connection and evolutionary relationships that I could only get a glimpse of. I started to recognize how certain ideas in fanfics were derived from other fanfics, further developing and expanding upon what previous storytellers had done.

Broadly speaking, some fanfics are interested in Stucky as a pairing, but don't delve deeply into what I consider to be THE hallmark of Buckyfic proper: the unmaking of Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier. The fundamental Thing about Bucky as a character, for me, is that he is formed out of a person's shattering.

And, yes, there are fics that are deeply interested in Bucky as a character as opposed to Bucky as one half of a slash pairing, that still treat him as basically the same guy but with PTSD now post Winter Soldier, so this categorization is wrong, but the unmaking aspect is what Bucky fanfic seems to iterate upon and extrapolate and develop most intensely.

Bucky fanfic is absolutely lush with explorations of what it means to be unmade. I plunged straight into a dense layer-on-layer sediment of storytellers "yes-and"ing what other storytellers had developed, exploring the ways that a man could have selfhood and personhood ripped from him.

The canon gives us these wrenching hints at a story that could be told: Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, wears a mask that looks like a muzzle; he is completely passive and lets the antagonist slap him across the face without retaliation; he cooperates placidly with his own torture; he hurls his body around as though it doesn't matter what damage he takes; he is scarred where the metal prosthetic that replaced his severed arm attaches to his body; he looks confused and scared and childlike and it's a shocking contrast to how brutally and swaggeringly he tears apart cars and slaughters people.

It's dripping with awful implications and that's what fanfic writers delved into so ravenously. Bucky was stripped of his name, his memories, his identity, and treated like a thing. His body was rebuilt to his captors' liking and used for their purposes. And fanfics explore every aspect of this.

For example, it's very common in these fanfics to have Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, be referred to with it/its pronouns. This is not the case in the canon but it's an accepted part of the story in this corner of the ecosystem.

There are several fanfics that portray Bucky as having Dissociative Identity Disorder, but even among the fanfics that don't explicitly conceptualize it this way, there are TONS of stories where Bucky has multiple "selves" that are like different persons that co-exist within the same body, to the point that some level of "plurality" is almost accepted as a standard part of the character.

The Winter Soldier is sometimes understood to be a separate personality from Bucky, as if man and machine are two persons in the same hybrid, cyborg body, and it's common for him to "switch" from one to the other. The Soldier can be conceptualized as nothing but a sucking void, an absence of self, or it can be its own "self" in the form of the remorseless killing machine, or (and this is where it gets really interesting) it can be this necessary darkness that was always part of Bucky, a self that fully unfolded when he was a sniper in WW2. Sometimes, the scared, broken man that is left after Bucky is rescued from Hydra is a third distinct "self" from the Soldier and the Bucky from before the war. It's fascinating. I could talk about it all day.

In fanfic, Bucky is very often physically disabled in multiple ways from his treatment as the Winter Soldier. It's fairly common for him to need to be tube fed, temporarily or permanently, or to have GI tract difficulties; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from seizures; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from drug withdrawals after escaping. Sometimes the prosthetic arm needs to be removed and he has to live as an amputee. Bucky's speech patterns vary wildly in fanfiction, but it's common for him to have a stilted, robotic way of talking, and sometimes his speech is impaired to some extent.

Relatedly, there's a subset of fics where the Winter Soldier's mask is somehow attached to his face or he can't remove it. Since this changes the canonical identity reveal, it's not as common, but it is one of those collectively iterated tropes (denoted by the tag maskfic, sometimes)

I've also read multiple fics where he was chemically castrated as the Winter Soldier, which sometimes caused lasting problems.

There is, I shit you not, an entire canonical tag on Ao3 for portrayals of Bucky with erectile dysfunction.

When I read, these things did not seem like individual decisions by writers to iterate upon canon in a certain way. The fanfics that used these ideas had clearly been influenced by each other. Once a certain aspect had been refined, other authors could just accept it as "their" canon and run with it.

And, I can say personally, from the experience of reading fanfiction and later writing it, that it's virtually impossible to keep canon and the broader story ecosystem separate in your mind: even if you can remember what is and isn't "canon," part of you just knows that they fed the Winter Soldier through a tube and bathed him by hosing him down, because that's the way you always heard the story told.

The Bucky fanfic ecosystem has done a lot of fascinating things with the lasting psychological effects of being the Winter Soldier as well. A really common theme is that Bucky is so accustomed to his dehumanization under Hydra that he switches to viewing the Avengers as his new "handlers," who he knows will abuse him if he doesn't placate them correctly. I believe Ao3 has a canonical tag for this as well, but I can't remember what it is. In general, Bucky fics delve deep into how the survival behaviors created by abuse don't go away after you escape the abusive situation. In more extreme iterations, Steve or someone else has to basically pretend to be Bucky's "handler" to provide some kind of stability for him mentally. It's fucked up and a lot of fun.

It's the same with the lasting impacts of having his pain disregarded and treated as unimportant: there's a recurring thing that happens in several different fics where Bucky, when he is hurt and someone asks how he is, responds "functional" (because his functionality is all that matters, not whether he's in pain). It's a little phrasing that spread like a virus between different stories written by different people.

It is, of course, impossible to discuss the Bucky Fanfic Ecosystem without discussing Hydra Trash Party.

In the posts at the links at the beginning of the post, I discuss how it's a really, really common element in fanfic for Bucky to have been raped during his captivity as the Winter Soldier. At some point I say something like, "Wow, this [the rape] shows up in a lot of different stories, I'm not sure if it's an unusually common thing with this character for some reason or what..."

This is so funny to me looking back. I really had no idea.

To quickly summarize what took me literal months to figure out: Bucky fanfiction, back in the day, was basically the Dead Dove Cambrian Explosion, except that Hydra Trash Party came before "dead dove, don't eat" and in fact is sort of what "dead dove, don't eat" is based upon, as per the post that literally coined "dead dove, don't eat" as a fandom term.

(There's a Fanlore page that explains everything, you can look it up. )

Technically, Hydra Trash Party can refer to a variety of things related to horrible awful nasty things happening to the heroes of the Captain America films, but in usage, it overwhelmingly refers to the idea that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, was sexually abused by his handlers. As a tag, it essentially communicates that the fic is going to explore this idea graphically, extensively, or in detail.

I was like "Wow! So this is the fucked up and immoral fanfiction I've heard so much about!"

Obviously, a lot of fans are not interested in reading about these disturbing topics in depth. There's a lot of Hydra Trash Party that I can't stomach myself. However, the idea that sexual violence happened to Bucky when he was the Winter Soldier is everywhere in fic, even if it's only alluded to with a single line. It's another of the things that is commonly accepted as part of the story everyone is collectively telling in the story ecosystem.

For me, this idea comes part and parcel with this essential broader theme of unmaking. Bucky's body and mind are profoundly violated; he is powerless despite his strength and prowess. He is tortured and surgically altered against his will. He has no control over his own body. The deep, nasty, visceral horror of all of this fascinates me. Conceptually and thematically, sexual violence fits perfectly with this story, to the point that it almost feels implicitly present even if we don't say it out loud; when reading an academic book about torture I came across the quote, "all torture is rape and all rape is torture," and while I believe that of course there's a reason those are separate words, it's expressing a truth about torture that is often erased.

Part of the reason it came to fascinate me was my initial reaction to reading a story where Bucky was portrayed as a survivor of sexual violence. At first, I thought, "Wait, does that even make sense? He's a super strong murder machine who could easily kill anyone in a matter of seconds." Then, I thought, "Wait. Rape isn't about whether the victim is able to physically fight back or not. That was a really shitty assumption to make." Then, I thought, "Wait. This is actually realistic to what happens with torture, and fits with the villains' philosophy of power and dominance."

It's rare to get caught off guard like that by a piece of fiction, caught in the act of automatically thinking some shitty thing that society programmed into you even though consciously, you would never, never, never endorse it. I got kind of slapped in the face by the fact that my first instinct was to doubt that someone physically strong could be raped. I think that communicates how important it is to tell that story.

The stories people have written from these ingredients, I have found to be cathartic and moving and thought-provoking.

It's the story-ecosystem that fascinates me, really, not the "canon" itself; the aliveness and interacting of all these elements. When I wrote my own Bucky fanfic, I picked out the things that had compelled me in other fanfics, I delved deeper into things that I wanted to be explored more deeply, I dug into new ideas that I felt would interact in interesting ways with the existing ones, and I grounded it very strongly in my own experiences and interests.

There is a scene in this version where, after Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet, where Gilgamesh goes to his mother Ninsun to tell her about him and Ninsun responds to Gilgamesh (in a fragmentary section) that he is a hairy wild man that has no family, and Enkidu collapses and bursts into tears. As I said it’s fragmentary but the interpretation seems to be that she thinks Enkidu won’t make a suitable partner for him.

This edition contains a related poem, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld,” where Enkidu is summoned from the realm of the dead by Gilgamesh

(there’s a manuscript that directly continues their story with Enkidu alive from here, which suggests that Gilgamesh rescued Enkidu alive from the netherworld in the minds of some Sumerians. But there are lot of parallel timelines and different versions of the stories with them.)

Anyway, that poem contains, well, this:

@magsintherain excellent question! I would have to dig deeply and do more research for a full understanding of the answer; what DID ancient sumerians generally see to be “the” story of Gilgamesh?…would they disagree on it?…was the poem we understand as THE epic of Gilgamesh seen as more reliable or more authoritative about the story…?

But I can say that the distinction between “canon” and “fanfic” is a modern invention. Arguably, “fanfic” is closer to how storytelling worked for most of human history.

The term “canon” is derived from the Christian tradition to describe works that are considered divinely inspired and/or sanctioned by the church, distinguishing them from other extra-canonical writings. It is interesting to note that in this original sense, “canon” isn’t a self-evident reality, it is something that had to be created to suppress the proliferation of different understandings of the same story.

all the theon discourses would take thee harshest breath inward when the violence is laid bare. a child hostage's fear of ned stark, northern hypocrisy, nothing truly happened to you theon, after all gared was a deserter, mance was a deserter. the repetition of false identities in/around this situation (rattleshirt for mance & gilly's baby for dalla's, both changelings such monsters; theon presenting the miller's boys as bran & rickon as well as jeyne poole as arya; theon presenting as reek) does inherently present arguments about how we justify violence based on who it is committed upon— which would make witnessing the Horror a unique experience for theon imo. all the other deaths-by-burning have been legitimized by accusing the victim of a crime (treason, cannibalism) and theon is a person who grew up in winterfell aware that he was already judged guilty of the crime of being his father's son. ned keeping him alive as hostage/ward was more akin to a stay in his sentence rather than any assurance of safety based upon his own good behavior. few if anybody would protest should theon's father have rebelled and ned been called upon to serve 'justice.' so the execution of an innocent child would not shock theon as it would the others who'd been content to say well it only happens to the most black-hearted of criminals therefore I'm content to look away. in fact, it'd be a confirmation of what we as readers know he's always known— since theon was a child, since he scoffed at ser rodrik protesting that jaime lannister would attempt to murder an innocent child, since robb forbade the torture/execution of hostages only to allow it in theon's case at ramsay's hands. I'm imagining theon bursting into inappropriate laughter and the disgust laid upon him, but who are you truly disgusted with? how did you think this would end?