oh baby, woo!

honestly, what gets me about the s3 torture scene is that we truly were so close to the perfect sequence in st history, but they missed in just a few spots.

like, for the psychological torture of it all, gotta be orchestrated by the american government. they’re the ones steve is terrified of in s2, and it adds to the horror of… this is my government, the people that are supposed to protect me. no one’s coming to rescue me from my own government. no fbi agents are gonna break in and bust the operation up. there is no one that could or would come to save me.

the duffers brother definitely had it with the people steve cares about being tangentially in danger, though. dustin and erica escaping through the vents but still being within the building, they could be caught at any time, it could be them going through this next. just. chefs kiss. oh and, of course, the bordering on inappropriate touching. yum. need more of that in my life. AND!!!! i need a demeaning nickname. butterscotch is one seen in a lot of recreations of the torture scene and i do love that, so something along those lines. because, just, the people torturing you think you’re a joke. they’re not taking you seriously. they’re mocking you to your face, and laughing as you wheeze and bleed. but they’re still not going to stop.

then, for the actual torture. obviously beating, but you know i want some waterboarding, always and forever. ripped out fingernails are a must, broken bones a necessity. i want steve struggling to breath in more ways than one. i want his screams to echo through the halls, i need the aforementioned people steve cares about to be listening and helpless. maybe i even need them to figure out a way to escape but that means abandoning steve and can they do that? can they leave him to this?

and now, again, i gotta give it to the duffer brothers, drugging steve? beautiful. but i don’t want it to be a giggly high, i want like. steve is just enough within his own mind that he can recognise he’s out of it and he’s desperately trying to stay as sober as possible because he knows he needs to hold it together, but the more time that passes the more he can’t remember why he needs to stay sober. why is he here again? and who are these people? and why is he in pain? is this billy again? and are the kids here? are the kids safe? you don’t know who the kids are? well…

i do love steve resisting the torture. i love when he holds out through all that pain and doesn’t break, but once he’s drugged out of his mind? once he doesn’t even really know what words are coming out of his own mouth??? but it was still him. he still blabbed. told them something. maybe even told them everything. and now he has to carry that guilt with him, along with all the trauma of being tortured.

Athos shoots D'artagnan

FEBUWHUMP - DAY EIGHT

For me personally, definition wise, the aftermath of a whump scene is not relevant to the whump part (the injury, or getting sick) before it. That's because I define whump as solely the hurt part in hurt/comfort. Even though I pretty much only consume whump content with a good ending, and vastly prefer it

I know that there's absolutely something to be said about how death of a character can be whump material for someone else, but in this case I'm just solely talking about the character the scene is about.

This poll also assumes that whatever happens before the death is an injury or illness of some kind, and the scene is not solely character dying.