#a word/words carved into skin is one of my favorite whump tropes | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

doitwritenow · 3 years

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Thanks for inviting me, @adreamer67 !

Rules:

List your top three whump tropes and tag people.

Whoever gets tagged gets to say how they feel about your top three tropes.

After finishing that, they can list their top three tropes, and the tagging cycle goes on!

Dream’s previous top three:

1. Sickfic. Sickfic is my jam. I can only think of one (maybe two?) of my own fics where a liiiiiiittle bit of sickfic hasn’t crept in, one way or another. I have a problem. Cannot seem to help myself. I just… ugh, love everything about it.

Sickfics are a mixed bag for me! I often like them, and find them done very well, but I don’t seek them out. Maybe I just don’t quite understand the designations that classify a proper sickfic, but they hit or miss for me, both reading and writing.

2. Independent/capable characters being made helpless. Having to depend on someone else for survival, and hating it, but there is Literally Nothing they can do because, for whatever reason (injury/illness/other) take your pick, there is absolutely no way they would live without help. Good stuff. Both physical and emotional whump tied up in a neat bow!

Oh this? This is beautiful. I love to see the struggle to maintain control, because it’s an attack on soul more than body by a certain point, and the emotions are very striking.

3. A caretaker unable to make it better. Maybe they can try and mitigate the pain, maybe they can be there and try their best to comfort, but they just can’t do anything to make it hurt less. Maybe they’re stranded somewhere, maybe it’s just something that’ll take time, but for whatever reason, the caretaker really has no choice but to watch the person they care for suffer. Double whammy of whump, and again, both emotional and physical, and this time, it’s two people being whumped at once!

This is also VERY good. An outsider perspective on pain is always very compelling to me, and characters being trapped together? A LOVELY recipe for helplessness. And if you take this and extend it to “caretaker knows they’re suffering but get to them”, you get just about my favorite whump trope of all time.

Now for my three faves!

Like I said a second ago, one of my favorite tropes is when characters are separated, and they know the other is hurting but are unable to get to them. This is kind of specific, but it’s fun when a sense is blocked--like they’re too far away to see, but they can hear each other, or they can watch but are too separated to make sounds.

I also very much enjoy characters having to resort to extreme measures to send messages. Writing words in their own blood, carving things into their skin, etc.--anything to try and communicate, or to cast a spell, or to call for help. Characters thinking outside the box and going to desperate, clever places when all their usual strengths have been stripped away is awesome.

Lastly, I am a sucker for the last moment switcheroo. Like a character is gearing up to be hurt, ready to take it, thinking of all the things they never said and wish they could say--and then BOOM, someone’s taking the bullet for them, literally or figuratively. That moment of shock is very nice.

Alright, no pressure tags for @rawringryu, @inkdippedfingertips, and @aelaer because maybe you’d enjoy this?

#tag game #writing #hurt/comfort

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my-whumpy-little-heart · 4 years

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stress positions, starvation, branding, and cages for the trope rating game?

Ooooohh thank you for all of these Marti! I’m probably gonna have to put a cut on this ask just because I am how I am with rambling about tropes >:)

Stress Positions

My mileage on stress positions may vary just because of all the inherent variety there, but if you’ve got a really good stress position situation, then fuck yeah!! They’re such a good way to exhaust a whumpee, create soreness that can last for days afterwards, and potentially humiliate them depending on who’s watching or what the position is.

Although, I have to admit that I like stress positions best when they’re paired with another method of whumping. Keep your whumpee in that position for a shorter amount of time, but maybe the bindings are barbed wire and not metal or rope. Tie them up in a stress position before threatening and cutting with a blade, whipping them, or electrocuting them (give me whumpees in a stress position and trying to deal with the aftershocks that they can’t control, jerking their already overstretched limbs against tight bonds and pleading for the shocks to stop, please and thank you very much).

Starvation

Starvation’s alright depending on context I guess. Casual starvation by the whumper, like not allowing the whumpee to eat as much or as often as they normally would, is a nice component for weakening them.

If or when it gets to the point of no food at all, though, that can be tiresome. You can’t really torture someone when they can barely stand up on their own, so I would rather have this sort of thing paired with natural whump and not captivity based whump. Even then, it’s not a favorite. If you have a whumper who will take advantage of the whumpee’s delirium and weakness to provide some creepy comfort then maybe you’ll have my attention, but as a trope on its own it’s kinda eh for me.

Assuming this cut works, we’ve still got branding and cages to go from here, and the former of those got pretty lengthy :)

Branding

You know me too well Marti, and you know exactly what you’ve done by giving me this trope.

First of all, I will go feral for nearly any form of permanent marking, and branding is high up there in the rankings (carved mark is the number one favorite but shhh don’t say that around branding you’ll hurt its feelings)

Branding is fantastic because you get burning and permanent marking all in one! I love the horror, pure terror in a whumpee’s eyes and the realization what’s going to be done to them. The struggle as they’re tied down, the futile cries and begging once they’re unable to escape but the whumper keeps restraining them further until they’re completely immobilized with no chance of moving and interrupting the branding process.

The optional time the whumper spends heating up the branding iron, showing it off in the whumpee’s line of sight before walking across the room, setting it in a fire to heat, and coming back to talk to them. Maybe they’re already gagged or muzzled so the whumper can explain their process without interruptions, tracing the exact area the brand will be placed in, whispering low in the whumpee’s ear, threats of what will happen if they can’t stay conscious through the incredibly painful process, promises about how they’ll be officially owned now and there’s no way anybody could take them away, gentle soothing and wiping away the tears already spilling from their eyes...

Then after all that, the whumper finally goes to retrieve the iron. And if the whumpee had somehow managed to calm themself down or insist that this wasn’t really going to happen, seeing the glowing white-hot metal in their vision is the jarring wake-up call of reality. They plead and scream and whimper slurred words behind a muzzle’s bit and shout threats at the whumper and sob in anticipation for the unimaginable pain to come. And then it does.

It’s only on their skin for a few seconds but it feels like an eternity. Immediate agony, and burning that presses them down, renders them breathless from screaming, has them begging for it to stop when it’s hardly begun, and sobbing long after the branding iron has been removed.

And then the aftermath. There’s so much of the aftermath I love, but especially the whumpee seeing their brand for the first time. The raised, flushed, angry skin that serves as physical proof that their body no longer belongs to them. It’s a mark that will be part of them forever, something they’ll probably have to see every day for the rest of their life, and just the thought of it has the whumpee crumbling, collapsing in on themself, and weeping all over again.

Cages

Cages are kinda middle of the road for me. I don’t actually have a whole lot to say on them. There are far better ways you could be keeping your whumpee, but I guess there are also far worse. Whumpees in cages are far more interesting in a visual medium, but otherwise it’s just eh in my book. Good for dehumanizing purposes and for making them cramped, then very grateful to be let out by their whumper, but never something that I’m super pumped to see unless they’re used in a unique sort of way.

#ask game #boa speaks #boa rambles for a socially acceptable amount of words #right? riiiight?#branding #burning #stress position #cages #starvation #fun trope braining!

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