#from a fictional perspective though... some pretty good ideas for the whump community | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sparxwrites · 7 years

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i think u have a point abt kinks being only one step sideways from vanilla stuff, but what about the heavier/violent stuff? im trying to think of where it might come from and my only idea is maybe a dark fascination with what our imaginations are capable of. i remember being younger and fascinated with writing violent things just because i was surprised my imagination served. you're certainly more experienced with dark stuff than i am, though. what do you think?

tw for frank discussions of violence and sex, sometimes the intersection between the two, and a whole variety of sometimes very extreme kinks

Okay, that’s a tricky one. And not something that has a single answer, either – I’ve talked to a lot of people about what they see in darker fiction, and honestly every single person has had a slightly different perspective on it (one person, entertainingly enough, just shrugged and said they liked the aesthetic). But there do seem to be some common threads, and I’ll see if I can… if not provide answers, then at least provide food for thought and maybe lay out the groundwork for an interesting discussion.

(The rest is under a cut because, me being me, I got a little carried away, and this turned out to be something of an essay, and a compilation of thoughts I’ve had for a while now and conversations I’ve had with others. Whoops.)

The first thing is, I think, defining whether we’re talking about heavier/violent stuff in a consensual (either fictional or non-fictional) context – ie. heavy impact play, bloodplay, needleplay, consensual nonconsent, humiliation and degradation, what I’d call BDSM in a broad context – or a non-consensual, fictional context – ie. fiction involving rape, torture, severe bodily harm, gore, what I’d call whump and darkfic.

(I’m not talking about non-consensual non-fictional contexts, on the basis those are a) pretty much illegal, and b) even people I’ve talked to who enjoy really dark non-consensual fictional stuff are usually deeply upset or even disturbed by the thought of the same stuff in a non-fictional context. I can talk about the psychology of someone who wants their fave fictional character being beaten bloody, but wanting that to happen to an actual person is… a little beyond me. It’s not something I’ve talked to people about, and something I personally feel deeply uncomfortable thinking about outside the context of a consensual BDSM scene.)

Another thing is to define whether we’re talking about sexualised “stuff” or nonsexualised “stuff”. The consensual things are almost always sexualised, fictional or not (though very occasionally you might come across depictions BDSM that are entirely free of sex). Fictional depictions of non-consensual things are also sometimes sexualised – noncon fanfic (which is, by definition, sexualised, since noncon vs. rape was fandom-historically used to differentiate between sexualised and nonsexualised non-consent) is the most obvious example. Most fictional depictions of non-consensual violence, though, are things like torture, sickfic (not exactly violence, but it falls under the general “people in pain when they don’t want to be”), hurt/comfort, and whump, which generally aren’t explicitly sexualised.

We also need to work out whether people’s responses to these various categories are erotic or not. Are people actively getting off to them? Passively aroused by them, but not getting off? Are people reading them because they want to be aroused, or is that a (possibly irrelevant?) side effect? Are they getting something other than arousal from them?

With sexualised stuff, this is pretty easy – people pretty much always have erotic responses to sexualised stuff, that’s what it’s designed for. It’s written with the intent to arouse, that’s why it’s classed as “sexualised”.

But with non-sexualised stuff, such as whump, or hurt/comfort, or torture porn, it’s a lot more complicated. Some people have erotic responses, but a lot of people don’t, or only sometimes have erotic responses. Many seem to struggle to even answer any of the above questions – the difference between erotic responses, other powerful emotional or physical responses, can sometimes be blurry and difficult to define.

I and other people I’ve talked to about this, though, seem to get strong “stomach feelings” when reading good whump. They sound similar to arousal but are different somehow. Variously, I’ve had people talk about things like an emptiness just under their ribcage, a heaviness in their stomach, a lurch in their stomach, “like someone’s tucked a hook behind my stomach and pulled”, lightning through their abdomen, shortness of breath / panting, tightness, hollowness, an ache…

There’s definitely similarities to sexual feelings there, but people usually seem pretty insistent that it’s not exactly the same – even though it does feel good, and it’s a sensation they actively try to find more of by seeking out fiction that generates it – since they only get it from fictional depictions of violence or pain. Trying to find language for intense, pleasurable physical sensations that aren’t sexual is incredibly hard, but non-sexual or only partially sexual physical pleasure seems to be an integral to a lot of people’s enjoyment of fictional violence.

(Case in point: like you, I also remember being younger (we’re talking like… starting from about six or seven, here, really young) and daydreaming about either my favourite characters, or myself / thinly-veiled self-inserts, being hurt to help me get to sleep. Like, properly broken bones and blood and screaming kind of hurt. It took me until maybe a few years ago to realise these were not the kinds of things “normal” people daydreamed about for fun, so I certainly wasn’t doing it out of surprise at what my brain could come up with, and it definitely wasn’t a sexual thing. I just liked it. Lots of other people I’ve talked to have similar stories of enjoying fictional depictions of violence, and daydreaming or thinking about them for enjoyment, from a young age and well before they had any kind of sexual awakening.)

In some ways, I think the sexualised stuff is easier to analyse, since that’s mostly about sex (by the sheer merit of being a consensual scene or a sexualised non-consensual fantasy, it’s designed to be jerked off to). So, let’s have a look at some of the feelings and desires based around that kind of thing first.

The fact that people get off on power and control, or lack thereof, and vulnerability, is just sort of… a fact. And almost all fetishes eventually come down to that power versus no-power dynamic, even the really weird, “scary” ones – I’ve talked to people about hard vore and rape fantasies and execution kink, and they’ve all talked about how it’s about Dom/sub roles, about the submission of the “victim” to their fate, about the power held over them by the predator / attacker / executioner.

On the basis I have notes from the conversation I had about execution kink, let’s look at that one (I told you, I really like learning about this stuff). On the surface, getting off to fictional depictions of people being executed seems very, very heavy, but… the person I discussed this with talked about liking the aspects of the person being bound and handcuffed pre-execution (bondage), about being tried and sentenced and paraded around in front of a crowd and feeling scared and embarrassed (humiliation), about the ritualised aspect of it (rituals of various kinds are common in the BDSM community, from collaring ceremonies to body modification rituals). They talked about the historical pressure for the condemned to submit to their fate, “put on a good show”, pay their executioner (submission). They talked about necks and breathplay, and the condemned’s feet twitching (foot fetish), and the “death erections” people sometimes get (involuntary arousal) with regards to hanging, specifically.

So that’s, y’know, something really big and dark that I think a lot of people would kind of instinctively rear back from, that’s actually just a lot of smaller, very “reasonable” kinks being combined into one thing. If someone says, “Hey, I’m into necks, breathplay, bondage, humiliation, Dom/sub stuff, and feet,” you might think that’s a lot of kinks or be squicked by some of them, but you won’t necessarily think they had “dark” tastes. Turns out, that’s also all the basic components people who like fictional depictions of executions and hangings seem to enjoy. Weird, huh?

On a similar but slightly different note, some things I’ve heard from a lot of people who enjoy noncon or dubcon are that, a) contrary to the popular opinion of “people who like noncon are stealth rapists”, they tend to imagine themselves in the victim’s position rather than the attacker’s, and b) there’s a strong element of “I feel ashamed by / scared of / nervous about the prospect of sex, and having to admit I want sex, and the negotiation and intimacy and emotions that come with that – but also I want sex. Therefore, in fiction, the idea of having sex forced upon me, or being drugged/intoxicated or manipulated to the point I am not responsible for having sex, is powerfully appealing”.

Essentially, a large part of the appeal of rape fantasies seems to come from the prospect of being able to have sex whilst maintaining you definitely don’t want sex – which, in a culture that constantly talks about sex and encourages sex and pushes images of sex, whilst also telling people (specifically women and afab people, and some other marginalised groups such as disabled individuals) that they shouldn’t have or even want sex, makes sense. In a rape fantasy, you can have as much sex as you like, and it’s not your fault (and therefore you’re not an awful, sex-hungry monster), because you didn’t ask for or consent to it.

Obviously, people don’t actually want to be raped and would be deeply upset if their fantasies actually happened irl, but in the privacy of their own heads it’s a useful “tool” of sorts to circumvent feelings of shame attached to sex. Also, hey! Conveniently plays into the whole submission thing a lot of people have, often conveniently plays into stuff like breathplay, bondage, bruises and slapping, humiliation, maybe age difference or size difference or group sex… Again, big scary fantasy, really not particularly scary once you break it down into lil bite-sized chunks.

(Not all people have rape fantasies for this reason, though it’s a very common one. For some people, the “actually wanting it, deep down” thing is actually a turn-off, given they’re attracted to the vulnerability and control aspects of it. For some people, they enjoy “actually wanting it” in depictions of sexualised assault, where there’s an element of ravishment to it, but dislike it in non-sexualised depictions of assault, where the appeal is the character’s vulnerability, or the control the rapist has over them, or the negative emotions and physical pain involved with it. Fantasies are complicated, and even people with very, very similar fantasies may be getting completely different things out of them.)

There’s also the taboo aspect of these kinks and other things like them, which is a powerful draw. Humans like breaking rules (or at least, breaking rules in the privacy of their own heads) for some reason – it gives them a bit of a rush, makes them feel good. Humans also just seem to fundamentally really like power dynamics, and as a result they’ve found a lot of really interesting ways to tie it into sex (with various additions for flavour).

(You’ll notice how I say “in fiction” or “in their own heads” or “in fantasies” – because, surprise surprise, a lot of people with darker sexual fantasies don’t want those things to ever happen. Fantasies are often not remotely an indication of what you actually want, irl, sexually. You can have a reoccurring, incredibly powerful fantasy that gets you off like a rocket every goddamn time, and also be kind of sick thinking about it happening irl. That’s perfectly normal, and perfectly fine – and, in the case of things like rape and executions, probably pretty good, because it indicates you’ve got a working conscience.)

With outright kinky stuff, too, I think there’s a habituation aspect to it – you can be kind of trained to find something erotic by having it presented alongside more conventionally erotic stimuli often enough, or even just coming across something that presents it as strongly erotic. A lot of people tell me they didn’t realise they had a certain kink until they read something I wrote with it, and I really suspect that’s because I kind of… think about the building blocks of what makes a particular fetish appealing, and emphasise them in a way that appeals to even people without the fetish. You can definitely coax other people into liking something with a “convincing” enough “argument”, or train yourself into liking something by associating it with pleasure. This, I think, though, is probably less common for violent and dark things than it is for stuff like, say… foot fetishes or leather kink, more every-day objects of fixation that it’s easier to accidentally associate with pleasure.

For less sexualised violent and dark fiction, such as whump and hurt/comfort, though, understanding why people like it becomes a little more difficult and murky. It’s not directly about sex, and people don’t seem to view it as inherently sexual or have inherently sexual responses to it, but do seem to get some kind of pleasure from it. Sometimes that pleasure is sexual, sometimes it’s not, mostly it seems to be a very confusing mix of the two. I suspect that mix has a lot to do with people who like whump also liking analogous, explicitly kinky and sexual things, and sort of… not signals getting crossed, exactly, but something similar.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the language of sex is also the language of pain – squirm, gasp, groan, moan, writhe, shudder, clench, too much, please, god, fuck, kicking feet and sweat and wide eyes and dilated pupils and hearts thumping in chests. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the language of pain is also the language of submission – begging and cowering, vulnerability, reliance on others, bending to another’s will, weak and small and shaking. Even when torture or pain isn’t deliberately being written as erotic, the language of sex and power (and a variety of other fetishes besides) is still there, and both brains and bodies will still respond to that.

Oddly enough, if they’re written similarly, your arousal probably doesn’t care much whether that fictional character being choked consented to it or not, or whether it was supposed to be sexual or not – their eyelids are still fluttering, their breath is still coming in short pants and hitching wheezes, they can still see the darkness creeping in at the edges of their vision and hear the blood rushing in their own ears, and they’re still going to have a collar of bruises blooming dark around their neck come tomorrow morning. The only difference between a Dominant and their submissive, and a torturer and their victim, is consent, and in fictional fantasies that can be a very blurry line when it comes to people’s weird, unreliable sex brains that just want that sweet, sweet power differential.

(As a side note, it’d be interesting to see what the correlation between “likes whump” and “likes various whump-like aspects of BDSM” is, and also what roles people tend to imagine themselves in when they read whumpfic versus how dominant or submissive they consider themselves. The general consensus by people who object to violent fic seems to be that everyone who enjoys it sees themselves in the aggressor’s position, because they’re “secretly abusers”, but… my personal experience is that people usually seem to imagine themselves in either the position of the whumpee, or the caregiver (the person getting hurt, or the person looking after the hurt person, respectively, for those not familiar with the terms).

A lot of very violent and dark stuff tends to be vicariously enjoyed from the perspective of the “submissive” party, it seems. And when someone vicariously enjoys it from the perspective the dominant party, even people used to existing in these darker spaces tend to get worried. I’ve had friends who’ve bumped into stuff like this outside of fandom spaces mention how they feel deeply unsafe around the people there (usually men) who enjoy taking on the role as the aggressor and also seem very into the idea of this stuff actually happening. So, even in dark kinky spaces, there’s a distinction between “safe” and “unsafe” people who are into stuff, based around perceived willingness to enact non-consensual violence irl.)

I think, though, the most powerful non-sexual motivators for liking non-sexualised violence in fiction are emotional venting and catharsis. Darkfic allows us to explore a range of very powerful emotions – sadism, cruelty, twisted pleasure, and anger on the behalf of the person doing the hurting, and pain, misery, fear, horror, desperation, and grief on behalf of the person being hurt – in a safe, controlled environment where we can say stop at any point. In real life, these emotions are powerful, and scary, and can be overwhelming, and in a way confronting them in fiction can be a good way of practicing for feeling them irl.

However, in the same way intense physical sensation can be good regardless of whether it’s pleasurable or not, intense emotions can be good regardless of whether they’re positive or not.

Sometimes, especially for people who are hurting, it can almost be better if they’re not good. If you’re hurting emotionally, sometimes it’s easy to translate that into physical pain in fiction, to match the way you feel like you’re screaming inside to the way some fictional character actually is screaming. If you’re angry, sometimes it feels good and cleansing to write about a fictional character getting torn to fucking shreds, in much the same way it feels good to punch a pillow and scream until your throat’s raw. There’s a lovely post about finding fiction that “matches the shredder noise in your head”, and although I disagree a little with the implication that only unhappy people like whump, and that you inevitably grow out of it as you leave your teen years behind, I really like the shredder metaphor.

Best of all, fiction comes with catharsis, usually. Not so much darkfic or torture porn, but whump and hurt/comfort usually have a caregiver character, who spends the whole story worrying over the character getting hurt, and / or spends a portion of the story nursing the character back to health. Either way, they provide a way for the reader to vicariously live through being cared about and fussed over and have people demonstrating their love for the whumpee through being deeply distressed over their pain and desperate to ease it, to help them.

(If you think about it, this is, perhaps, very similar to the way a Dom provides their sub with love and catharsis and care during aftercare after intense scenes – which may have included powerful emotions such as shame from things like humiliation and dehumanisation, or physical pain from things like flogging or spanking… Isn’t it funny how people play out the same patterns over and over? Once you’re looking for them, they’re surprisingly easy to spot. Breaking people down, building them back up again… violence and vulnerability, and control.)

For anyone (and, again, especially for people who are hurting emotionally already in some way) this whole process can be very powerful, and very soothing. The character is hurt, broken down – and there’s this lovely, intense emotional release on the reader’s behalf where they get to experience all these big, scary, good emotions, maybe have a bit of a cry, maybe feel a bit sick, maybe get a little aroused. They can wallow in the state the character’s been brought down to, where they’re so tired and broken and damaged that there’s nowhere lower to go, that they can just be – which, oddly enough, can be very soothing in a way.

And then a caregiver turns up, and demonstrates their love and affection and deep desire to help the character that the reader has been putting themselves in the position of – and the reader gets to experience that love and care and acknowledgement of the pain they’ve just been through, second-hand.

Some people need this final catharsis a lot, and go for hurt/comfort, where the balance of hurt to comfort is usually 50:50, or tipped even further in favour of comfort, and the hurt is generally fairly mild (broken leg, small accident, minor injuries). Some people need more intense hurt, and less comfort, where the balance is maybe 75:25, or tipped even further in favour of hurt (possibly even no explicit comfort, just the promise that it’s going to happen after the story), and the injuries might be graphic, or there might be torture. And then there’s darkfic, and tortureporn, that’s just entirely hurt, and usually involves gore / guro / body horror, people enduring unsurvivable injuries, and possibly the character dying at the end. So the vulnerability-catharsis cycle isn’t the same for everyone! And, in fact, doesn’t even need to be a cycle for some people.

(I, personally, tend to sit cheerfully on the line between whump and tortureporn, for those curious. Love me some torture, but I generally want at least the promise of a positive-ish ending, if not a little outright worrying and comforting from a caregiver character. Suffering is most interesting when there’s someone who cares there to witness it and worry over, for me – it legitimises the pain of it, somehow, I think.)

Incidentally, mentioning “broken down”: characters can be really interesting to read about and write in extreme mindsets, whether that’s someone broken down to almost nothing, someone furiously determined not to give into the pain and stay strong, someone who’s abusive and whose thought processes are badly warped as a result, someone who’s so sadistic they’re barely even human any more… extremes of human existence, of human experience, of human thought processes and mindset, seem to just be a Thing that people find interesting. (They’re a thing people are interested in experiencing, but in a controlled environment where no one’s actually getting hurt.) So I’m sure that’s also got something to do with it – that humans are kinda voyeuristic and nosey when it comes to Horrible Things and Mangled Corpses and Huge Tragedies, even irl, and that naturally bleeds over into fiction.

Another important aspect is that both irl and fiction are full of examples of violence and hurt towards minority groups – women, poc, and lgbtq+ and mentally ill people, to mention just a few, since they’re the groups fandom is largely comprised of. But there’s very few depictions of (specifically cishet and white, but not exclusively) men experiencing violence, or being hurt. When men in fiction do get hurt, they largely bounce back from it, action-hero style. You get this sort of “impervious, invulnerable man” character, who never seems to experience any true sort of pain or suffering – and who also looks a lot like the people who enact violence on minorities in real life.

There is, then, something appealing about a) seeing the untouchable become touchable, the unhurtable become hurt, the invulnerable made vulnerable, b) seeing someone who is usually the one enacting trauma being the one that’s experiencing the trauma, and suffering for it, “seeing how it feels”, c) seeing someone who usually shrugs off any kind of trauma or pain having to actually deal with that pain, and become vulnerable and more real as a result, sort of humanising thing, and d) being able to project the violence and trauma minorities experience or live in fear of on a daily basis onto a “blank slate” character.

In a culture that treats male (again, especially white, cishet male) as the default, hurting fictional male characters can be a way for minorities to examine, explore, and discuss their fears and feelings surrounding the violence they’re constantly hyperaware of, but one step removed from themselves. You can hurt a white, cisgender man and be able to realistically talk about violence, and the short- and long-term consequences of that violence, without having to think about stuff like racism, transphobia, and misogyny, which may be a little too close for comfort. Even given fandom’s tendency to make characters gay or bi, a fairly small proportion of whump and darkfic is focused on attacks to do with or even tangentially related to a character’s sexual orientation. People want the violence and the aftermath, but they don’t necessarily want the messy, real societal issues that so often come along with that.

There’s a lot of discussion about women using slashfic to examine their thoughts and feelings about sex and romance without having to confront various, female-specific or gendered issues around them. I get the feeling – especially given most whump targets are male, and many people are utterly disinterested in or actively upset by female whump – that whump is, similarly, a “safe” way for women and other minorities to explore their thoughts and feelings about the violence they are immersed in. They can even create imagined minorities which which to explore realistic violence against minorities but again without the personal context. This is most obvious with A/B/O and BDSM aus (omegas, who are stereotyped in-universe as weak and prey-like and needing an alpha to “protect them”, and subs, who are stereotyped in-universe as much the same), but even in aus more removed from being obvious social critiques people tend to create some kind of group perceived in-universe as weak and easily victimised with which to explore these issues.

And, even when the whump targets are members of real-life minorities, such women, or poc, or lgbtq+, there’s still that element of author or reader control. They can control whether the whumpee is getting hurt because of their minority status, which minority status they’re being hurt because of, whether the violence they experience lines up to common irl expressions of violence against that minority, how far the violence goes, whether the fictional community around the whumpee reacts realistically or overwhelmingly sympathetically…

Finally, and relatedly to the above point, there’s also the eternally-trotted-out “coping mechanism” line, which… has been pretty badly weaponised, unfortunately, by people who don’t really seem to care about the people using darker fiction as a coping mechanism and mostly seem to care about policing people’s fiction consumption. But it’s definitely a thing, and some people enjoy darker fiction because it gives them a way to relive past abuse or mistreatment in a safe environment (they can close the tab, hit the back button, if it gets too intense). Allows them to put themselves in a position of power again (reading noncon and imagining themselves as the rapist, or reading noncon and knowing they can stop reading at any time, or reading a consensual nonconsent scene where the sub actually has the power because they can say stop at any time). Gives them a sense of reassurance and catharsis through the caregiving aspect of it (their fave characters went through what they did, these characters still have people who love them even after the abuse, these characters were told it wasn’t their fault and they’re strong and perfect and deserve to be supported and their abusers are bad people). Gives them a chance to fictionally confront their abuser (the fictional abuser gets put in jail, or killed, or gets the shit kicked out of them / gets verbally condemned by the survivor’s friends, or the survivor finds the strength to confront them about what they did).

And oh, hey, look, we’re back to power, and controllable vulnerability, and catharsis. Surprise!

So… that’s it, really. In the end, it largely comes down to power and control, and catharsis, and vulnerability. People use darkfic because it’s a safe way of feeling intense emotions and then getting love and catharsis afterwards, or of venting negative feelings and desires they’re already feeling without hurting anyone or needing to feel guilty after, and because humans have been getting off on power dynamics and taboos since probably forever. People have kinks for… pretty much the same reasons, but with sexualisation and erotic responses. Pretty much every big, scary kink can be broken down into lots of little non-scary kinks. Fantasies aren’t inherently bad, and it’s pretty normal and not inherently harmful to have fantasies about things that would be Deeply Bad irl. Humans are fucking Weird, and I love them for it.

Did I really need over 5k to say that? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s been fun putting thought into this whilst avoiding doing my coursework, and hopefully it’ll be useful to some people (and maybe to me, next time I need to argue against purity politics).

If you’re interested in talking / thinking more about this: my ask box is always open. I’m always curious to hear people talk about their own experiences with trying to understand their weirder or darker kinks, or happy to answer questions about why I or other people like things, or to just be as much of a safe space as I can manage for these kinds of things. If you’re interested in more introspection about non-sexualised violence and why people have intense, enjoyable (but largely non-erotic) responses to it, go into the “whump” tag and poke around a bit on the blogs that post in there – most whump blogs talk about why they like whump a fair bit, and there’s a huge amount of variation. The “purity politics” tag on my personal blog has a lot of me being annoyed at people trying to police fiction, but it also has a lot of really good, introspective thoughts on why people like, want, and need darker themes in fiction. Finally, the book “In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification” by Victoria Pitts also touches a bit on similar real-life things, where body modification overlaps with kink and fetish and BDSM things and people’s enjoyment of pain and injury as both a personal thing and public spectacle. (She’s got some fun thoughts on identity that I really liked, too, though that’s for a different discussion.)

Otherwise… Whilst I think it’s good to think critically about what you’re into and how and why, and do the same about what other people are into, I don’t think it’s necessarily great to criticise yourself for what you’re into. (Caveat: this is not me approving of people committing illegal acts irl, just… acknowledging that people usually worry a lot about having “bad” fantasies, when really fantasies rarely hurt anyone, don’t necessarily indicate a desire for something to happen irl, and are rarely as bad / weird / unusual as the person having them thinks.) Think about stuff, but try not to stress, and try to enjoy working out the shape of your brain and what you like. You might be surprised what you find out about yourself in the process.

#anonymous #ask #whump #meta #darkfic #sparx chats #idk what to tag this with really???#it's just like. 5k of me talking about why human brains are weird and sometimes really like violence #even if your human brain is Definitely Not Weird and you Definitely Don't Like Violence i'd suggest reading it tho #i would hope it's interesting #and i think it's got a bunch of important things in it given the current fandom climate #essays

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