Something I have been thinking about lately is. So I like whump. I am one of many people who enjoys reading about bad things happening to my favorite fictional characters, as the long and storied history of fandom will attest. We love it when people get hurt.
But one thing I also love, that I feel like I don't see very often in whump fic, is people writing about the recovery process, the unglamorous, difficult, after-the-fact details of having sustained serious injuries and living to tell the tale. Sometimes there will be a brief scene at the end of the fic where we are assured that, yes, the character made it to the hospital and survived, and is now surrounded by concerned friends-- particularly when the story veers more into hurt/comfort territory--but that's not really what I'm talking about. What I want is stories where the treatment and recovery are front and center, the medical details are realistic and the injuries are treated with the appropriate gravity, where the process is long and hard and has pitfalls and obstacles and above all takes time.
I think a large part of my desire for fics where the recovery is more centered than the actual moment of "hurt" stems from being aromantic and asexual and preferring gen stories, but still craving moments of intimacy in fiction and thus looking for it in less conventional places. Caretaking--or being taken care of--can be great sources of intimacy in stories where sex is off the table, for one reason or another. Needless to say, it's been an obvious lacuna. People do still write it, but not as often as I'd like to see, and that's always struck me as strange.
On the other hand, my wife has never been as into whump as me. She never hated it, but didn't seek it out or write it very often and had to be in the right mood for it (and to some degree still does). But lately she's been getting much more into exploring it in her writing because it offers her an opportunity to write characters experiencing similar things to her as she's dealt with the challenges of becoming disabled and largely housebound and reliant on me for certain caretaking tasks. And as a result we've sort of gravitated towards some similar kinds of stories, where recovery and caretaking are just as if not more important than fucking that character up in the first place.
Anyway. It's lead me to think more actively about that gap I've noticed as a life-long whump reader, where the recovery doesn't really matter and the stories are mostly just about the moment of "hurt" and maybe a dramatic rescue at the end. And I won't pretend it's all ableism, but I really do think that some of the reason fandom is allergic to writing true, messy, real caretaking and recovery is rooted in liking the aesthetics of disability (the angst! the drama!) without really caring much about the reality of it. It's the same reason action heroes get knocked unconscious all the time without concussions, why sci-fi and fantasy prosthetics so often seamlessly replace lost limbs, and why everyone in fiction eventually recovers from injuries and illness (except for when they die). There's no room for the unglamorous in-between, where someone ends up permanently affected by what happened to them and where "hurt" has life-long consequences.
I guess that's all to say--I wish fandom were as enthusiastic about the disability narrative potential in whump. Even in instances where people do make incredible recoveries from horrible injuries (which I've seen firsthand with friends!), a brush with serious injury is at the very least a brush with short-term disability, and more likely than not will have effects for the rest of someone's life. That can be interesting, and even intimate if you want it to be, too.
So yes, please do fuck that character up--it's a cornerstone of fandom for a reason. But consider, maybe, telling the sort of story where what happens afterwards matters, too.
