Hello, you can call me Rabbit or Jonah, and this is my whump sideblog. 30s. they/them or it/its. aroace. autistic. actually just multiple special interests in a trench coat. Main blog @graveyardrabbit ( icon credit ) pending moodboard requests: 7
to this day i can't quite explain what it is about the kidnapping/long-term captivity trope that fascinates me. maybe it's just the microcosm of one person having nearly godlike power over your life and struggling to fight back against it, escape from it, and/or be rescued from it. something like that.
HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian vs Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh
HMS Surprise
Heavy Time
Voting ended onNov 15, 2025
Propaganda under the cut!
New propaganda will be added and reblogged, and will follow the winning entry into the next round. Positive propaganda only, please.
Preliminary rounds are open for one week.
HMS Surprise:
Anon says: (Note: While HMS is technically the third book in a series, it can be read by itself. This book is what the movie Master and Commander was based on.)
Unhinged brilliant doctor-spy Stephen gets captured, tortured, rescued, angsts over a young patient he can't save, gets marooned and survives on bird blood (!!?), gets shot and has to perform self-surgery...just incredible quality and amount of whump. Somewhat difficult prose if you're not used to the style and some uncomfortable British being British in India in the second half of the book, but Stephen really goes through it in this book and the relationship between him and Capt Aubrey drives people insane. If you're a kirk/spock shipper and also like Jane Austen you're gonna eat this UP.
Heavy Time:
Anon says, "Paul Dekker is an asteroid miner found drifting in space nearly dead. He's rescued and spends most of the book recovering mentally and physically. He has amnesia about what happened, and gets traumatizing flashbacks. He also gets gaslighted because what he begins to remember is really bad for some powerful people.
His rescuer hates his guts but the other characters try to give him comfort. Dekker's story continues in the sequel Hellburner, and he gets whumped a lot there too, but Heavy Time is a self-contained story and can be read alone. CJ Cherryh is amazing at whump and this is my top book from her whump-wise."
Two immortals engaged in a sideshow act that's unspeakably popular with certain underground medical circles as an alternative to grave robbing, although it's seen as even more an atrocity against god by the church
One of them, somewhat inured to pain, sits back and lets his rib cage be opened
The other is the one opening him up, holding a lamp
Medical students desperate to learn, to understand, and at the same time pale-faced and sweating observing this man sit back on a table and calmly pull back the cracking cage of his own ribs so that his partner can point out his organs
"Of course," the living example says mildly one evening, "a real surgical example will have blood. Lots of it. It'll spurt everywhere, stain your apron."
"Where's yours?" asks a bolder student, though his voice quavers.
The man with his torso opens smiles.
His partner says, "We put it away."
"For safe-keeping."
"Quite. No need to take it out of the house with us all the time."
Based on this prompt by @allthingswhumpyandangsty!!
Contains: Dead dove do not eat, graphic descriptions, body horror, gore, mutilation, blood, dehumanization, And I Must Scream
There in the freezer hung a piece of meat.
It was an oddly shaped piece of meat. The Meat thought so, too. Its body lined with frost and its skin pale and blue. Uneven lumps where two arms used to be. Jagged nubs where legs once were. Ear canals stained with blood that had long since dried, the ears itself having long since been cut off. Gaping fleshy holes where eyes had been gouged out. A gaping mouth where a stump of what used to be a tongue twitched uselessly inside, while drool sluggishly trickled down the chin.
The Meat was shivering.
It hadn't stopped shivering, ever since it had been hung here, strung up by chains, hooks embedded into the flesh and dangling from the ceiling. Shallow, shaky, ragged breaths that came out in a frosty mist. Agonized and trembling, with noises that sounded more like whimpers than any attempt at words. The Meat couldn't stop shivering.
The tears on the Meat's cheeks had long since frozen. More clustered around the empty, bloodied eye sockets—while the eyes had been gouged out, the tear ducts hadn't. It had been so carefully done.
The Meat could not see. The Meat could not hear, due to its eardrums being having been impaled some time ago. The Meat could not speak, only softly, wordlessly sob. The Meat could not move, other than weak, pathetic squirms and the clenching of the torso, as well as the constant shaking that only made it more exhausted.
All the Meat could do was feel, smell. And… think.
And all the Meat could think, desperately, in broken, fractured and disjointed thoughts, was of begging. Begging for anyone, anything, to let it all end. But the tube, snaking directly into the hole that accessed the Meat's stomach, continued to provide it with sustenance, ensuring that it preserved itself. Alive. That it would suffer. That it would last as long as the Butcher wanted it to. Until the Meat no longer knew anything but agony, and the curse of being so very alive.
There in the freezer hung what used to be a human being… who was now nothing more than a piece of breathing, bloodied meat.
I think for me, cannibalism is the secret spice that really elevates horror from ‘pretty creepy’ to ‘genuinely haunting and I feel this in my bones and will be thinking about this all week.’ You know things have gone well and truly fucked once people start eating each other!
It’s the horror of it being the last resort in the most desperate of people, but then being such a personal, visceral crime when someone chooses to do it, wants to do it. You’ve reduced someone to an animal, to meat. It’s both unnatural and yet terrifyingly natural in the most horribly primal way. It strips both parties of their humanity.