ELECTRIC ★ ANY PRONOUNS ★ GENDERFLUID ★ QUEER ★ ADULT
⋆.˚˖࿔ ࣪ WELCOME to my whump & creative blog! I’ve been an enjoyer of whump, hurt/comfort and horror for a long, long time, even before this blog’s creation.
I primarily create works about my OCs, but I’m also an avid enjoyer of fandom — both whump and non-whump. Most of my works on this blog will be about my own original creations.
⚠︎ This blog will contain potentially disturbing, sensitive, and/or explicit content intended for a mature audience. Please take care of yourself and utilize the back, x, and block buttons if needed. Obviously, I do not condone real life harm of any kind, and it is not my intent to promote or glorify it.
FAVORITE TROPES: Torture, captivity, lab whump, pet whump, rough recovery/lasting trauma, psychological/emotional whump, suppressed emotions, nonhumans, noncon body modification, toxic relationship dynamics, whumper -> whumpee, surrealism, nonhuman -> human, human -> nonhuman, unrealistic/strange whump, drugging, addiction & so much more !! I have a wide range of interests and I’m willing to try anything once (or twice… or more)
MY CREATIONS
None right now (not including old/retconned works); will be listed once I get to writing/posting any series etc.
Fiction makes, implicitly or explicitly, some kind of argument. A fictional portrayal of a guy simply going for a walk might make the argument that walking is a nice activity to do. This might not be a particularly earth-shattering message, but messages like this are implicit within the literary tools we use in how we portray characters, behavior, settings, and relationships. This underlying argument – a theme – is present in all of fiction. It’s why you’ll often see people make the statement that “all art is political”. And when it comes to torture – a subject which in and of itself has been the topic of political debate for millenia – how we approach the ideas and arguments made within fictional depictions of torture warrant, in my opinion, a degree of care. Torture isn’t just something that happens in movies. It is something that happens today, to real people, on a global scale. It’s not even particularly rare.
The difficulty with the subject of torture specifically is that for the past two decades, the public perception of torture has shifted on a global scale, seen most clearly in how torture is presented in contemporary media, fiction or otherwise. Everybody believes these myths. And getting indoctrinated into having reactionary takes on a topic is nobody’s fault, considering that almost every source outside of academia feeds you misinformation. But that’s, y’know, kinda why I made this blog: in the hopes that I might be able to get people to consider what ideas they’re presenting in their writing.
I want to start out by briefly reitorating some basics of how torture apologia typically works within political discussions, because this very much is relevant to how you can avoid accidentally sending the wrong message.
The first thing you need to understand is that the real-life debate surrounding torture isn’t framed in terms of whether or not torture is good or bad – everybody, including torturers themselves, will concede that it is bad. The more insidious argument is that torture is useful for achieving certain goals, and that it is therefore justified in extreme emergencies. Not only does this argument try to soften the usually rigid negative framing of torture in moral discussions, but it also seeks to poke holes in the international laws which ban the use of torture outright. It’s a moral, political and legal argument all wrapped up in one reactionary package. For this reason, having the theme of “torture is bad” doesn’t always mean a piece of writing isn’t making use of torture apologia. “Torture is useful” serves that goal just fine.
Torture is also often discussed in terms of civility – not the civility of the torturers, but the civility of the victims. It’s the argument that the people who are being tortured are bad people, and therefore don’t warrant the respect and dignity we usually offer to other human beings; they are so bad, essentially, that it’s fine for us civilized people to war crime them. Whenever I’ve encountered this argument, it has usually been presented in a way that was, shall we say, sussy as fuck – some even give up the pretense and straight up call their victims “savages” or “degenerates”. I hope I don’t need to explain why this line of thinking is insane, but in any case, it’s just my way of getting you to consider that a lot of the myths surrounding torture are rooted in broader sociopolitical issues, often racism and religious discrimination, and historically, most often within the context of colonialism.
With that in mind, let’s get into the myths, starting with the most obvious one.
"Torture for information works."
Every study I’ve read has concluded that torture is counterproductive when it comes to gathering intel from reluctant sources. Under severe pain or distress, victims are more focused on saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop, as opposed to providing accurate information. On a neurophysiological level, severe pain or distress actually interferes with the pathways of the brain relating to long- and short-term memory; this means that torture in and of itself is likely to destroy the very evidence it sets out to gather. Furthermore, victims are less likely to cooperate if subjected to physical abuse, including torture, and nothing in the infliction of pain itself works as some kind of truth serum. Lying and defiance are more likely under torture.
To a large minority of people, portraying torture as a reliable tool for gathering accurate information will make the implicit argument that torture, although usually bad, can hold utilitarian value in certain exceptional cases. I’ve written about this more in depth here.
"Under torture, everyone cooperates sooner or later."
French prosecutors used torture in the events leading up to the French revolution, as a way to gain forced confessions from suspects. Their failures and successes were jotted down, leading us with a pretty revealing insight – the highest success rate for gathering forced confessions was in Toulouse, an exceptionally high 14%. In Paris, only 3% of suspects cooperated long enough to sign their name – the rest did not. This is one of the primary reasons that the French criminal justice system eventually dropped using torture for intelligentsia. To quote Darius Rejali, who wrote The Book on torture: “Torture the clumsiest method available to organizations.”
So no, not everybody talks – in fact, rough estimate, 90% of torture victims never do. Defiance is by far the norm with torture.
"When the bad guy does it, it’s torture – when the good guy does it, it’s a tough, but morally justifiable decision."
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Heroes of stories, especially in the action genre, often engage in the use of torture for information, usually following the framework of the ticking bomb scenario, a thought experiment based on the false notion that torture works as an interrogation method. Here, torture is turned into a heroicact, one that speaks to the toughness of the person who uses it. Ask yourself if you want to frame torturers though this lens – because if you do, you are literally justifying the act torture, and, y’know, you do you, but I am gonna call you stupid and reactionary. Torture done by a “good” person is just as abhorrent as torture done by anybody else.
"Some methods of torture are less severe than others."
This myth stems from governments trying to downplay the use of certain methods of torture, and usually goes hand in hand with euphemistic redefinitions of the concept, such as the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation methods,” also known as “torture lite,” or the Israeli “coercive interrogation.” The methods that have been proposed in this supposed less severe category of torture includes stimulated drowning, also known as waterboarding, as well as caning, beatings, limbs being broken with clubs, sleep deprivation, stress positions (ex. forcing a person to crouch against a wall for extended periods of time,) mock executions, sexual assault, and more. If these things all just sound like torture to you, it’s because they are. There is zero evidence to suggest that any torture methods, including those that leave no physical mark on the body, have less severe outcomes than those that do not – on the contrary, non-physical torture methods, including mock executions, or witnessing the torture of a loved one, have been ranked by victims as causing equal amounts of psychological distress as physical torture.
"Torture only causes harm to the person who is being tortured."
This is incredibly unrealistic. Torture is an act that is destructive in all directions, causing trauma to victims, their family, witnesses, and even torturers themselves. It disintegrates the structure of the organizations that use it, it breeds resentment and hatred in the communities around it, and it radicalizes people into extremism. Pretending that consequences like this don’t exist isn’t torture apologia per se, but if your aim is to show the realistic outcomes of torture, these are some of the things you need to consider.
Torture is portrayed as “scientific”; torturers are “skilled” in the “art” of torture.
The most common methods of torture in use today are: hitting people, sleep deprivation, and starvation. These don’t require a whole lot of brain power to conjure up, in fact the infliction of intense suffering is very straightforward. Human beings are full of nerves. Stick a knife anywhere, and I’d be more impressed if it didn’t cause pain.
Not to mention, portraying torture as “scientific” or something that “requires technical skill” makes the implicit argument that torture works for its intended use, here under the condition that you should at least do it right – which brings us right back to that utilitarian fallacy.
"Torturers are expert interrogators, and possess an extraordinary ability to detect lies in their victims."
Studies have been done on the ability of police officers to detect lies for about four decades now. The average person will have a 57% accuracy rate, meaning they’re barely better at spotting deception than a coin toss. For police officers, the highest estimate is around 65% - but it might also be as low as 45%, meaning they might be less accurate than a coin toss – even though police officers tend to think of themselves as exceptional at spotting deception. The same trend is seen in torturers.
In fact, this myth in particular originated from torturers’ accounts of how they conceptualize themselves, which is not only false, but also cringe. When an interrogator starts making use of torture, their focus tends to shift away from gathering reliable information, and more towards “perfecting” the infliction of pain, which means that over time, those interrogative skills are substantially degraded – they are terrible interrogators. So torturers are no better at spotting lies than your average person; they might actually be worse. They can’t read minds, and they don’t possess some secret mystical knowledge about the psychology of their victims.
"You can train someone to resist torture."
Loads of intelligence agencies and revolutionary groups around the world have published material that supposedly serves as manuals for resisting torture, but the truth is, torture is so extreme, there really is no way to prepare or train someone to “resist” it; this is something that even the CIA has acknowledged. Everybody’s reaction to pain will be different. There is no way to predict how torture will affect anyone, much less give them instructions beforehand that will somehow magically negate those effects.
"Brainwashing through torture works."
Torturers can’t change the emotional framework of a person through the infliction of pain. They cannot change the strongly held beliefs and opinions held by their victims through the infliction of pain. They can’t erase someone’s entire personality or make them a ‘blank slate’ through the infliction of pain. They can’t predict how a victim responds to torture, much less direct that response to their own benefit. This is not how pain works.
This is not only an implicit argument for the usefulness of torture to change someone’s behavior or force religious conversions, but the myth that torturers have some form of control of their victims even after the torture has ended is also used in real life to paint survivors as dangerous or unstable, and thereby bar them from treatment and aid, and even to allow access into countries to escape the circumstances that facilitated their torture in the first place. That last point is why you often see the advocacy of refugee rights in organizations that work to prevent torture; these two branches of activism have a huge overlap.
Torture victims cannot be controlled by their torturers. Brainwashing isn’t real.
"Stockholm syndrome is real."
This is a derivative of the brainwashing myth, which means all the connotations previously mentioned remain, but as a cherry on top, Stockholm syndrome as a trope can also serve as an implicit argument for the utility of domestic abuse. So that’s cool.
If you deliberately inflict suffering on someone, that is guaranteed to make that person dislike you. In real life, torture survivors not only tend to be extremely resentful of their torturers, but they also tend to be resentful of anyone belonging to the same demographic as their torturers, whether that be ethnicity, nationality, or even gender or general appearance. Like I said, torture radicalizes people.
"Torture makes people obedient."
Any physical abuse or neglect, including bad cell conditions, access to medical aid, decent food and clean water, is likely to breed resentment in victims and makes them far more reluctant to cooperate with their aggressors. With torture, defiance is the norm, by far. You saw this on a larger scale in the war on terror, for example – turns out that carpet bombing a country to deter terrorism only radicalizes the civilian population, producing more terrorists. No form of violence exists that will make a person particularly eager to shut up and do what you want them to do. It will just make them hate you.
The notion that torture makes people obedient is also an implicit argument for the use of corporal punishment or as crime deterrence, something that along with capital punishment has repeatedly been proven false by sociological studies. People just do not function like this. If you want to create obedience in your story – violence is the last thing you should use.
"People “break” under torture."
Victims of torture sometimes make the conscious decision to do what their torturer wants them to do, and this often serves as a means to buy enough time to plan an escape, or mount up whatever act of defiance they can manage. Sometimes they simply do it to get the torture to stop – this, too, is a tough, conscious decision. If you want to consider this a form of “breaking”, by all means go ahead, but implying personal weakness or lack of willpower in torture victims rubs me the wrong way. I personally see it as a rational choice made by a person who is in an otherwise impossible situation.
"Torture survivors are “broken”."
Torture certainly can lead to extreme psychological distress, but again, the term “broken” here implicitly makes the argument that torture victims simply lacked the mental fortitude to withstand their trauma. In my opinion, there’s a certain degree of victim blaming involved with framing torture survivors in this way, and certainly, it’s a framing that inherently strips away their agency.
Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the fact “brokenness” implies a degree of permanence and rigidity to human beings that simply isn’t there, as if we are solid objects that, once shattered, can never regain the function we once had. It’s a nitpick, but I view people as organic things, capable of healing and growth – not as glassware.
Conclusion
I’d wager that while reading this, a good portion of you recognized some of these myths from depictions of torture in fiction; that’s not particularly surprising to me. These myths aren’t just widespread, they’ve been engrained in the global public perception of torture by decades of political debate and government propaganda, and as a result, have seeped into popular culture.
Torture isn’t rare, and neither is torture apologia. According to Amnesty International, 31% of the global population believes that torture is justified “in some cases”; as of 2014, AI had also reported on torture or other ill treatment in 141 different countries, despite the fact that torture is internationally recognized as a war crime.
In an ideal world, the subject of torture in fiction is treated with the same due diligence with which we have learned to portray subjects like homophobia, sexual assault, and racism; because, to be fair, all of these things have the capacity to intersect, and very often do. The first step in that regard is to spread awareness about how torture actually functions, which is what I hope to slowly start doing on this blog. At the very least, I hope I can make people more aware of how they choose to portray torture in their writing.
something i never see explored with caretaker or friend characters is what it's like to grow up surrounded by traumatised people, but have no trauma of your own. it feels like you're on the outside of this club that you can only get into by going through something Really Bad, even though the people inside the club are happy to welcome you anyway, you know you'll never actually fit in.
and fucked up as it sounds, you want to fit in. you want the awful things to happen to you. you feel envious of what they have, even if that thing is memories of the most awful things known to man and consequences that run your daily functioning into the ground.
you're not sick enough to relate to the sick people, but you've seen ever so slightly too much to fit in with the "normal" people. your problems seem so minimal compared to these life-altering horrors that the whumpees have been through, yet you're not coping anyway. so either you admit that the problem is yourself, or you find a reason to react that way.
give me caretakers that sit through whumpee's stories and swallow back envy. who actively go looking for danger and dodgy people in the hopes that they'll go through something that can put them on whumpee's level. who plan out how to make things worse in precise, structured detail, then get angry with themself because what the fuck are they doing and it doesn't count if it's fucking orchestrated.
which of these shows that seem popular in the whump community* have you seen?
supernatural
stargate sg-1
stargate atlantis
daredevil
9-1-1
prodigal son
the 100
chicago p.d.
all of these
multiple
none
results
Voting ended onJun 4
(partially counts as well)
*this is just based on my experience. maybe mostly in the part of the community im around most often, and the gifsets and seemingly favorite whump scenes that have been shared there in the past years
content: past forced pregnancy, past noncon, lady whump, lady whumpee, minor whump, child whumpee, grooming a baby to be okay with torture, implied torture
It had been thirty-four months.
Two of Whumper trying to get her pregnant.
Eight of carrying the child.
And twenty-four of the baby growing and learning things.
Not all of which had Whumpee's approval.
Whumper had been right. Whumpee wasn't always around. And the times she wasn't, Whumper had the baby. And he was... training her. Grooming her.
Whumpee could tell. Sometimes there was blood splatter on her little baby clothes. Sometimes she could tell the baby had been crying a lot. Sometimes, she would say concerning things, like 'more whip' or 'hurt more'.
"Where are you taking her?" Whumpee hissed when the baby was in the other room, playing. "When I'm not here. Where are you taking her?"
"Daddy-daughter bonding time isn't your concern."
"This is my baby."
"Our baby."
Whumpee was so angry she was trembling. She clenched and unclenched her fists. She wanted to hit him.
"So?" he asked, a grin on his face. "Will you try to run with her? You won't make it."
"I know," she said through gritted teeth. There was a loud bang from the other room, like wooden toys clinking against other wooden toys. Whumpee immediately left Whumper to go see what the commotion was about.
"Bad!" the baby cried, beating the wooden doll with a wooden cow. "Bad, bad, bad! Been bad! Punish!"
Whumpee rushed over and grabbed the baby's hand, then gently guided her to put the cow down. "You know we don't hurt others when we're upset," she said gently. "Remember when we talked about that the other day?"
"Daddy does," she said, and Whumpee had to try really hard to keep her expression neutral, and her eyes on her baby.
"Daddy is wrong. We don't follow Daddy's example."
The baby stared at her. Whumpee didn't know if the message got through to her. Explaining concepts like 'right' and 'wrong' seemed to be a bit early.
"When Daddy hurts others, do you know what those others do?"
"Cry," the baby said.
"Exactly. We don't want to make others cry. That's bad. We want to make others happy! And laugh! Like this," Whumpee said, tickling her baby and making her laugh. "See? Isn't this much better?"
"Yes!" she said in that baby-babble voice of hers, and Whumpee smiled.
When she woke up the next day, her baby was gone. And when she got her back, her baby clothes were smudged with blood again. "Where were you?" Whumpee asked in a shaky voice.
"Bad," the baby said, waddling towards her. "Bad people cry. Punish bad people."
Whumper who "Admires Whumpees spirit" and forced them into having a child. They were very clear that Whumpee doesn't have to be involved in the raising of the kid, Whumper will hire people for that, they just wanted a kid with such a strong, resilient instinct as Whumpee.
Whumpee, who never wanted a kid and detests Whumper, doesn't like how the hired help does things, either. They don't want a baby, but any baby deserves better then THAT.
So imagine Whumpers happy surprise when they discover Whumpee reading a picture book to the baby, and saying that it's easier when they pretend the baby is a little sibling and not their actual child.
happy belated mother's day i'm sorry i was too tired to do this on sunday
content: implied past noncon, implied past forced pregnancy, lady whump, lady whumpee, there is a baby and she's not hurt at all but just be aware there is one
It had been eleven months.
Two of Whumper trying to get her pregnant.
Eight of carrying his child.
And one month of sticking around to see how the 'hired help' did things with her child. Because she wasn't Whumper's child. She was hers. She had carried her under her heart, she had given birth, and she wasn't about to abandon her.
"See that?" Whumpee asked gently, pointing at a cow in the picture book. Her baby — it was easier to think of her as a baby sister, she'd never wanted a child, she'd especially never wanted a child with Whumper — babbled and stuck a finger in her mouth. "That's a cow. Do you know what a cow is?"
Whumpee looked down at her, looked into those innocent, big, brown eyes, and she knew she was trapped. She couldn't leave her. The baby laughed.
"Of course you don't," Whumpee said tenderly. "You don't know anything yet. You're just an itty bitty baby. Do you know what a baby cow is called?"
"I see you're getting some bonding time," his voice came from behind them, and Whumpee squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and he sounded so happy, and she wanted to take the baby and run far away.
"Get out," she said. The baby realised something was up. She was quite perceptive from the first moment of being out of the womb. She stopped laughing. She looked scared.
"Can't I spent time with my family?"
"We are not your family."
"Sure you are. I mean, you didn't have to be, but you chose to stay. So you're included."
"Get out."
"This is my house. I can go wherever I please."
The baby was on the verge of crying, Whumpee could tell. She gently hushed her, rocking the two of them back and forth, choosing to ignore Whumper instead of upsetting her any more.
But Whumper wasn't done.
He walked into the room and came up behind them, carding his fingers through Whumpee's hair. "You make a wonderful mother. And this child will grow up to be just like you."
"And then what?" she hissed. "Then what? What do you want with my baby?"
"Anything. She will be able to do anything. And unlike you, she won't know anything else but me."
"I will raise this baby to know gentleness."
"Oh, Whumpee. You can't always be around. And babies are so pliable."
Tears stung her eyes, but she kept rocking them back and forth, keeping the baby from crying. "Get out."
He laughed. "Fine. Well, just go on with whatever you've been doing. I can tell it's doing her good."
Living weapon (slave in a gladiator ring trained at a young age to serve for entertainement) vs living weapon (child assassin prodigy in a secret, special military unit that deals with the goverment's dirty laundry)
#there aren't even words for how much i want a book tv show movie anything where this is the cast#the performative fighter molded to make everything a spectacle#flashy attacks and dramatic banter#silence meant punishment#living off the excitement and entertainment of the crowds#the moment they stop being popular is the moment they die#and the secret assassin is the opposite#being noticed could be deadly#firm stares and gritted teeth but never a word spoken and never a sound made#killing quickly and efficiently with a single strike and of course cleaning up after#that's their job after all#to clean up for the higher ups' mistakes#and the sapient sword oh boy#when did they become sapient? do they remember being made?#the others were born human and turned into weapons but they were created to do nothing but destroy#is being used for violence against their will or do they crave it#then there's the lab creature#lots of ways that one could fall#it might be as quiet as the assassin or it could lack volume control completely#“suffering for its creators' hubris”#it was meant to be different than it is somehow#so much could've gone wrong#imagine you're born and you've already proven worthy to be discarded#imagine you're subject to torturous experiments and tests because they're trying to figure out what went wrong with you#man#and the ways they'd interact.....#the similarities and differences............#augh via prev
Whumpees misinterpreting or taking too literally something caretaker says always gets me, but there's one specific scenario that I don't ever see, but it's been on my mind a lot lately;
Whumpee was kidnapped and has been held in a basement/prison/etc. for quite some time now. Months or maybe even years at this point. They've been severely injured (maybe by torture, failed escape, etc.) and finally they're being rescued. Only, the person rescuing them is a stranger (Caretaker). Not that Whumpee minds, at this point they just can't care. Anything is better than this, anywhere is better than here.
As their bindings are being undone, Whumpee's eyes begin to flutter as a wave of exhaustion comes over them. Caretaker notices this and they lightly tap Whumpee's face, "c'mon, I need you to keep those eyes open for me, alright? Stay awake, you can't go to sleep yet."
Whumpee, to the best of their ability, listens.
Infact, they listen so well that a few days into recovery, Caretaker notices how tired they seem.
"You alright there? You can take a nap if you need."
Whumpee looks at them in surprise as their eyes begin to well up, a slight, grateful smile creeping its way to their face. They begin thanking Caretaker profusely.
Confused, Caretaker questions them on their reaction and as they piece everything together, they ask Whumpee if they've not been sleeping.
"When you came for me, you said I have to stay awake. And I think I was good, I did good right?" They ask, proudly and excited to finally sleep.
Or they feel guilty and admit that they think they passed out a few times but they're so sorry and they didn't mean to, and they'll be good from now on, they promise!
Either way, Caretaker feels a combination of concern and guilt. They hadn't specified when Whumpee would be allowed to sleep, becuase they didn't think they had to.
They apologize to Whumpee and explain that that's not necessary and that it was a misunderstanding and miscommunication.
Idrk where it goes from here, so if you have any ideas, or you want to write something based on this, lmk or tag me! I'd love to hear some ideas!
i'm not in this fandom but i've had this in my etsy likes for so long bc it's such a cute, clever, whumpy idea and i'd love to see it done with more characters
Natural Black Hair Tutorial!
Usually Black hair is excluded in the hair tutorials which I have seen so I have gone through it in depth because it’s really not enough to tell someone simply, “Black hair is really curly, draw it really curly.”
The next part of Black Hair In Depth will feature styles and ideas for designing characters and I will release it around February. If you would like to see certain styles, please shoot me a message!
When I was in my teens, I used to make an entire magic system with 900 unique spells, ordered in magic schools and categories, and it boggles my mind that I basically reinvented DnD mechanics, even down to metamagic.
I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.
The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.
I even got lore related to it all, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna simply reuse it all for OC worldbuilding. Ngl the fun part was naming all the spells, symbols and coming up with the logic of it all.
Edit : Due to popular demand, I'm making the wiki now yay. There's even more sigils done now >:]
After almost a year of brainstorming, coding, designing, writing and drawing, I am proud to announce that the magical system wiki I was working on is finally ready to open to the public !
You can check it out here !
World Anvil is a worldbuilding community and collection of tools for authors, role playing games storytellers and worldbuilding
The writing part is done, and I've done enough spells to provide an example for each element. The goal is to fill up that huge array eventually! >:]
