Whump Is A Beautiful Bloody Thing

Announcement: In some fun personal news, I now have an anchor job. My paid Friday newsletters will continue as normal but please grant me some leniency in Monday updates as I adjust to my new schedule. And by leniency I mean I'm going to miss some weeks and be spottier going forward.

Hello friends, may I interest you in some whump?

People's experiences differ, but for me whump is a term used interchangeably with hurt/comfort (h/c) and is one of the most common tropes in fanfiction. In the way that some fans detached from any single specific media property and became fans of slash, many have also become fans of whump. We like to see characters in pain - we like to see our characters in pain. Fandom affinity breeds a sense of ownership, shared though it is, so that on top of the normal pleasures of a TV character going Through It, fanfic or art or carefully curated video clips of our blorbo adds an extra layer of emotional attachment to the pain they are feeling. And some fans like to watch the world burn.

H/c covers a wide variety of fic, some leans more toward hurt and others toward comfort. Both sickfic (Starsky has a cold!) and dismemberment (Hutch lost an arm!) could qualify. You could also go the emotional destruction route with a divorce, a new or hidden trauma, or a character's death...The central idea is that something is now wrong (the whump) and now the characters must find a way back to the status quo. Non-comfort fics may not even get back to the status quo at all. A lot of early whumpy fics tended toward very dark subject matter. They were referred to "get em" fic in that certain (favorite) characters were singled out by the author and then put through the wringer. The biggest recipients of these in the late 70s and early 80s were Spock of Star Trek and Avon of Blake's 7. And get em fics were not kind. One of my favorite fandom acronyms, for its unashamed bluntness, is BUARA: Beat Up and Rape Avon.

Rape fics these days would be considered darkfic (although darkfic can also deal with even heavier subject matter) as well as classified as noncon (non-consensual; also see: dubcon, dubious consent) but those nuances and warning tags didn't exist in the early days of zines. Fans of this type of fic didn't simply want to see their blorbo in discomfort, they want to explore what it would be like for them be completely physically and emotionally violated and at the time had limited means of getting at that type of violence. At the same time, these sorts of narratives played in orientalist fantasies of the nature that The Sheik provided in the 1920s - of women being swept away by a threatening swarthy man and forced into illicit pleasure (just because the authors made it gay doesn't mean it's feminist). Modern rape fics have updated with the times in that rape culture and recovery are much more discussed so there are "clearer" rules to violate, but the origins of women wanting to write about rape through their male characters of choice definitely bears scrutiny.

In terms of classic slash, the desire to hurt a male character comes from a variety of sources, such as:

1. Hurting the character provides an avenue for that male character to express vulnerability. Much like football is an acceptable "excuse" for men to touch each other, being sick or hurt provides a reason for men to be weak without violating social rules.
2. You want to explore dangerous and dark subject matters in the safety of your fandom's comfortable and familiar narrative. How does adding this into the universe affect the character and everyone else? What will it take for this character to break? To truly understand a character don't you need to break them down to their very foundation and figure out how to build them up again?
3. They're pretty when they bleed.

The Pain Fandom — Fansplaining

How whump—one of fandom’s oldest and most divisive genres—gained a fanbase of its own by Maria Temming

FansplainingMaria Temming

I've written before about themes of BDSM in popular sci-fi and it might seem as though whump is the same thing under a different name - but the crucial thing that you learn as a fan, and what the unashamed sexuality of fandom can teach you, is that BDSM revolves explicit consent and negotiation of rules and scenes. Whump is when something happens to you, kink and fetish is something you do. While certain characters may play into dynamics on screen that hint at dom or sub, there is no actual BDSM happening, and it's very rarely that a show represents it correctly. Whump on TV happens all the time, but fandom has managed to single out the elements of television drama and angst and turn them inwards. While style varies, a large portion of fic does not contain plot the way an episode of television does - the whump doesn't "move the plot forward" but is instead the focus and catalyst for character growth or failure.

It might seem counterintuitive, or on its surface even abusive, to say that fans hurting fictional characters is an expression of love (except it's a character and fictional and you can't abuse a fictional character, etc. etc.), but would lavishing unending praise be any more suitable? Whumping a character can reveal how well-rounded and full a character feels, in that you can peel back their layers. It can revel in the fragile human condition that we all share. It can bring depth to a character that was sorely lacking an emotional core before. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, it's really, very hot.

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