Chatter post

[trashmod]

For all your discussion needs.

Ground rules:
- Try to keep it loosely trash party related, or at least Cap fandom related.
- Disagreement is fine, nastiness is not.
- Being offended is not carte blanche for nastiness.
- Trashmeme ground rules apply. Read at your own risk, no romanticizing your noncon garbage, no wank about the moral acceptability of noncon kink.
- Body shots, sniper shots, and tetanus shots are all available at the open bar. Party like it's 2014, kids.

Comments

Re: Seriously curious - not trolling

[(Anonymous)]

for a trash meme it seems that everyone steers toward sexual violence

This meme was established as a space for fic about "violent sex and sexy violence" -- I don't know why you'd think the focus on rape here is out of place. That’s like going to a steakhouse and being confused as to why everybody’s eating beef. You’re right, there’s not a lot of salmon on the menu … because it’s a restaurant that specializes in steak. It says so right on the door.

Why not embrace your rape fetish?

Publicly? It's an anon meme because, as I'm sure you've noticed, some people in fandom act like assholes when other people like things that they themselves do not like. I manage to keep my seething contempt for Coffee Shop AUs under wraps because I'm polite and have good impulse control. I recognize that my complete lack of interest in that genre is irrelevant to everybody who isn't me, that random strangers are not interested in the many ways in which I think Coffee Shop AUs are harmful corporatist bullshit that spoon-feed pablum to the masses in the name of ~relatability, that they completely ignore the characterizations of canon in order to generate another paint-by-numbers romantic comedy that lacks both romance and comedy. However, many other people on Tumblr are not interested in civility and, when confronted with people who like things that they don’t like, instead choose to act like complete fuckheads. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that waving a red flag in front of an asshole who’s demonstrated that they don’t give a shit about other people isn’t a constructive move.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of variety here

Do you even go here? I could say exactly the same thing about 99% of the Steve/Bucky fic I see on AO3. It’s all the same derivative crap. Back to the steakhouse metaphor: just because your palate can’t differentiate between a porterhouse, a flank steak, a striploin, or a T-bone doesn’t mean that the rest of us aren’t enjoying a wide variety of satisfying meals.

Why not simply admit it's a kink?

Where are you seeing people who say that reading and writing fictional stories about non-consensual sex is *not* a kink? That comes from the critics who want this entire genre, and all of the people in it, to disappear — it doesn’t come from the authors themselves. Rape and rape recovery are very commonly-written narrative tropes across many, many fandoms, and have been for as long as fanfic has existed -- including way back in the day when it was printed on physical paper and mailed to your house (see: Kirk/Spock) — because rape kink has been a thing for a very, very long time. There’s rape kink in the Christian Bible, for fuck’s sake. HTP did not invent darkfic or rapefic, nor did it somehow magically popularize it beyond its prior existing popularity. You'll find rape and rape recovery very obviously listed on Fanlore here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/List_of_Fan-fiction_Kinks,_Tropes,_and_Clich%C3%A9s and in every other fan space that discusses the history of fandom. I'd write more, but I don't see the point, as it's been thoroughly covered in this post: http://whatisthehydratrashparty.tumblr.com/why

"Even if it's as a coping mechanism, just admit you enjoy characters being put through trauma."

Yes, I do, and so does pretty much everybody else here on this meme -- just like everybody who enjoys reading hurt/comfort, or angst, or pining, or recovery, or pretty much any other genres of fic apart from short, plotless AU fluff. The fact that I enjoy reading stories where some of that trauma is of a sexual nature is because, in the world I live in, *very often* I encounter trauma that is of a sexual nature. Fiction reflects reality. Why would I avoid writing about ideas that examine, dissect, explore, and discuss themes that have so much real-world relevance to me?

"the worst thing happening to characters having to be rape"

Is it, though? Is that what you see when you read HTP fics, that the only bad thing, or the worst bad thing, that happens to them is rape? Because what I see is very often, the worst thing that happens to characters is the thing *leading up to* their rape -- their betrayal by other characters, their dehumanization, their exploitation, their imprisonment, their torture, the callous cruelty with which they're treated. Sexual violence is both the outcome of, and only one facet of, all the different kinds of violence that are visited upon characters here.

Re: Seriously curious - not trolling

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, five seconds browsing the tags and comments on this post makes it pretty obvious most writers enjoy doing terrible things to their faves in fanfic: http://runningwolf62.tumblr.com/post/135371138433/lovelysuggestion-treat-yourself-like-you-would