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)]

I can't honestly say the sexual aspect doesn't do anything for me, but that's far from the main reason I'm here. I mean, sure, I get off to rape fantasies occasionally, but I'm here for the emotional aspect. The part of this meme that I love is the way a character slowly breaks down (or doesn't) under duress until they're a shadow of what they were before. The way uncertainty and self-loathing worms its way into their heads and the defense mechanisms they try to find to hold on. The way even after it's over they're still broken and they know things won't be the same, and the horror of that inevitability and trying to cope with it. I love this in fiction because it's a concentrated dose of what I find myself going through in real life. It helps me cope, and it comforts me. And I'll take it any way I can get it, including sexual violence.

Honestly, it's easier to get hold of stories about rape than about torture or slavery or other kinds of human rights violations. A few years ago I tried to avoid rape stories entirely (I was also underage a few years ago so there's that) but I eventually realized the only consistent way to get my "break a character down and watch them suffer" fix was to read stories about rape.

Also, I don't know if the idea is that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a person so much as that it's a separate kind of terrible. Because it takes something that is supposed to be pleasurable and uses it against the victim, something that's supposed to be intimate and, since it's not done with someone the victim trusts or wants to be close with, violates that intimacy. (That's just my understanding of it; I've never been raped but I've been sexually harassed and that was the aspect of it that was most terrible for me.) It's not so much that rape is in necessity worse than death/dismemberment/torture, but whereas those take something already terrible and heap it on, rape takes something that's supposed to be nice and makes it terrible.

TLDR; for me it's more the emotional horror rather than the sexual aspect; if I could find non-sexual violence fics in either the number or quality that I find sexual violence fics I would be reading those in addition to or instead of the latter, if I could find an audience I would definitely be writing them instead (I've actually never had sex do you even understand how hard it is to write sex when you've never had it), and sexual violence is in a different category of violence from other kinds of violence.

Re: Seriously curious - not trolling

[(Anonymous)]

DA, and agreed. I'm mostly here for the emotional aspect.

Actually, let me be a little bit more specific:

I've always gotten off to bondage and power play, ever since I was a wee child and didn't know why I kept having funny pants feelings when I got to the part in books where someone was captured and tied up and rendered helpless. So, there's always that. Good D/s relationships where the power differential is highlighted gets me there, as does stories with rape fantasies, or really anything that highlights the pure helplessness of the situation.

That said, I can get that elsewhere. *waves at hentai*

What I find in this trashpile in highly concentrated dosage, is dehumanization (and, ideally for me, re-humanization.) And that's what really gets me, emotionally. Dehumanization can take many forms, from sexual ("haha it's like masturbating or fucking and animal") to non- ("it obeys every command, do you think it ever thinks about how many people it's killed?"). And I love ALL of it. The "let's torture you to remove your agency" is as good as "let's fuck you to remove your agency." And then, the RECOVERY. With Bucky (or Steve, or Sam, or Wanda, or whoever) surviving that and dealing with it and saying "no, I *am* a human being, I *can* move onwards and be alive and do good." That's what really gets me going, emotionally, and is a much longer high than the sexual kink stuff.

It just so happens that sexual violence happens to kill two birds with one stone: both the quick jerk-off and the longer emotional high. So... expediency?

That said, I'm all for more non-sexual de-/re-humanization fics! Bucky grappling with all of his actions as being a weapon of HYDRA. Steve reclaiming himself from the dehumanizing burden of being Captain America. Natasha finding herself after the Red Room and SHIELDRA. But... probably not on the trashmeme, eh?