hydratrashmeme | Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Holy shitballs, look at us go. Welcome to Captain America fandom's resident wretched hive of scum and villainy: ROUND THREE. AKA Bad Guys Do Dirtybadwrong Things To Your Faves, AKA the Hydra Trash Party kinkmeme. As usual, BLANKET NON-CON AND NSFW WARNINGS apply: just assume going in that everything in this landfill is unfit for human consumption.

Rules in brief: don't be a jerk except to fictional characters, warnings for particularly fucked-up garbage are nice but not required, thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor's kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two, off-topic comments may be chucked out of the dumpster at management's discretion, management's discretion decrees that omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, and dark!good guys AUs are off-topic.

[Round 1] [Round 2] [Fill post] [Chatter post] [hydratrashmeme Pinboard archive (maintained by

greenkirtle)] [Round 3 in flat view (comments in non-threaded chronological order, most recent last)]

Round 3 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 4.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

All of this. Also, on another note, if the reasoning is: less recovery prompts will make sure there are more "real" prompts, or fills...I'm not sure that is what will actually happen.

I can only speak for myself, but Steve trash is my jam, and I've all but stopped posting prompts because they just got hijacked by people trying to turn it into a circle-jerk about how Steve getting raped would "affect Bucky's recovery." I know I'd be a lot more comfortable participating here if that shit were less out of control.

(da) That sounds really frustrating, but isn't a blanket condemnation of a popular trope too big a missile to aim at the problem of prompt hijacking? Especially since the Word of Mod on several other occasions has been that the best response to hijacking is to tell the hijackers to go make their subthread its own prompt. Besides, I'm not sure telling people "stop posting recovery prompts, except you can still post them, but not very many, maybe only post your Number One Best Aftermath Idea" would actually solve your problem, which goes back to the problem of practical ways to stem the tide without driving out readers and writers who, like me, primarily kink on rape aftermath.

DA

Yeah, agreed. I love the variety of stuff prompted, discussed, and written here and tbh think it's perfect the way it is, although I realize I'm biased as more of an aftermath nonny. But I think it would be good to have more of a hard line on prompt hijacking.

DA

@ recovery trash: I don't see the line here, either. Especially since lot of recovery prompts have very vivid flashback, so... *scratches head* Dear mod, please clarify!

@ prompt hijacking: I think what makes the meme so lively is that people prompt something and other people join in, "aahh"-ing and "ooh"-ing, but also developing ideas further, almost like mini fills sometimes. And if the OP doesn't like where it is going (I've been there myself) nudging people to make their own prompt is usually received very well. So no qualms, just do it!

DA

I'm the OP of the recent 1930s rape prompt whose thread is practically a fill in itself and tbh I'm so delighted with that 'hijacking' I can't express it. So I'm totally with you on loving the inventive and energetic discussions that can thrive here, and I hope any harder line on prompt hijacking would still protect people's freedom to participate in our conversation culture. I've never had a problem with redirecting the suggestions on a prompt of mine away from angles I don't like, but if several people are having trouble with that then the rule should be opened to discussion. Spitballing: maybe discouraging/outlawing comments that wildly deviate from the prompt, like 'what if this was Pairing X instead' or 'ohhh but imagine if the focus were on Character Y'?

NA

The line seems pretty clear to me. The original dumpster said "is it violent sex or sexy violence?" not "let's talk about Bucky's eating disorder and Sam Wilson's tertiary trauma for 200k words." To be clear, I love talking about Bucky's eating disorder... but it's a far cry from violent sex and I don't think it belongs here, especially in such amounts.

Okay, but if you go by strictly that, then the majority of fills here don't qualify (and never have) including some of the best stories on here.

Even some of the actual rape fics are not violent.

DNA

I do think that, a year and three dumpsters on from the beginning of the trash party, it's pretty natural that the genre is changing from where it started. Of course we're not all still writing elevator gangbangs. We did that! We did that a year ago. The meme goes through different phases and interests and keeps changing, which is why we're all still here a year later instead of getting stun baton gangbangs out of our collective system and moving on. One week it's all milk prompts, another week it's all hydra husbands. Right now recovery is big, but a) the pendulum will swing in some other direction after a while, and b) with all due respect to the mod, I think it's a lot more productive to post prompts you like than it is to tell people to stop (or even more unhelpfully vaguely, slow down) prompting what they're interested in.

Agreed. Variety is the spice of life. If there weren't a huge diversity of topics allowed here, we would all have gotten bored and this place would be dead. Probably all the trash regulars have survived meme phases they didn't like (I can think of like four off the top of my head that really grossed me out), but just having people here, feeding their enthusiasm into the environment, that draws writers, and writers draw traffic, which draws writers, and so even if you don't like the current phase letting the energy run does everyone good in the end. It's a trash economy.

(da) Okay, here's where I kind of agree with you and kind of don't. Let's take your eating disorder example. If someone prompts Bucky having an eating disorder for some non-trash reason -- oh, he was fed through a tube for seventy years, now his stomach's fucked up, alas -- then it's obvious that's off topic. I could find or prompt that fic anywhere in fandom. But what if his eating disorder is the direct result of rape? Look at the trash masterpiece Situation Normal, where food was used in his sexual torture. Or the recent eating disorder prompt where Bucky has issues with certain foods because the textures, taste, or appearance remind him of being raped. Are these somehow inappropriate fare for the meme now?

What's in question is whether the fucked up shit that happens as a direct result of rape falls under the sexual-violence-and-violent-sex umbrella. To me, that's a clear yes, it does. For one thing, rape and rape aftermath are just two facets of the same kink; rape aftermath fic is still focused -- often intensely, erotically, and with gusto -- on rape, whose presence is not lessened even if there isn't an explicit rape scene. The HTP has been churning out rape aftermath prompts and fills since its inception -- this is a time-honored meme tradition, and it zooms in on rape trauma in a way that your typical Winter Soldier recovery fic absolutely will not.

If what the mod wants is to crack down on prompts where sexual violence truly is a negligible fringe element, then please, I'm all for that. I also don't come here for shit about Bucky learning to put on socks again. But I'm sad, worried about the implied threat to prompts that do focus on rape -- just, apparently, the wrong part of rape, the fallout. Those prompts are part of the vibrancy, creativity, variety, sexiness, and nightmare trash kinkiness that make this meme so great. I echo sentiments that if you discourage creative thought in that direction, you won't get that energy redirected toward acceptable rapefic, which apparently means the centerpiece has to be a rape scene -- you just won't get that energy at all.

These are all excellent considerations, anon, and the variety of ways HTP and aftermath fic are deeply intertwined is the reason there is no definitive, categorical line in the sand. It would be impossible to draw one at all without being grossly unfair. Instead, I'm asking you guys to exercise your judgement and be more judicious with the recovery prompts--to pay attention to what they're actually focused on, to various anons' points about what makes aftermath trash on-topic, to the wider climate of the meme and whether you're prompt-spamming or helping drown out all the other subgenres that give HTP its vibrancy.

This is a tricky thing to mod, because kosher/unkosher distinctions are really not what it's about; handing them down by fiat would be the suckiest, most ham-handed way to address collective topic drift. Hence trying to do it with a heads-up and a nudge in the general direction of on-topic. If most active trashmemers try to be mindful about not helping dubiously-relevant recovery prompts overrun the dumpster like meth-fueled mutant kudzu, the details of where any one person draws the line are beside the point.

Hey, thanks for replying. I understand your concerns, and I get what you're trying to do here. However, I think maybe you don't get how anxiety-inducing this kind of vague, ominous warning from on high is. Right now I don't feel comfortable posting anything aftermath-related at all (and I don't think I'm alone, judging from a few other comments I've seen on prompt threads) and, to be honest, rhetoric like "you can't post the prompts you like without killing other, more worthy prompts" also makes me feel very unwelcome in a meme I've been participating in since the beginning. Various anons have been hashing out what makes a recovery prompt on topic, but could you please clarify that for us, in your own words, so I feel like I can post prompts here again?

AYRT

I really love the prompt hijacking/discussion threads where people are kind of making up their own story. But I can see A AIRT RT's frustration when there are a lot of nonnies who really enjoy a different type of fic, turning their prompt into that type of fic, and personally as a shy person I would find it hard to be like "stop talking about Bucky's recovery in my Steve rape thread!" And if people were careful about not hijacking then maybe people like me who want to read everything can flatmeme, and people who only want to read certain things could read the threads on that subject, and everything would work out that way...except, like I said, I love the discussions and so do you apparently so that's tough...I'm glad I'm not a mod, solving problems is hard!

AYRT

It's not really about the hijacking, though. Having a prompt derailed with an unwanted plot suggestion is an annoyance. Having a prompt outright invalidated with a suggestion that the really interesting thing about Steve trash is whether his rape trauma might hurt the feelings of a character who wasn't even mentioned in the prompt? That's a symptom. A nasty one.

I'm generally a fan of the trashmeme's comment culture and the back-and-forth elaboration on prompts. But the trashmeme's growing culture of "everyone else is an accessory for Bucky's pain, and the validity of their experiences is derived from how they might ~affect his recovery~" is alienating as fuck. Mod intervention is not the only thing capable of chilling effects on the meme's variety and creativity.

Yeah, it is a symptom. Of rudeness, and also of people liking something you don't like. I get it! I never liked childlike or robotic Bucky, and for a while that was all there was to read, and sometimes people still comment on my prompts like "Oh! Imagine robotic Bucky's reaction to so-and-so!" At which point I gently shoo them away, rather than trying to burn down their sandbox. I have all the sympathy for your irritation with people not respecting the spirit of your prompt, but I disagree that sweeping systemic cultural changes would solve your problem without unfairly sweeping out a lot of partygoers with it.

Hi, I think I've seen a few of your prompts and totally shared your frustration at hijacking (I've seen other cases of hijacking too, with people requesting other pairings than requested etc).

My issue with this is: they're not actually prompts. They're reactions to prompts. And that's not what the mod is even suggesting in toning down.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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