Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[trashmod]

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.

Comments

Re: "Recovery" prompts

[trashmod]

Okay, more detail.

First: solidly trash-centric aftermath prompts are still perfectly welcome. Breathe, guys. If HTP is the topic and everything else derived from it is only as on-topic as its proximity to the original premise, that puts pretty much all of the classic aftermath trash squarely on-topic.

Second: the increasingly off-topic drift of the recovery prompts, the months-long escalation to a wildly disproportionate volume of the trashmeme activity, and the omnipresence of woobified-Bucky tropes in non-HTP fandom all seem like manifestations of the same underlying thing. I'd hoped that waving my arms in the general direction of the thing and going "guys, not our actual destination, can we get this trashfleet straggling back on course in the general direction of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?" would be enough of a heads-up without unduly constraining anyone's wanderings, but whoops, translating community norms into rules and policies is hard. So here's an attempt to address them separately.

- "Would this prompt still work if you took the trash out of Bucky's trash past?"/"How hard would it be to adapt this into regular non-HTP-flavor recovery fic?" is a good rule of thumb, and yes, mod intends to take a stricter approach to edge cases in the future. Keep the garbage nice and pungent, folks.

- Nothing is going to get frozen or mod-warned over the proportion thing. Being considerate is encouraged, though, and "if well over half the most recent page consists of minor riffs on the same theme as your prompt, maybe ask yourself how much it adds, or how bad you need to post it right this second" is a good thing to keep in mind--across the board, for all tropes. There's always room for the answer to be "yes, I DO want it that badly," after all.

- The reason woobie recovery fic gets a mod nudge where other tropes that temporarily took over the meme didn't (infantilization, lactation, gaping assholes, etc.) is because the mod is worried about its potential to permanently disrupt the dumpster ecosystem, which is otherwise pretty self-regulating. Not because the mod has it in for aftermath/recovery as a genre. You're free to think that worry is off-base, but going by the months-long escalation on the trashmeme and woobiefication tropes' track records in other fan spaces, there's ample reason to doubt it would get any less out-of-control on its own.

Lastly: Believe it or not, much of the ambiguity in this thread has been a desperate effort to avoid anything that could turn moderately-trashy aftermath/recovery--a staple of the trashmeme--into a bystander casualty of the attempt to rein in the influx of dubiously-trashy woobie recovery porn. Unfortunately, drawing a big bright "this is unequivocally okay" line through a gray area also creates massive temptation for any dissatisfied (or just contrarian) parties to see how far it can be pushed. The benefit of reassuring nervous anons has to be balanced against the risk of setting off a war of attrition right on those anons' home turf, and predictably, the results have been a mess.

Re: "Recovery" prompts

[(Anonymous)]

So, in short: "Do as you were doing, but make sure your recovery prompts are trashy enough to be good dumpster fare"?

Mod, that's reasonable. Thanks for coming back to explain. I know my own worries about aftermath trash's standing in the dumpster would have been nonexistent if this had been plainly stated from the start.

Re: "Recovery" prompts

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for the clarification, Trashmod!

Re: "Recovery" prompts

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for clarifying everything!