hydratrashmeme | Dumpster #4: I Don't See How That's a Party

Okay, kids, you know the drill. Don't be a jerk except to fictional characters. Warn if you want, but read at your own risk, because

hydratrashmeme is about as far from a safe space as you can get. Garbage we like: noncon, whump, aftermath, violence, mind control, inappropriate uses of Bucky Barnes' metal arm, bad guys doing dirtybadwrong things to your faves. Garbage you should find a different trashcan for: a/b/o, D/s-verse, soulbonds, mundane AUs, OOC evil!good guys doing dirtybadwrong things to your faves, rotting leftovers dressed up as a romantic gourmet meal. Nothing wrong with 'em, but this isn't the crowd you should be pitching to if you're trying to sell Brock Rumlow as anything but a human dumpster fire.

Link your fills on the fill post, post unprompted fills as replies to a header comment so the wall o' text is collapsible, and let me know if you're interested in helping out with the Pinboard archive.

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All prompts or fills that contain Infinity War spoilers must go on the Infinity War spoiler post until May 26th. Spoilers in the main dumpsters will be deleted.

Round 4 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 5.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've seen a number of prompts where Hydra used psychological manipulation, planting Hydra operatives as fellow prisoners, gaslighting, drugging, etc. as part of the initial step of breaking Bucky down and turning him into the Winter Soldier. What if you took it to the logical extreme of using only psychological manipulation to remake Bucky?

This is blending comics and MCU a bit, but the Winter Soldier originally had a name: Aleksandr Krovopuskov. What if Hydra took advantage of the injured, weakened, and probably concussed state they found him in to carefully rewrite his identity? They wouldn't have to start from scratch. They would simply have to recast the people and places he knew with their Soviet analogs. Instead of Brooklyn, he grew up in Leningrad. His best friend Steve is now Stepan. He was a sniper in the Soviet Army, instead of the U.S. Army.

They could give him drugs to make him more suggestible, and surround him with carefully chosen operatives who would be kind and gentle and wish him a speedy recovery from that terrible fall that made him forget. They could even make a whole Soviet Kommandos team that would seem so familiar, so he'd believe everything they told him. They could tell him that Stepan died a hero, saving Mother Russia. They would tell him that he needed to get better so he could go back to being their best sniper - don't worry about your arm, we'll make you a new one. Perhaps in addition to the drugs, they did use electroshock treatments to muddle parts of his memory so they could rework them, dressing the treatment up as therapeutic.

When everyone around him is telling him that he is mis-remembering parts of his life, after a while he will start to believe them, especially when the lies they feed him are so close to the truth, and especially when the people telling the lies sound so concerned for his well-being. Bucky would have tried to resist torture, for a while, at least. He has no reason to resist care and compassion.

This method has the added advantage of being far more difficult to reverse. Assuming Hydra didn't later wipe him clean, the Winter Soldier would have a fully formed personal history. The Winter Soldier wouldn't have loose bits of memory of Steve ready to float up when Steve sees him in D.C. and says "Bucky?" He'd have fully formed memories of Stepan, his dead war hero best friend, whom he mourned and laid to rest years ago.

This scenario is, in some ways, scarier than torture, despite the lack of physical violence. Torture is fairly straightforward, and it can be resisted. This type of psychological manipulation is difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to resist. When an entire false reality has been constructed around Bucky for the sole purpose of turning him to Hydra's side, there is little he can do to save himself, and he may never trust his own mind again.

uh oh, I hope you like longfic

OP, here. I have the outline of a plan rattling around in my head, and it will be a long, long fic when I eventually get to it in the queue. I thought I'd put the concept up here to gauge interest and believability before I commit to writing a research-intensive monster of a fic. This is part of a much larger AU universe I'm working in that takes science and reality a lot more seriously but still manages to produce a Captain America and a Winter Soldier.

It turns out that with 1940's science a suspended animation process would be just barely possible, as long as the scientists didn't care too much about the long-term health, safety, or sanity of their test subjects. The Soviets actually were working on suspended animation in the 1940's, and they had some promising results in animal studies (see the Zombie Dog Experiment). I'm currently working on tackling realistic suspended animation for another fic, and the research for that has been a mix of fascinating and disturbing. That will eventually come into play here once the Winter Soldier has been created.

Mind control is another one of those topics that is popular in science fiction that a good dose of science could make even more terrifying than it already is. This is another area the Soviets actually were researching, and there are some allegations that they used Vietnam-era POWs as test subjects. Then there's the famous Patty Hearst case, where there is still debate over whether she was brainwashed, developed Stockholm Syndrome, or was acting of her own free will. The type and degree of mind control used on Bucky is also interesting because it makes the Winter Soldier a much more psychologically nuanced character? How much of the Soldier is Bucky? How much is what was added by Hydra? How much of Bucky did they have to remove? How much agency does he really have? How much awareness does he have of his own condition? Then you combine that with a really buggy suspended animation process where he doesn't stay unconscious the whole time, adding layers of psychological trauma on top of his already scrambled psyche, and you have a very dangerous, unstable assassin on your hands.

And that's enough 2am headcanon rambling for now.

If anyone else wants to do their own fill, by all means go ahead! The more the merrier. :-)

1. I'm really excited about this prompt, I hope you get to it.

2. Did you watch Agent Carter? Soviets controlling people through hypnosis is canon :D

Dumpster #4: I Don't See How That's a Party

Break Him Down Gently But No Less Cruelly

Re: Break Him Down Gently But No Less Cruelly

Re: Break Him Down Gently But No Less Cruelly

Re: Break Him Down Gently But No Less Cruelly