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I really love the Dumpster, you guys
So, uh, if you read my journal here, you... may have noticed that I have slid into a corner of Captain America fandom known as the Hydra Trash Party. In case you have not worked out what that phrase signifies, here is the fanlore article for the Hydra Trash Party. (I wrote that! I am weirdly, intensely proud of it.)
We've gone ten rounds of "non-con fic is awful and no one should write it" wank over on Tumblr lately--there is always going to be one more outraged person on Tumblr tagging their outrage for trash partiers to find and argue with--but in the last 24 hours I've been really, really feeling my love for the Dumpster and all my trashmates.
So for me the trash party is a throwback to a part of fandom that I never really participated in during its heyday: the mostly anonymous Dreamwidth-based kinkmeme. The hydratrashmeme is juuust busy enough to make me feel engaged without being totally overwhelming (and the things that are not relevant to my interests generally have nice, descriptive subject lines so I can delete the notifications unread/scroll quickly past them). I've written a couple of things to prompts and am following some awful/wonderful WIPs and generally, you know, enjoying the whole anon/kinkmeme experience for the first time in 2015.
So last night a prompt got posted for a scenario where Bucky was sexually abused by various Hydra personnel over the years, and recordings of those abuses went out in Natasha's Hydra Data Dump, and consequently there is now all this horrible footage of Bucky out on the internet: it's a scaldingly awful scenario to contemplate, and my first reaction to it was NO NO NO DID NOT HAPPEN DO NOT WANT.
But then I watched the comments start flowing in as people speculated about how this would play out--the ways Steve would try to protect Bucky, but also the ways this would hinder Bucky's recovery, the shame he would feel in this exposure repeating his trauma again and again, and so on. By the time I went to bed last night it was just a dark well of infinite suffering.
And then this morning, the collective speculation about the scenario continued--but it hit an inflection point, and various anons started talking about how Bucky would push through even this and recover, would reclaim his own agency, would identify himself without shame as a survivor and bear up fiercely under the scrutiny, not only for his own sake but for the sake of every other survivor shamed for the ordeal they'd been put through, and this vortex of suffering turned into a thousand possible triumphs for Bucky. It just made me so happy to watch all of these anonymous trash partiers decide to turn that corner and find a way for Bucky to overcome even the most miserable of compounded traumas, just because none of us could bear to leave him at the bottom of that well.
It felt like a whole microcosm of fandom, the way we tell stories to each other, try out different possibilities, arrive sometimes at a consensus about the kinds of stories we want and then tell them out and elaborate them, all gathering together around a character or a pairing or a trope or a single prompt.
So, yes. I really love the Dumpster, you guys. I really love my fandom and my people, both narrowly and broadly construed. And I really really love anyone who actually clicked through and read all of that.
PS, tonight Tumblr led me unto the Internet Archive's collection of every episode of The Joy of Painting, in case you need some soothing palate-cleanser and/or a kindly affirmation that you can do whatevvvvver you want with the fictional worlds you create.
(Bucky cries a lot in mine, that's just how I like things to be. Maybe in yours he's happy and eats pizza and has a lot of happy sex with the partner or partners of his choosing! Everybody gets to make their own world. Thanks, Bob Ross.)
We've gone ten rounds of "non-con fic is awful and no one should write it" wank over on Tumblr lately--there is always going to be one more outraged person on Tumblr tagging their outrage for trash partiers to find and argue with--but in the last 24 hours I've been really, really feeling my love for the Dumpster and all my trashmates.
So for me the trash party is a throwback to a part of fandom that I never really participated in during its heyday: the mostly anonymous Dreamwidth-based kinkmeme. The hydratrashmeme is juuust busy enough to make me feel engaged without being totally overwhelming (and the things that are not relevant to my interests generally have nice, descriptive subject lines so I can delete the notifications unread/scroll quickly past them). I've written a couple of things to prompts and am following some awful/wonderful WIPs and generally, you know, enjoying the whole anon/kinkmeme experience for the first time in 2015.
So last night a prompt got posted for a scenario where Bucky was sexually abused by various Hydra personnel over the years, and recordings of those abuses went out in Natasha's Hydra Data Dump, and consequently there is now all this horrible footage of Bucky out on the internet: it's a scaldingly awful scenario to contemplate, and my first reaction to it was NO NO NO DID NOT HAPPEN DO NOT WANT.
But then I watched the comments start flowing in as people speculated about how this would play out--the ways Steve would try to protect Bucky, but also the ways this would hinder Bucky's recovery, the shame he would feel in this exposure repeating his trauma again and again, and so on. By the time I went to bed last night it was just a dark well of infinite suffering.
And then this morning, the collective speculation about the scenario continued--but it hit an inflection point, and various anons started talking about how Bucky would push through even this and recover, would reclaim his own agency, would identify himself without shame as a survivor and bear up fiercely under the scrutiny, not only for his own sake but for the sake of every other survivor shamed for the ordeal they'd been put through, and this vortex of suffering turned into a thousand possible triumphs for Bucky. It just made me so happy to watch all of these anonymous trash partiers decide to turn that corner and find a way for Bucky to overcome even the most miserable of compounded traumas, just because none of us could bear to leave him at the bottom of that well.
It felt like a whole microcosm of fandom, the way we tell stories to each other, try out different possibilities, arrive sometimes at a consensus about the kinds of stories we want and then tell them out and elaborate them, all gathering together around a character or a pairing or a trope or a single prompt.
So, yes. I really love the Dumpster, you guys. I really love my fandom and my people, both narrowly and broadly construed. And I really really love anyone who actually clicked through and read all of that.
PS, tonight Tumblr led me unto the Internet Archive's collection of every episode of The Joy of Painting, in case you need some soothing palate-cleanser and/or a kindly affirmation that you can do whatevvvvver you want with the fictional worlds you create.
(Bucky cries a lot in mine, that's just how I like things to be. Maybe in yours he's happy and eats pizza and has a lot of happy sex with the partner or partners of his choosing! Everybody gets to make their own world. Thanks, Bob Ross.)
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I love the Dumpster. I lurk, but I lurk there with love.
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I have definitely done my share of lurking in various corners of fandom! The Dumpster has plenty of room for all.
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That is...honestly awesome. Thank you for writing this post! This is a corner of fandom about which I know very little, and yet you've found a way to make it relatable for me.
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(But, omg, I would feel so bad for the characters! I read some H/C, but only sporadically and with authors I generally trust).
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I love how fandom is indeed so very awesome. Thank you for bringing up this iteration of it!
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I really hope that image is in the story someone wrote for the prompt (it looks like a lovely story but at 11.5K I haven;t read it yet.)
I
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It does get dark before it gets better, but it gets better, too.
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Then again, I'm one of the fen who falls into the "we have had this wank before, and I was tired of it then" camp. Kids get offa my noncon lawn! (I've been cracking up lately at the "how was fandom/fic different Back In The Day?" post circulating on Tumblr, too, because yep. Been there for and done most of that!)
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Some of them have comfort?
Re: Some of them have comfort?
(There is a little bit of a subgenre--I'm not sure to what extent it exists in finished fics vs. people talking about things they want in it--called "Bucky's Broken Dick" that is all about sexual dysfunctions/difficulties Bucky has following Trash Party abuses, and how he (and Steve, usually) cope with them.)
Re: Some of them have comfort?
Re: Some of them have comfort?
Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life is a post-HYDRA Bucky who is convinced that he is going to be executed but is enjoying being treated kindly in the meantime. It's... a bit harrowing, but... probably hopeful on balance?
Re: Some of them have comfort?
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I want to read about a Bucky who is really messed up by his time in HYDRA and it seems like the default way to portray Bucky's damage in fandom is an intensely passive reaction to trauma, (which is obviously possible.) But I have encountered a wide variety of human fucked-up and I've got to tell you , people respond to trauma in every single way and generally poorly. And the place to find a really fucked up Bucky is often in the dumpster.
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Yeah, I think my favorite thing in this whole fandom is actually trash party recovery, especially the "Bucky has non-standard sexual needs due to trash party trauma and Steve does his best to supply them" variety. And I think in a fandom that didn't give the trash party its own name and consider it all to belong in the dumpster we would just be calling that "hurt/comfort with rape recovery" which would be a totally mainstream and reasonably acceptable thing depending on the degree of Magical Healing Cock. (This also reminds me of the conversation I was having with some trash partiers the other night where people were talking about how much they prefer "competent but weird" Bucky to "sad helpless" Bucky.)
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PS I am keeping this in my memories and rereading it the next time people wank about the HTP (and the next and the next and the next...)
PPS Your article is clear, concise, and excellent. Well done, promulgator of knowledge!
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Thank you! I'm glad if this proves helpful to you. :)
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Over the years it absolutely has.