Episode 194: The Pain Fandom
In Episode 194, “The Pain Fandom,” Flourish and Elizabeth are joined by journalist Maria Temming to discuss her recent article on whump, hurt/comfort, and fandom communities centered around fictional characters in pain. Topics discussed include the history of whump and its place in modern fandom, the overlap (and divergence) between broader fandom interest in h/c and self-declared whumpers, and why the lack of “comfort” in much of our violent media means some see whump as an inherently anti-violent subgenre.
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:05] Read Maria’s article before you listen!!
[00:02:43] Our interstitial music throughout is “Where was I” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:10:30] That’s MulderTorture Anonymous.
[00:12:18] Pleased to learn that “#he’s a fine looking man!! #would love to see him in a fit of despair” appears to have been originated by a whumper.
[00:16:05] The survey Maria’s referring to.
[00:17:34] We talked about our personal interest in hurt/comfort in our Patrons-only Tropefest series!
[00:24:14] Laura Miller was the critic who (accurately, in our opinion!) described A Little Life as hurt/comfort in her review of Hanya Yanagihara’s most recent novel.
[00:25:02] That’s “Poe Dameron Hurts So Prettily: How Fandom Negotiates with Transmedia Characterization” by Chera Kee.
[00:28:29]
[00:33:06] Flourish is talking about the arguments from Camille Bacon-Smith’s 1991 book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth.
[00:34:10] A history of whump meta by haich-slash-cee.
[00:46:30] Elizabeth’s article on Mary Sues.
[00:50:54] That’s “Neurophysiology of Whump: A Research Proposal” by S.E. Klein.
[00:51:58] [x]
[00:57:02]
[00:58:53] What’s that? I suppose we have to share this again…
[01:03:38] If you’re interested in making a one-off donation—large or small!—to help us commission more journalism, here’s the link. Or, of course, you can pledge to our Patreon on a recurring basis (and get many special rewards in return!).
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #194, “The Pain Fandom.”
FK: [laughs] No, we are not talking about masochism.
ELM: [laughs] I like how you went there immediately. It could be about masochism, it could be about masochism.
FK: It…it could be, but it…well…it’s about whump.
ELM: [laughs] OK, so, we are going to be joined by journalist Maria Temming, who also happens to be one of our transcriptionists, but she’s not coming on [FK hoots, ELM laughs] in that capacity.
FK: No.
ELM: She’s coming on because as you may have seen if you follow us on social media, we just posted the article, she wrote us a long, in-depth reported piece about whump, which we should probably just quickly define. Give a little TL;DR.
FK: Uh…how to define whump…
ELM: OK, maybe I’ll define it.
FK: Stories… [ELM laughs] Fanfic…about…characters getting hurt. A lot. Often physically. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Someone needs to read the, read the article. [laughs] Right. So, whump is an old term that’s had a resurgence in popularity recently, and it’s a group of people…whumpers are united by their interest in hurt/comfort or hurt/no comfort, right? And it’s not just fanfiction, people like to post gifsets of characters, you know…nursing their bruises and tag that whump. That kind of thing.
FK: Sure. Sure, right.
ELM: And I think there’s some stigma towards whump, even though hurt/comfort is one of, by far, one of the most popular tropes in fanfiction fandom. So I’ve always found it very interesting.
FK: Yeah, and it’s definitely an interesting, uh…it’s like its own community within fandom. Doin’ its own thing, in a way that’s kinda different than any other group of people that I know about. So I’m really excited to hear about all of this from Maria, because I have never really dived that deep into the land of whump.
ELM: And she dove so deeply! She talked to a ton [both laugh] a ton of whumpers, and it’s a great piece. I would actually recommend reading it first, before you listen to this conversation, this is meant to be a bit of a supplement. You can find that on Fansplaining.com/articles.
FK: All right, well in that case, shall we take a break and call Maria?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, I think it’s time to welcome Maria to the podcast! Welcome!
Maria Temming: Hi, thank you so much for having me!
ELM: Thank you for coming on, thank you for writing this article, which is wonderful.
MT: Yeah, of course!
ELM: OK, so we’re here to talk about the article, we’re here to talk about your research.
MT: Yes.
ELM: I would like to know why you pitched this article, this topic, in the first place.
MT: Yeah, so, I guess the most important context is that I’ve always read a lot of hurt/comfort fiction. My first introduction into fandom was finding h/c Marauders fic when I was like, 12 years old on Fanfiction.net or whatever. [FK laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] OK wait wait wait, who, who would get hurt, and who would get comforted in your faves?
MT: Uh, Remus, I feel like was the most natural option, and then comforting, the other characters, yeah yeah.
ELM: Yeah. Yeah, OK.
FK: Absolutely. No no no, Remus is definitely the one who gets hurt, [MT laughs] you’re like, “This is correct.”
MT: I was gonna say, I feel like Elizabeth might say the opposite. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve obviously read a bazillion stories that are like that, but I would, I’ve never thought of them as hurt/comfort, I don’t know if I even knew that term when I was back in that fandom, so. [FK and MT laugh] That’s funny.
MT: Yeah, and I remember finding those stories, and being like, “Oh, finally, here are the characters taking care of each other, the way that I wanted them to in canon.”
FK: Aww…
MT: And a lot of those stories were either under “angst” or “hurt/comfort,” and so those stories were kind of my inroads into fandom more broadly. But when I found AO3 in college, that was a game-changer because you can search specifically by tag across fandoms, right, and so I started reading, you know, for fandoms that I had never heard of, or was only tangentially familiar with, but you can find specific tropes or story forms that you’re interested in across fandoms.
FK: I just have to say, I am delighted to hear you talking about this, because this is a way of dealing with the AO3 that is so much not something that I do, and makes me happy whenever I hear people be like, “I do this thing!” and I’m like, “I…!” [MT laughs]
ELM: You’re like, “Change the topic of the episode.” Now we just have 100 questions about reading by trope [FK and MT laugh] agnostic of fandom. [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] I kind of do! But we’re gonna put them aside, I just wanted to express that that’s really cool. [all laugh]
MT: Yeah, yes, yeah yeah yeah. And so, I’ve read like, a fair amount of hurt/comfort, and angst, sort of like, tropes in that whumpy constellation for a lot of my fandom history. But I didn’t really know that anybody else was doing this, particularly with the hurt/comfort-style tropes, until I stumbled across this whump community on Tumblr, a few years ago at this point, and so was interested in that sort of trope-first or genre approach to fandom just in general, because that’s how I had generally treated a lot of my fandom history.
And then also particularly for this kind of like…pain-centric element of fanfiction, because I think that that’s something that…it’s an element of fandom that if you even try to describe that genre of fanworks to people outside of fandom, totally cold, it sounds a little crazy. Um… [FK laughs] Or, you know?
So, I was interested in, OK, what is it that unites this group of fans, how did this pan-fandom community come together of people who are interested in this particular genre of fanfiction? How is this fan community behaving? Both to better understand the community itself, and to understand my own fanfiction fandom experiences better. So yeah, so I guess that’s how I had gotten interested in it.
ELM: OK, so, for people who haven’t read the article yet, maybe we, do we wanna define whump?
MT: Yeah.
ELM: There’s gonna be a little bit—if you have read the article, I think it’s gonna be a little bit of retreading of ground, but I think it’d be useful to kinda lay that out.
MT: Yeah, and I think, so disclaimer, whatever I say, someone—many people are going to disagree with it, because whump is something that the definition has evolved over time, and it really varies from person to person.
But generally speaking, whump is either an element of a story or the story itself, where the sort of main focal point is the pain and often recovery of a character. And so the way that I sort of think about it is like, an analogy to romance, where like, you can have, in a scene of a movie or a TV show, a romantic scene. Or you can have a romantic subplot, or a romantic dynamic between characters. Or, in fanfiction, you can have 5,000 words devoted to just romance between characters, or you can have a whole, you know, romantic fanfiction.
Whump is kind of the same thing, like you can see a whumpy scene in mainstream media, or you can see a whumpy dynamic between characters or a whumpy plotline, but also you can have whump fanfiction that’s focused on kind of the pain and recovery of characters, whether it’s a oneshot or, you know, an epic longfic. And also, more recently, there’s been a large contingent of the whump community that’s interested in writing those sorts of pain-centric scenes and plotlines for original characters that they’ve created.
So in the broadest terms, whump is kind of hurt-centric fiction, or elements of fiction, and whether or not you include hurt/no comfort or whether you include hurt/comfort in that definition just kinda varies between people.
FK: So does that usually mean like, it’s physical pain only? Or is it also, like, being tortured emotionally? [all laugh] Or mentally, right? I mean what are we, because I guess when I think about whump I think about the most classic, like, physical stuff.
MT: Totally.
FK: But I don’t know, what you were just describing sounds like it could be broader than that.
MT: Yeah, I think that there are…I’ve certainly seen, there are whole tags in the whump corner of Tumblr that discuss just definition, you know, what is whump? And some people will say it really needs to be this more like, physical kind of injury, torture, kidnap, you know, characters getting beaten up, that sort of thing. And then other people saying, “No, it can be defined in these broader terms.”
I’ve almost seen it both ways, or I’ve seen both people who claim to be older fans saying that whump used to be synonymous with hurt/comfort, and it’s since changed, but I’ve also seen particularly on Fanlore, older definitions of whump being very physical-pain-centric. So I really think it’s one of those squishy fandom things where, depending on what fandom you came into, you know, where in the timeline and where in the sort of fandom landscape your origin is, that sort of shapes your perception of it, and people still very much disagree about what should be included.
FK: Right, and whether you even use the term whump, right? Also.
MT: Yeah. Yeah, totally. But I have seen people in the whump community on Tumblr who are more…like, emotional h/c or psychological h/c. So there are those people out there. But particularly if you’re on fandom-centric whump, as opposed to like, original fiction whump, on Tumblr, you’re seeing a lot of gifs, and the most visceral whump gifs are gonna be characters getting physically beaten up, right, or in hospital recovering, or, you know, sometimes there are gifs of people breaking down in tears in each other’s arms, that sort of thing, but if you’re looking at visual forms of whump, oftentimes it’s physical just because that’s the nature of what’s being presented on screen.
ELM: You know, this is interesting, it’s partly my perception having edited the article, but it seems like historically, a lot of it has been centered around specific characters. The, like, torture of which perhaps was coming from…an interest of the writers of the shows, for example, like the example of Mulder, right, or—
FK: [laughs] The man who gets beat up more than anyone on television. [FK and ELM laugh]
MT: I am still truly shocked at the… because I knew, conceptually from reporting the article, that MulderTorture Anonymous was a thing people have written a lot of—but looking through the screengrabs of the show looking for art to accompany this story, I was like, “Oh my God, why doesn’t this man quit his job?” [all laugh]
FK: So true!
MT: He’s in the hospital every other episode! I was shocked!
FK: Maria, it’s because he likes it. It’s because he is fundamentally a masochist and he loves it! This is my, this is my headcanon, and it’s true.
ELM: Well, but this is like, this is my question. I guess the original, in Star Trek, it was about Spock, right?
MT: Yeah, I’ve seen it both ways, but…
ELM: He was the more popular whumpee, the get ’em…
FK: Well, they had get ’em Kirk also.
MT: I’ve also seen a lot of Kirk whump for the most recent movie series.
ELM: OK, but I’m talking, like, the 70s here.
MT: The OGs, yeah yeah yeah. Someone should definitely correct me from the whump community on this, but I’ve, most art that I’ve seen has been Spock whump. So, yes.
ELM: Right. So, yeah, I guess I’m just, I’m kinda looking at these historical elements and saying, you know, there seems to be a shift that’s happened over time from like, oh, maybe some people were drawn to The X-Files, and drawn to X-Files fanworks, because they loved seeing Fox Mulder in a hospital bed, right? Like, they, the writers of the show and the writers in the fandom all shared that, right, you know? As opposed to—
FK: [laughs] They did! Truly you could not love The X-Files without loving [MT laughs] seeing Mulder get just beaten up. Yeah, he is a beautiful man, and he gets beautifully beaten up. [laughs]
ELM: Wait, what’s that Tumblr post, that’s like, “That’s a fine-looking man, I’d love to see him in a fit of despair.” Do you know those posts? [laughs]
MT: Yes! Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] It’s so, and it’s so true! It’s so true.
MT: [overlapping] Yes.
FK: I’m sorry, I’m just bringing my Mulder feelings into this, but like…
MT: No, yeah yeah yeah yeah.
FK: I’m pullin’ it back. [FK and MT laugh]
ELM: [overlapping] All right, all right, so… You know, that’s, that seems a little bit chicken-and-egg, right, as opposed to a self-identified community that’s using it as a lens, right, and it’s not necessarily, and now you’re talking about this shift into original writing as well. Do you have a good sense of that kind of shift, is that, does that track with what you have researched?
MT: Yeah, I think…hmm. It’s hard to say, because part of this story is kind of the shifting in platforms of…originally there were sort of these fandom-specific communities, like MulderTorture Anonymous, or listservs, or fandom communities that were into Danny whumping for Stargate SG-1, and a couple of the fans that I spoke to who were around for those sorts of older fandom communities where it might look like you’re only into MulderTorture Anonymous because you really like seeing Mulder specifically in those sort of perilous situations, saying, “No, I was interested in whump more generally, it’s just that that was…the campsites of fandom that were around were fandom-specific. So you know, I could’ve been whumping…I don’t know, insert x other character here, and I would’ve been just as happy, but there was this X-Files community because there was already an X-Files fandom for that specific media property, so that’s where I was going to do that.”
ELM: Gotcha.
MT: I think it’s hard to say how much there’s been an actual shift in people going from character- or fandom-specific whump to whump more broadly, or whether that’s just because there are now pan-fandom platforms like Tumblr or Discord, where you can find other people regardless of fandoms and have that sort of multi-fandom communal space where you actually talk about this sort of thing.
ELM: That’s really interesting, and you know, thinking about the self-definition thing, too, one of the things that you and I went back and forth on a bit in the editing process was the synonymousness with… synonymousness? Is that a word?
MT: Synonymity? I don’t know…
ELM: [almost simultaneous] Synonymity? [all laugh]
FK: I don’t know either.
ELM: All right, one of those is probably right, maybe there’s a third word we don’t know.
FK: [overlapping] Synonymousness. Synonymousness. Sy—synony—
ELM: [overlapping] All right. This is not a convincing facial expression, so. [FK and MT laugh] Um, you know, the equating, having whump and hurt/comfort as synonymous, right, you know?
MT: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: And I was like, “Hey hey hey hey hey. I think a lot of people like hurt/comfort and they either have never heard of whump, or they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s weird.’” And you know, I think that as we went back and forth, I think you really finessed the distinctions, but I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, because I stand by my assertion that a lot of people like that trope but would never consider themselves, whether they actively know what whump is or not, would not self-identify that way.
MT: Yeah, and I totally understand that, in that like, I’ve been a hurt/comfort junkie for most of my fic-reading experience, right, but when I found the whump community, I didn’t join the whump community, I wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ve found my people.” And I think that part of that was because, again, it’s like a lot of physical, visible whump, particularly for the gifsets, or you know, sort of, like, elements of that sort of, the hurt/no comfort version of whump, which I’m not interested in.
And I’ve talked to a fair number of people in the whump community now who say, “That’s not all we are, we’re interested in hurt/comfort,” and in fact I was looking back at the survey results for the Renée Nielsen survey where they looked at about 800 whumpers in the whump community, and 75% of them said that they preferred hurt/comfort, that variety of whump, and only about 12% said that they preferred hurt/no comfort, and then there’s some people in the middle who say they have no preference.
But I do think, particularly when you’re looking at prompts on Tumblr for whump, there’s a lot of, again, that sort of physical hurt element, which might turn people off to it if they’re particularly interested in the hurt/comfort. One question that I had in my reporting that I never sort of completely resolved is what fraction of the enormous number of people out there who are interested in hurt/comfort, who have read hurt/comfort, who like it or who have written hurt/comfort, are interested in just that element of the story? As opposed to like, what fraction of people out there are whumpers and they don’t know it, because they don’t know about the community, and they don’t know how broad and inclusive it is of various levels of hurt and comfort interests?
So I do sort of agree with, I think it was Envy who said this in the piece, where I do think there are probably a fair number of people out there who are interested in hurt/comfort, who might find the whump community and find like-minded people there, who aren’t currently part of that community. But I genuinely have no concept of how…of like, what piece of the pie of hurt/comfort users on Archive of Our Own that would be.
FK: Yeah, I was really wondering that too, because it, you know, as I was reading the piece, I was thinking, I really like hurt/comfort, and I’ve been in a fandom that was, I went to MulderTorture sometimes, I knew that that was a thing, but I really don’t think of myself as a whumper, and reading about the community I was like, “That isn’t me.” And I was like, “Why isn’t it me?” And I don’t actually have an answer to that entirely, it just doesn’t feel like a fit, and I’m not sure why.
MT: Part of it might also be, people in the whump community talk about having really liked this from a young age, and liked it particularly. This was almost kind of a universal experience, where if I asked people, “How long have you liked whump?” people were listing Disney movies, they were listing comics that they read as kids, so things from almost kind of their earliest memories of reading and enjoying fiction, liking those sorts of scenes where a character is in peril and another character takes care of them. And having that sort of…also visceral reaction to whump, the whumperflies, [FK and ELM laugh] and like…
FK: A wonderful term. [ELM laughs]
MT: Yes, love this term, definitely have experienced whumperflies myself. But that sort of, both the longevity of the interest and it being kind of a core part of your reading and viewing experience from the time that you’re a young kid, and also that sort of, like, physical reaction that you might get from reading or looking at this sort of thing, and then also the sort of, “Oh I’m into it to a level that I feel like if I tell somebody about this, they’re gonna think that it’s really weird, and I need to keep it a secret.” So I think that all of those elements, if you haven’t been into it for as long or if you don’t feel self-conscious enough about your interest that you feel like you need a community support network to feel more comfortable about it, or if you, maybe you don’t have that sort of physical reaction to reading or viewing whump, maybe all of those elements would be kind of like, “Oh, I don’t like it enough to identify in this way.”
ELM: Yeah, this reminds me of something else that you and I discussed during the editing process, too, and we tried to think about other examples of, like, a community brought together by a trope, you know what I mean? And I don’t think either of us could think of anything, Flourish, I don’t know if you can. You know, this idea that like, I’d be an enemy-to-lover lover, and I would like that trope everywhere, and identify that way, and be thrilled when I saw that trope in mainstream media, and also be interested in original enemies-to-lovers fiction? Like, I don’t know, that, that…you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, I think that I see, like, [laughs] there is a group of people who I would consider to be dark fuck prince people, who like, you know, like I have gone…
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, do you know any, [MT laughs] do you know any of those people? Are you, are you familiar with any?
FK: Uh, gosh, do I? Am I familiar? [ELM laughs] You know, so there are definitely, like, I have observed people going from fandom to fandom for the same sort of tropey relationship type, and like, I mean, myself included, but like, even more than that. There are other people who are doing it way more than I am.
MT: Right.
ELM: Sure, yeah.
FK: And I’ve seen them doing it, and I’m like, “I know why you’re into that. [ELM and MT laugh] I know.” But, the thing is that those people, even though they remain friends, it’s just like migratory slash fandom, where people are like, “Hey, it’s that one! I like those guys!” You know?
ELM & MT: [simultaneous] Yeah.
FK: It’s not the same kind of like, stated community, they’re not, they’re not having Tumblr usernames that say like, [FK and ELM laugh] you know…”darkfuckprince” or whatever.
MT: [simultaneous] “darkfuckprince…98.” Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah.
FK: Whereas like, the whump community fully is like, “Yep, my Tumblr username is about whump, I’m about whump, and yeah I’m in this fandom but I know my overall thing,” and that feels really different to me.
MT: Yeah. And I do think that a lot of, maybe before…like, I’ve sometimes thought of myself as a migratory h/c reader, where some people are migratory slash shippers, I’ll read h/c across fandoms and find things to enjoy. But I do think that maybe some people in the whump community would also consider themselves to be like, migratory whump readers, where they just read this across, and if they hadn’t found this particular community that was interested in this, then they would’ve just considered themselves to be migratory fans in that way. But because this community does exist and also because I think that there’s so much both internalized and perhaps externalized stigma around being interested in this particular element of fiction or media, that an actual clump of fans has formed a specific community around it. I have also seen that some, I mean some people, the whump blog is their sideblog, right?
FK: Sure.
MT: And so they have their main fandom blog where they’re engaging with whatever fandoms they’re interested in, and then the whump stuff is like, “But I am particularly interested in… [ELM and FK laugh] this specific element, and I want to read original fiction about it,” and so that’s kind of something they also have going on.
FK: I mean I think that makes a lot of sense too, because a lot of like, whump imagery is really maybe not something that you want to just be putting on your main blog, especially without lots of tagging, right? Like, if you’re interested in blogging images of people getting hurt, then maybe it’s nice to have a sideblog where you can just be like, “Hey folks, if you’re not into really gross images of pain, walk on by!” You know? [FK and MT laugh]
MT: Right. Yeah, it’s certainly one of those—and maybe we should say for people listening, just general content warning if you decide to go into the whump tag on Tumblr, make sure that you have your tag blocks ready—um, just because yeah, there is a lot of both, like, written work and prompts and scenarios and gifs of stuff that, I don’t know, maybe you should just be prepared to see.
ELM: So, that’s a good segue into the kind of question, I mean you just brought it up, the externalized stigma. Right? I mean I guess the stigma all around. And it makes me think of the phrase “torture porn,” which, uh…is not positive. [laughs] Usually, I’m wondering if that’s a term that comes up in these conversations, because this is a tricky, you know, this is a tricky area and obviously relates to other “dark fiction.” As far as I know there’s not like a self-proclaimed community of non-con lovers, maybe there is and I don’t know about it, you know? Partly too, I’m also thinking, the hurt/comfort thing is somewhat rare in mainstream media, the way we think of it in fandom. And I, the one book that I’ve seen I think accurately described as hurt/comfort is A Little Life. I don’t know if you’ve read that, Maria.
FK: Sure.
ELM: I thought that was a really—I think it was Laura Miller who called it hurt/comfort, I thought that was an insightful read, and just, you know, that’s also a book that people have said is torture porn, it’s like, hundreds of pages of one character being just totally, totally, I mean I’m sure it’s a very whumpy book, you know? So like…
FK: Ohhh yeah. [ELM laughs] I might even go, I might even say if you’re into whump, like, read A Little Life, because that book…that book. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] If you just want to see a character ground down for hundreds of pages. [MT laughs] You know, but that’s a huge, people who hate that book say, “Oh, this is just torture porn, it’s just people reveling in this guy’s miserable life, and every awful thing that’s happened to him,” you know what I mean?
MT: Yeah, totally. One thing that this brings up for me is an interesting sort of…I can’t remember whether it was just referenced or mentioned in the “Poe Dameron Hurts So Prettily” research paper, but there have been arguments from the whump perspective saying that whump is almost explicitly anti-violent. Because in mainstream media, say your hero gets beat up, you know, almost is at death’s door, and then the battle’s over, whatever, and then you cut to them sort of, like, mostly through recovery or they sort of bounce back action hero-style, is a quote from the Poe Dameron piece.
And what these whumpers say is that, “We’re actually taking the time to linger on like, what are the actual effects of violence? Whether it’s physical violence, whether it’s psychological violence. And we’re staying with that character, right next to them, and exploring what the impacts of that would be on this character, and not always but very often sort of lavishing comfort on that character afterwards, and going with them through the recovery process step-by-step.”
One thing that a couple whumpers mentioned to me in the interviews was the frustration that people have when there’s like, a lack of aftercare [laughs] in a whump scenario, and so yeah, I think that there can be this—and I certainly can’t speak for all of the whumpers out there, I’m sure that there are people who are looking at those scenes with a sort of torture porn kind of lens, where the appeal of it is the actual violence itself—but at least the whumpers that I spoke to, and the whump literature, meta, that I’ve read, has been more about, OK so there is the violence, the violence—again, whether it’s like, emotional, physical, whatever—is kind of the premise or the setup for the deeper exploration of the character and the resilience of that character and the comfort of that character afterwards. As opposed to mainstream media just being like, “Oh yeah, violence!” You know? You know. [laughs] And this lingering gaze on the aftereffects of those events is more about, OK, but what are the impacts?
FK: Yeah, that’s really interesting, and it actually, it makes a lot of sense to me, although it also makes me think about the differences. I mean I haven’t, I haven’t been a part of many of the fandoms that people love whump from, so I don’t know much about Stargate, but it definitely made me think about how Star Trek, the original series, is really different to The X-Files in this way. Like, in Star Trek, at the end of the episode everything’s fine, it’s all forgotten, we move on, there’s usually no continuing comfort. The X-Files has more of that, it has more like, you know, arcs in which there’s lots of angsting about things. But still probably not enough, given the amount of [laughs] torment that the characters are being put through. That makes me think that this is really valid, because I’m thinking, “Oh yeah, people are looking both to enjoy it in spaces where it exists, and then to provide it in spaces where it doesn’t exist.” You know?
MT: Yeah. It makes me think of just the sheer number of “Tony Stark has PTSD” tags out there—
FK: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MT: —or like the “Bucky Barnes needs a hug,” Bucky Barnes desperately does need a hug.
ELM: [overlapping] Bucky Barnes… [laughs]
FK: He does!
MT: He does, yes, he does. I mean he desperately needs therapy and I haven’t seen the, I feel like he gets therapy in the show. I haven’t seen it, but.
ELM: I saw it, he, in one of the few episodes I saw before I had to stop…
MT: Uh huh.
ELM: There was a therapist, yes.
MT: OK, gotcha. So—
ELM: That’s my anti-recommendation. [all laugh]
FK: Also, but Bucky Barnes also just needs like…a shot of him weeping, with music and a big pan or something. Like, he needs a little bit of that happening for him, which he doesn’t get. [laughs]
MT: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. Yes. So, Bucky Barnes, on screen, right, he’s busy…I haven’t seen enough of Marvel. But so he’s busy out there helping save the day, right?
FK: [overlapping] Killing people! I don’t know. [laughs]
MT: Busy out there killing people.
ELM: Yeah.
MT: But he’s got this, like, decades-long, really traumatic, terrible backstory that’s just never really…at least for many many years, was never really unpacked in any sort of significant way. And so there is, so fandom is kind of, and the whumpy side of fandom is kind of filling this void of like, “OK, but actually though, what would be the effects and can we please for the love of God just have Steve Rogers, like, give him a hug that lasts longer than three seconds?” or whatever. [FK and ELM laugh]
So yeah, so I think that Flourish is right, both, there are some fandoms that are canonically pretty whumpy and there’s fertile ground for a lot of characters taking care of each other, and then in a lot of other mainstream media, because you’re not spending 30 minutes of your typical Marvel movie having characters patch each other up and take care of each other, and go for fast food and be found family, um…the way that some people in fandom want them to, [ELM and FK laugh] then…yeah.
FK: The ironic thing being that actually they do go for fast food and be found family in The Avengers. [FK and ELM laugh] Is shawarma fast food? I guess it is.
MT: [overlapping] Is it the, how do you—shawarma, yeah yeah yeah, that was a popular tag for a while.
ELM: Yeah.
MT: But…yeah. So. [laughs]
ELM: This is interesting though, I mean there’s such a, you’re putting such an emphasis on the comfort part, and to me, when I think of whump, I think of the hurt part. And I’m not saying any of this as a judgment, you know, or bringing it up in the same breath as all these other dark topics, you know? But I do think, there is something specific, and I think people are wired differently, about the idea that a lot of folks, when they were kids saw a Disney movie and were like, “Ohhh,” got an interesting feeling when they saw a character in peril, right? And I don’t think, I’m certain there are many people who are not in fandom who also feel that way.
MT: Totally.
FK: Yeah, and I feel like there’s a big difference, also, like when you’re a kid, I remember hating that. I remember being like, “No! Don’t wanna see it,” like run away, hide my eyes, character in peril, right?
ELM: And you can’t watch any secondhand embarrassment comedy, either, you know?
FK: Nope. Can’t do that.
ELM: And I’m like, this is, I’m lovin’ it, you know? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, and when I was a kid, both of these things were big differences, I know there are people who liked to see the character in peril, because I knew them, [ELM laughs] and they were enjoying it, and I was running away! [laughs]
MT: Yeah! Totally. And, it’s kind of interesting, just to go back and briefly address, the comfort emphasis, this may be a bias in my own reporting, and in the people who respond to survey data, just in that almost everyone that I talked to was a hurt/comfort sort of person. And again, that survey just, even the one that was…
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, it’s the majority, yeah yeah yeah.
MT: But there are those 12% of people out there who are really into the hurt/no comfort specifically, and this is something that I talked a little bit about in the story, where people, whether they’re autoethnographers, or the scant amount of whump research that’s been done, say there’s no totalizing theory for, or you shouldn’t try to seek one, because that’s kind of like asking why people like romance novels, or something like that. It’s like, there’s, people are just bringing such different interests and emphases of their own about which part of it appeals to them.
So yeah, there are certainly people out there who are specifically interested in the, only the pain part of it. I think that probably the reason that we think of—and the reason that I defined at the top of this episode, that whump is about pain-centric fiction—is because regardless of the comfort part afterwards, it’s kind of this umbrella term. There has to be some, in order for it to be whump, there must be some violence, physical, emotional, whatever, as sort of the setup for it, or the main core part of it. Whatever else happens after that is kind of the, whatever flavor you're interested in.
FK: It is interesting to think about, you know, you’re talking about, there can't’ be a totalizing theory of it, you know when you look back at the history of fan studies, there were sort of two competing theories about what was at the heart, what was the most interesting part about fanfic. And the one that sort of won, as it were, was Henry Jenkins talking about slash, but the other one was the idea that fics that we might call whump—I mean I think that the term hurt/comfort was more frequently used there, but the Get Spock fics and so forth—people’s idea was that that was the heart of fandom. And I think that’s really interesting, because there is such a desire to be like, [laughs] let me come up with a theory for why this is important!
MT: Yeah!
FK: And we’re gonna make you care about it, you know? [laughs]
MT: Yeah, totally. And this was something that really frustrated me in my early research, because of course there’s like the Camille Bacon-Smith…somewhere back there, where she’s talking about how hurt/comfort seems like it’s the heart of fanfiction, she’s like, “But it’s a little weird though!” [all laugh]
So there’s that perspective in 1992, and haich-slash-cee had a quote that I didn’t get to include in the story, because they had written this beautiful Tumblr post about the history of whump meta, and they said something about, you know, “It’s addressed in Bacon-Smith’s book, but the awkward was still there.” [FK laughs] And then there’s like, decades of research and literature about slash fic, right?
And for the hurt/comfort side, it’s like, OK, there’s this book in 1992, and then…almost nothing. I mean people…it comes up, it’s acknowledged that it exists in literature, but until this 2011 autoethnography about hurt/comfort that’s in Transformative Works and Cultures I think, there’s no deep exploration of h/c, like I loved going… My, as a science journalist, my first reaction whenever I’m like, “Oh, this is interesting,” is to go to Google Scholar and see. And there’s almost nothing about hurt/comfort or whump.
And so there is kind of this…gap in understanding of it, as opposed to, I think that there’s more work that’s been published on Omegaverse. [laughs] Which I think of as being a more niche interest, but.
FK: Yeah, I mean I guess this is just the way that things work, right, there’s also, there isn’t really very much about the material history of texts after, in fanfiction, after Camille Bacon-Smith, for a long time, and it’s sort of like, well everyone jumped on the one thing that they liked, which was ethnography, autoethnography, and slash, and then like, ignored the hurt/comfort and material history of texts stuff, because… I feel like that’s a way that academia works. Right? Is that there’s this thing—and I hope, I mean I’ve seen a little bit more material history of texts, and I hope that’s also true for people studying whump.
ELM: Well, this is interesting though, I understand the distinctions that are being drawn here, but it’s like…and I also understand that studies of slash are not maybe mentioning hurt/comfort, but also hurt/comfort…I mean I don’t have the data on this, but like…it’s a very slashy… [FK and ELM laugh] You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah! They’re not separate things, [all laugh] you aren’t either a slasher or a hurt/comfort person.
MT: Yeah. And I wonder how much of that is just…and when we were editing the article, we talked a little bit about this, where actually in Wince Magazine’s definition of whump, I believe was saying that it’s actually, it’s generally gen content but it can be slash.
ELM: Hmmm.
MT: Which I thought was interesting, as kind of this modern perspective, because as we mentioned in, on the Archive of Our Own at least, a lot of the top relationships listed are platonic ships for both hurt/comfort and whump. And I wonder how much of h/c or whump being traditionally viewed as from this kind of slashy lens is just the selection bias of like, so much fic is slash, and has historically been slash, that naturally the hurt/comfort stuff falls within that. But you’re right, there’s a huge overlap.
FK: I mean that’s interesting for me to hear, because as a het person, I really think of there being a lot of hurt/comfort in het also, at least within the fandom context, right? Like OK, I’m not solely a het person, but I’ve never thought of it primarily as a slash thing, even though I think that you’re probably right that by volume, [laughs] you know?
MT: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah. Well, I’m also thinking about, I mean, we may have toned this down a bit because it was a point of contention in the article, but there was the, you know, there were these very old school slasher arguments about hurt/comfort, saying, “Oh, it’s just a,” —t’s just like, it’s such a time warp for me to even say this bit, but you know— “Oh, this is just sublimating, you’re just using these dynamics between these two men because you don’t want to actually write them fucking.” You know? That kinda thing. And so I definitely think there’s that history, that het won’t have had.
MT: Yeah.
FK: Sure! But there’s also a history of het, like there’s a very powerful thread of, “Uh oh, somebody’s been hurt, and he needs to be nursed back to health, and that’s how he, you know, that’s how he falls in love.” Or like, the lady in peril, right, has to be saved or whatever. So there’s all of those other het tropes that get definitely pulled in when you’re talking about someone with a het ship.
ELM: Those are romance tropes. Slash—I’m talking about fic, coming from within fandom, you’re talking about things that have always existed within pro romance that are replicated within fan spaces.
FK: That’s very true, but then when you actually read the fic and you’re like, “Yeah, this is a fic that’s like, you know, many pages of x character being tortured.” [laughs]
MT: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Sure.
FK: So I’m not denying that they come from different places in a certain sense, I’m just saying that if you’re looking at it purely from a “what are the content of the fics,” you know, it gets sticky. Like, MulderTorture was actually, in my experience, it was as much about het as it was about slash, for sure. Maybe it’s just because that was a het pairing that had a huge chokehold, maybe not a total chokehold, but like, it was so big in that fandom. Maybe that’s why? But like, I can think of it in a bunch of other fandoms also, where there’s characters who are being tortured in both the het and slash ships that they’re in. Maybe for different reasons.
MT: Another element of it might also be, and this is just data from the sort of like, modern whump community, I don’t know how far this goes back, but there’s definite bias just towards whumping male characters in general.
FK: Yeaaah.
MT: And so, there’s a lot of reasons that people present as potential reasons why people…why there’s so little lady whump, as it’s called, in comparison.
FK: Lady whump! [laughs] Lady whump!
MT: Yeah, like, enough that there’s a specific term for whumping, [FK laughs] like, female-identifying characters.
ELM: [overlapping] Like femslash. Add “lady” to it, yeah.
MT: [overlapping] Exactly, exactly! Yeah, and so if most people are generally tending to whump male characters anyway, you’re gonna just find a lot more male characters in slash ships than you are, maybe even in het ships and obviously in femslash ships. And this is something that I should look into, which I neglected to do for the article, is just like, what are the sort of fandom stats for whump and h/c in femslash specifically? Like, are they…maybe I’ll send a Tumblr message to Toast, like “Can you find this out for me?” [laughs]
ELM: They probably can! And actually they may have looked at some of this, because they…I don’t know if they published all the results, but they were doing frequency of tags in different tag groups, I’m sure hurt/comfort is in there. So I’d be curious to know.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Because it’s interesting, I think what Flourish, you’re describing in het, is very um…I think female-centric subversion, this kind of idea that the man is the one that needs, you know what I mean? The man is the one that’s being made weak, right? And, like, that…
FK: [overlapping] Absolutely, absolutely.
ELM: Right. So I understand the power in that, right?
FK: Yeah. And I mean then, and again, I’m not trying to say that that’s like, coming from the same source, but I think that they do…in my experience, which is nowhere like yours, they do sometimes touch, you know what I mean? [laughs] Like, if your interest is in the whumping, then maybe it…you know, it’s like, well…people are definitely getting hurt! [laughs]
MT: Yeah.
ELM: I mean I feel like this goes to some of the things, you know, we were talking about this a bunch in the Toast episodes too, comparing femslash and stuff, like…you know, there’s the old argument that all these things happen to white male characters for all these reasons, right, you know—not just men, but like, white characters in particular. And maybe bad things shouldn’t happen to female characters, or to male characters of color, et cetera, et cetera. Or like, I think even in your research, Maria, you were touching upon this idea of like, oh, the men who are whumped represent the patriarchy or whatever, you know what I mean? That kind of thing. Right?
MT: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t know, I thought it was interesting to see that, within the whump community, there was such thoughtful discussions about the idea of putting an already marginalized character in peril, whether it was a character of color or a disabled character, right, you know, to say like…I thought that was interesting, and it seems like something that fandom on the whole is maybe not as good at talking about sometimes. I don’t know.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
MT: Yeah, I’m sure that there’s much broader discourse about this than even I’m aware of. But yeah, I thought it was interesting that, you know, there have been some discussions within the whump community about why…why the overwhelming whiteness of whumpees, and some, of course, people saying, “Maybe writers feel less comfortable whumping characters who are already part of vulnerable minorities.” And then other whumpers saying, “OK but the whole point of whump for a lot of us is not the sadistic character-bashing, not this sort of torture porn, glorifying pain sort of thing,” it’s about, you know, OK, focusing on the pain of a particular character and the effects of that on them, and their resilience, and the intimacy that they might have with other characters as a result, and, you know, adding new dimensions to the character and seeing them in this sort of richer context as a result of this character-defining, really emotional scenario that you’ve put them in. And like, why shouldn’t characters of color, why shouldn’t female characters, why shouldn’t other characters who are parts of vulnerable minorities be given that sort of very careful and loving and intimate attention? Not to mention, again, all of the comfort that is bestowed upon all of these white characters who are in hurt/comfort fics.
So yeah, there are certainly a lot of, and probably not enough, discussion that goes on on these topics. But yeah, I was curious to see that as well. Just because looking at the sheer stats on Archive of Our Own, who are the top whumped characters, it’s like OK, you’ve got your Witcher white men, you’ve got your Winchester white men, you’ve got your Marvel white men, you’ve got your Minecraft YouTuber white men… [FK and ELM laugh]
ELM: Fantastic.
FK: [overlapping, laughing] Oh my God. Wait, there’s Minecraft—of course there’s Minecraft Youtuber whump.
MT: [overlapping] Oh my God.
ELM: Flourish!
MT: Minecraft YouTube fandom, on AO3 at least, is one of the whumpiest fandoms I’ve ever seen.
ELM: Oh, I believe it. It’s also, Flourish, you know it’s like one of the largest fandoms right, you’re aware of this?
FK: No, I know it’s huge, I know it’s huge, I understand that.
MT: [overlapping] Yeah, it’s huge.
ELM: [overlapping] OK. [laughs]
FK: I just, somehow my brain did not, like, put together the fact that this would mean that there were people getting whumped in it, which of course there are.
ELM: Yeah!
MT: Of course there are.
FK: Of course there are.
MT: The found family potential in…OK, so I’ve never watched, I’ve never played “Minecraft,” I’ve never watched the streaming thereof, [FK laughs] but I have at this point read a fair [laughs] a fair amount of this fic—
ELM: I love it.
MT: —just through tag searches, and yeah, the hurt/comfort—because you’ve got a huge cast of ensemble characters of people, right?
FK: Yeah!
MT: So yeah, and people of all different ages and relationship dynamics, just, I do think it’s interesting that like, that there is this very ostensibly whumpy fan community, and it is a lot of like, it seems to me, younger fans or newer fans that are coming into this space. And I wonder what your, like how that would shape your perspective of fandom, if you’re coming in and your first fandom is “Minecraft,” and the top tag on that is angst and hurt/comfort, as opposed to some other fandoms that may not have as much emphasis on that content. I didn’t speak to anybody who was in Minecraft YouTube fandom specifically. But I’d be curious to know more about that.
FK: [laughs] I want to respond to this but I realized I don’t know what to say, because my first real fandom was X-Files, and let me tell you, [MT laughs] I was there for that, you know?
ELM: Right, and then you went to the same place that I did, where there were teacher/student relationships with Stockholm syndrome. So… [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] Having had this experience… Yeah, absolutely, no no no, I mean definitely. Like, whatever, I was 11 when I was reading a lot of the X-Files stuff, and like, I’m sure that it warped my brain a little bit, but you know, I, it’s all right. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
MT: Oh yeah! I don’t mean, I don’t mean warped your brain in a bad—I mean, again, my first fic experience was like, whumpy Marauders, and I’m sure that that sort of, that definitely, you know, guided what fic I was looking for on Fanfiction.net. When I came over to Archive of Our Own, I was like, I know that this hurt/comfort tag is a tag, because I found it on Fanfiction.net, and I liked the stories there. So yeah, I just, I guess I wonder like, how much do the tropes that you’re exposed to when you’re first coming into fandom shape what you think fandom is, or could be? Like if I, if my first experience had been finding like, a bunch of…I was gonna say Omegaverse fic, but some, some trope that I am not really into, I might be like, “Oh, this fandom thing is this Wild West of tropes that I’m not really interested in, and then I may not have gotten into it as deeply, as opposed to finding fandom tropes that really indulged these things that I wanted to read about anyway.
ELM: But, you know, hurt/comfort is so popular, I wonder how much of this is like—I mean I’m gonna do a little armchair theorizing here, taking a page out of Flourish’s hot take book [MT laughs]—but you know, it also makes me think about, you talk about younger fans, thinking about my adolescent self, and obviously people of all ages like hurt/comfort, I don’t think you age out of it. But I do think there’s something specific about adolescence that might make this extra appealing.
MT: Yeah.
ELM: And I’m partly thinking about like, when I was researching, I wrote a piece a few years back on Mary Sues, and some of the, there was some research that was suggesting that there were these proto-Mary Sues in the 19th century, and the…the Mary Sue, the stand-in for the author, would tragically die. You know what I mean? [laughs] And everyone would like, mourn their beautiful Victorian corpse or whatever, right?
MT: Yeah, yeah. Sure. [laughs]
ELM: And that feels so…teenage girl to me. You know what I mean? And so I wonder if there’s some…teens are a little dramatic, if there’s a little bit of, uh… [FK laughs] maudlin age group, and then maybe you have adults who are a little older doing that kinda [laughs] careful comforting, you know, we’re doing therapy now kinda stuff, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, that’s almost exactly what I was gonna say, I was thinking like, that’s a time when you’re pushing boundaries, also. You know? When you’re a pre-teen and an early teenager, I feel like there’s this moment of like, “Well, what is possible? What is safe?” With your identity, with everything else, and you know that you don’t want to do those things, necessarily, like actually, but through fiction you can explore some of those ideas. That’s definitely how I think about the stuff that I read at that time, some of which was just like, woohooo… [ELM and MT laugh] What was…what was going on? [laughs]
MT: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Yep!
MT: Flourish is making this face like they just got off a roller coaster. [all laugh]
FK: Yeah! Like, but you know what I’m saying? So yeah, I wonder, I mean obviously that doesn’t account for everything, but I kind of wonder whether that’s something that is also appealing, as a young teen, and maybe that’s also driving part of it, right?
MT: Yeah.
FK: As Elizabeth was saying.
MT: Totally. Yeah, I mean, hurt/comfort at least—and I think that I’m, again, sort of angling towards the comfort side, and of course this interest also exists for the hurt/no comfort people—but I think that at least hurt/comfort interest, there is something very…it does just kind of soothe your id, in a very specific way. Where you can sort of externalize watching this character go through something really difficult, and then get the sort of soothing comfort aspect of the story afterwards. And I do think that there’s probably something about that that appeals very specifically to the teen brain, maybe where…your…now I’m armchair theorizing.
ELM: Do it! [MT laughs] We’re all in our armchairs together.
MT: Where if you’re sort of growing up and feeling like you need to be independent for the first time, maybe there’s something very comforting about being able to read stories where characters get taken care of instead. But…it may also be one of those things where, and I don’t know about this because people talk about liking whump since they were young kids, but potentially also, your music tastes get set when you’re a teenager, right? [FK laughs] I think I’m quoting Flourish from the last episode. [FK and ELM laugh] But maybe there is something also about that, where if you read a lot of h/c that you like as an adolescent, does that affect, does that sort of crystallize that interest for you, as a lifelong interest? I don’t know. The fact that people talk about liking it for much longer than that makes me think that that’s probably not true for some people, but I don’t know, if you’re finding hurt/comfort on Fanfiction.net when you’re 12 or whatever, does that change how interested you would become in it, versus if you found it when you were 22 or 32? I don’t know.
ELM: That’s interesting. It’s very funny to hear you also talk about—you know, now I’m thinking about, I was a teenager reading all this Marauders fic and writing it too. Obvious—sorry to talk about Harry Potter, but you know what I mean. [FK and MT laugh] Like, obviously—
MT: Sorry, I brought it up. [laughs]
ELM: No, I know, but it’s also something that I’ve read so much of, but it’s funny because it’s like, yeah, he’s a werewolf, and he, there was so much fic about like, [in a breathless tone] his painful transformation, and seeing Sirius like, or the three of them would like comfort him, and I was always just like, “Yeah, all right.” Sorry, this is how we’re different, you and me. Whereas like…
MT: Yeah.
ELM: I was just thinking, what did I like about that as a teenager? And I was like, oh, I liked that they were destined to die, [MT laughs] and everything had this deep tragic irony, you know? And that also feels a bit adolescent, but it’s funny, because it’s like, it’s funny to see how, with the same set of stories, it was like, you know, we were reading the same things basically, but they were different tragic things that appealed to each of us, I feel like. You know?
MT: [overlapping] Yeah! Yeah, and I think that one thing that I thought was interesting, I think this came up in the neurophysiology of whump Wince article, where someone was analyzing whether whump or h/c was tragic media or comedic media, implicitly, and they were saying that at least through the whump lens, it’s not tragic because the whole point, in most cases, is not for the character to die. It’s for them to get to the worst possible situation, whatever that is, worst case scenario, and then be saved or save themselves, and then have some sort of aftermath, where you’re exploring that, as opposed to tragic media, obviously the main character’s [makes a choked noise]. Um…so… [laughs]
So yeah, and I think that also, at least borne out in the data that I’ve seen of surveys, that it’s important to them in whump for the character not to die. And so I think that’s interesting for a fan group that’s ostensibly about people going through the worst possible situations and being put through these painful scenarios, that it’s really important to a lot of people that the character not die. And we might have talked about this a little bit when you sent the Sonic the Hedgehog… [MT and ELM laugh] was it just a tweet? About like, about Sonic dying in a hospital bed or something?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah! [all laugh]
FK: You, I was not sent this tweet, and I…
ELM: [overlapping] No, you were not, you weren’t a part of our conversation.
FK: And I’m making such a face.
MT: Yeah, I think it was, something where Elizabeth was like, “How whumpy is this?” and it is whumpy in the sense that the character was getting hurt, but also it’s almost not whumpy because the character’s gonna die, I can’t remember the exact…
ELM: I wish I could remember the exact thing, it was something like, it was like, “Oh, why did I always wanna see Sonic in a hospital bed when I was a kid” or something like that, right? That was the…yeah.
MT: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: We should go look for this.
MT: But, yes.
ELM: But you were saying that people have like, this whump in the wild, you know, people identifying those feelings.
MT: Yeah, this tag on Tumblr, and I hope I’m not misquoting it, but it’s something like “whumpers in the wild,” [FK laughs] and it’s screenshots of, I don’t know, a tweet, or even something on Tumblr that’s not on…whumpblr?
FK: [laughs] Whumpblr?
MT: I don’t know how to pronounce it, I’ve only ever seen it written.
ELM: I love it.
MT: Um, but people outside the whump community talking about how good it feels to see, how much you wanna see a character in peril, and all the whump people going, “Yep, there they are, they’re out there.” [all laugh]
FK: “It’s actually normal!”
ELM: OK, but like, this makes me think, though, I’m wondering if you’ve seen commentary about this, or analysis about this, within the community, because OK, “that’s a fine-looking man, I’d like to see him in a pit of despair,” that is a very popular post. Or like, variations on it.
MT: Yeah.
ELM: I’m even thinking about the, there’s the memes going around Tumblr for the last few months like, “I’m sorry about your boyfriend, I put him in a blender,” do you know this? [laughs]
MT: [laughs] Oh my God…
ELM: And they’re very violent, the way people talk about things, they’re like, it’s very violent right now, and being in the Interview With the Vampire fandom, there’s so much of that, like, “Oh, I’m obsessed with Lestat, I just wanna like, put him in a centrifuge and watch him be…” you know. And so there’s very, like… [all laugh]
MT: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m only laughing because like, I can totally see myself reading something like this on Tumblr, and in context it’s like, very serious, and you’re like, “Yeah, I really vibe with that,” [ELM laughs] or you don’t, but when you say it out loud…yeah.
ELM: No! I think it always sounds absurd! [MT laughs] This, they’re funny, some of the tags people have about what they wanna do to these men, you know, and with that one too it’s not just like, “Oh, I wanna study him like a bug,” it’s also like, “I wanna see him on his knees, crying, beaten,” you know?
MT: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: And I’m wondering if that kind of…I don’t think it’s unique to that fandom or that character, I feel like it’s something that I see all over the place, and I’m wondering if there’s been a notice of this kind of trend. Which I think also goes hand in hand with the like, “I want Harry Styles to run me over with his Jeep” or whatever, you know?
MT: Yeah, “step on my neck,” that sort of thing, yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] Yeah. After he hits me.
MT: Yeah, I… [laughs] I don’t know, I’ll have to, maybe ask some of the whumpers that I spoke with whether they’ve noticed an uptick in that sort of thing, but this is something that I did ask people about, whether they felt like whumpers were kind of a discrete community among fandom at large, like whether there’s an inherent difference between liking whump for its own sake the way that whumpers have self-identified as liking? As compared to sort of like the rest of people who might use an h/c tag more casually. And a couple people that I spoke to did mention, you know, “We see, besides people tagging fic as h/c or whatever, we see people talking about characters in a whumpy way, outside of the whump community itself,” whether it’s on Tumblr or whether it’s on other platforms, and so those whumpers saying “That’s evidence to us at least that our interest is not as niche as maybe it might at first necessarily appear.” But I don’t know whether there’s been any analysis about, you know, trends over time of people talking about that sort of thing.
ELM: I would really, I wonder if anyone has been researching this kind of shift to violent language. I know there was a lot, there was a lot of like, you know, kinda surfacey media coverage of why people wanted Harry Styles to run them over with a car, you know?
MT: Yeah.
ELM: But I do think that the way people talk about male characters in particular on Tumblr right now, and the way it makes them feel, it’s interesting, because there was a lot of discussion like, five, six years ago about people describing themselves as “trash,” right, you know, and I feel like this has taken the place of that to some degree, this kind of…
FK: Yeahhh.
ELM: This, “I wanna put his brain in a blender, he’s put my brain in a blender,” [FK and MT laugh] and you’re like, why are we all so violent right now, you know?
FK: Why is it blenders…
MT: [overlapping] Such a terrible intimacy to that. [ELM laughs] Yeah, I will say there’s probably a notable difference between somebody saying that they want Harry Styles to run them over with a car, [ELM and FK laugh] in which case they’re probably not being—I shouldn’t assume, but I’m assuming that they’re not being literal about that. [ELM laughs] But people saying that they wanna see so-and-so beaten up and bloody, that is something that people literally do want to see in gif form. They do want to see Dean Winchester gritting his teeth…
ELM: Oh yeah.
FK: That’s true.
MT: …sweat and blood dripping…yeah.
FK: I don’t know if that goes for the blender thing, and also I’m enough of a Millennial that the thing that’s been running through my head is [doing an Eve 6 impression] “Wanna put my tender heart in a blender, [ELM and MT laugh] watch it spin ’round to a beautiful oblivion.”
ELM: [overlapping] Stop it, get outta here. I’m gonna mute you. [laughs]
FK: [still doing the impression] “Rendezvous then I’m through with you…”
ELM: Wow, you really committed, committed to that one.
FK: “Rendezvouuuuuus…” [laughs]
ELM: [still laughing, as is MT] Stop!
FK: I’m sorry, it was just running through my head so strongly, I thought it would go away and it wouldn’t go away. [laughs]
[ELM and MT both do a simultaneous coming-down-from-laughter long sigh, then start laughing again]
MT: You’re like, “I’m gonna explode if I don’t get to!”
FK: I had to! [all still laughing]
ELM: Yeah.
MT: But you’re right, you’re right, I don’t think that people literally want to see Dean Winchester’s brain in a blender, that is probably true. [FK laughs] I think that there’s probably a spectrum, there’s a spectrum of like, when people talk about wanting to see a character in pain, like how literally they’re… [FK laughs] and it’s another one of those things where like, whumpers are, whether they’re in actual fandom whump or even if they’re on Tumblr and writing and reading original character whump, we’re all kind of in that hyperbolic-speaking internet soup, [laughs] where people are already using those sorts of violent terms, and so that also gets incorporated into whump fandom regardless of how literally you’re talking about wanting to hurt a character.
ELM: I do think in the case of Lestat, people are being a little more literal than they are with other male characters. [all laugh]
FK: Yes! Yes, I think so, but that’s also because Anne Rice is literal in those ways.
ELM: I mean, and he’s always crying. He’s always on his knees weeping.
FK: And I would not be surprised, if you told me that in one of the later books she literally put him in a centrifuge, [ELM and MT laugh] and he then later reconstituted himself, I would believe you no questions asked. No questions.
ELM: Ohhhh, Maria, you really gotta watch it. [laughs]
MT: I… [laughs]
ELM: You’re gonna love to see him on his knees, crying. You’re gonna wish he was in the swamp, actually.
FK: [overlapping] Oh, so pretty. So pretty.
MT: I did so enjoy the um…the Todrick Hall Lestat music video.
ELM: Oh, I guess we’re gonna have to put that in the show notes again, since you mentioned it.
MT: [overlapping] Yeah! Do it, do it.
FK: [overlapping] Gosh, how hard, what a horrible fate. [ELM laughs]
MT: [overlapping] I really, I really vibed with that. But yeah, and as soon as I’m finished with binge watching Would I Lie to You? again, [ELM laughs] then I will, I’ll get around to it.
ELM: OK good.
FK: That’s your homework.
ELM: OK, I feel like you’ve actually already done enough homework because you wrote this massive article, so everyone needs to read it.
FK: That’s true! [FK and ELM laugh]
MT: Yeah, and thank you so much to the whumpers who spoke to me for it, I know it was a little…probably jarring to have somebody come into your Tumblr inbox and say, “I’m a journalist, would you please talk to me about this [FK laughs] thing that people notoriously don’t want to tell anyone in real life about.” [laughs]
FK: Aww! Thank you, whumpers!
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! No, I really, I’m so grateful to you, that you covered it so sensitively, and that they were willing to talk to you, because I think it is really interesting that this does feel like something hard to explain outside of fandom. But even with, you know, for us it’s like, I have questions, but also everything you say makes total sense, you know what I mean? Whereas I feel like if I tried to explain this to like, one of my normie friends, they would be like, “OK, that’s…people have different interests,” you know, [FK laughs] but for me I’m like, oh, this makes total sense within the context of fandom, you know what I mean?
MT: Yeah, yeah. Totally.
ELM: So like, I’m hopeful that other folks who maybe are not in the whump world, or even in the hurt/comfort world, will enjoy the piece.
MT: Yeah! Yeah, me too. Maybe someone will…
ELM: Become a whumper? Do you think, is that your goal, to convert?
MT: I…well, when I was starting to do the reporting on this story, I did think to myself, I’m reaching out to these people who, you know, people whose meta I had read and people who I knew from answering a lot of asks from anons, saying like, “What is whump?” or “Who are you people?” or whatever. So people that I knew were at least comfortable talking to normie fandom people about it in that sense. But when I was reaching out to people, part of the reason that I’m interested in writing this story is I feel like just given the sort of question that we have about how many hurt/comfort people are interested in whump the way that you are interested in whump… I don't know, unless people stumble across the whump tag on Tumblr, they’re not gonna know that you guys are here. [laughs] And so…I don’t know, I hope that, you know, somebody who reads the article may learn something about themselves.
ELM: Yeah, I hope so, too.
FK: Yeaaaah!
ELM: Well thank you so much for writing it, and thank you so much for coming on, it was a delight to talk to you further, even though I feel like you and I have talked about this topic a lot. [all laugh]
FK: I found it to be a delight to talk about this topic with you for basically the first time!
MT: Yeah! Well, thank you so much for having this conversation with me, this has been a lot of fun.
[Interstitial music]
FK: Well, I was trying to come up with some way to say, like, make some joke, be like, “I’ve been whumped by knowledge,” or I don’t know what, but there’s absolutely nothing that I can come out of this. I enjoyed it. [laughs]
ELM: Get out. How do you do, fellow kids!
FK: [overlapping] But the dad jokes, they’re failing. [both laugh]
ELM: Oh my God. Get outta here. Um…
FK: Yeah…
ELM: That was fantastic, Maria is such a—
FK: It really was.
ELM: —a font of knowledge around this topic, after such deep reporting.
FK: Absolutely. And I think it’s probably a good time to mention that those of you who have been keeping an eye on what we’ve been doing have noticed probably that we haven’t had that many articles lately, and we’re really excited to have one with Maria. And…one thing we wanted to note is that one of the reasons that we haven’t been able to have as many articles is just, you know, there’s a funding thing going on. Which is that articles cost money, and we do care about paying journalists, especially for something reported like this. And we can’t afford to pay as much as we’d like, and we’d like to both pay more and also do more articles like this one. So…if you liked this conversation, and the article that Maria wrote, you can directly impact us [ELM laughs] having more conversations like this, more articles, and just generally more Fansplaining overall, by, you know, giving us money.
ELM: That was an NPR-level—I mean this is a great compliment, that had… [FK laughs] the finesse of the banter that they do during the pledge drive.
FK: Thank you! [ELM laughs] I was trying to channel it, I was like, reaching into my memory of NPR pledge drives, imagining. But it’s true, if it wasn’t true it wouldn’t have finesse.
ELM: OK, well, so this is all true, but there’s now, we’re gonna talk about Patreon in one second, our regular listeners have heard this spiel, we’re gonna spiel it again. But, we have something new, get excited! We, uh, are going to— [laughs]
FK: [laughs] A new way to give us money!
ELM: Get excited! Uh, so, we have long had a PayPal account that we use for various things, and so we’re gonna be setting that up as an opportunity for folks to give like a one-off pledge, as it were. Because we know a lot of people don’t use Patreon, don’t really wanna sign up for a recurring thing, but maybe you liked this article and wanna give us, you know, a tip, or you wanna give us a larger donation than a tip, that could fund the next article. But like, you know, it is true, I will say, as the editor of these, this is like…we…when people write articles for us, they’re doing really serious reporting, and I really wish we could do more of them, but honestly we just don’t have the funds to do it.
So yeah, if this is, specifically writing is something you’d be interested in seeing more of, or just funding the podcast which we already are making kind of at a loss, and you don’t want to do that recurring thing, please consider it. We’re gonna put it on our website, and specifically we’ll put it on each of the article pages, like we already mention Patreon on those, just so people can have a direct way to donate.
FK: And never fear, you can still, if you haven’t already, donate to our Patreon, patreon.com/fansplaining, as always we’ve got Tiny Zines, we’ve got special episodes, we’ve got really cute little enamel pins that we send out to folks, so if you’ve been thinking about it, been on the fence, not sure if we really need that kind of support, we really do need that support to continue to grow and especially do more journalism like this. So…patreon.com/fansplaining.
ELM: And we’d be remiss to note that Patreon is how we pay our transcriptionists, not just Maria, but the wonderful Rachel—
FK: Yay!
ELM: —who’s transcribing this right now. I just wanted to make sure that Rachel doesn’t feel left out. [laughs]
FK: OK, that’s good. That’s good. If you don’t have money or don’t want to give us your money or whatever, you can also support us, as always, by sending us messages, comments, questions: fansplaining at gmail.com; or fansplaining.tumblr.com, our ask box is open, anon is on; there’s also a form on the Fansplaining.com website; you can also send us a voicemail, 1-401-526-FANS. Love voicemails. And, you know, that really actually also helps us a great deal. Or, just spread the word, let people know about this incredible podcast, with fully transcribed episodes! Yeahhh! OK. I think I’m done now. I think that’s it. I think I just…it’s done.
ELM: [overlapping] All right. I think we’re, I think we’re both done now. I think that we’re finished.
FK: OK great. It was good to talk with you, Elizabeth. [both laugh]
ELM: OK, goodbye, Flourish.
FK: Bye.
[Outro music]