Working on some fandom history and I found a thread from 2011 using the term “whumpee”, which I thought was a relatively recent term! ETA: Earlier than that, even! Both “whumper” as the antagonist and “whumpee” as the target of whump seem to have been well-established in 2007.
“Caretaker” as a general term seems to be much newer than I thought – the earliest use I found doing some blog archaeology on @justwhumpythings ‘ blog was only three years old.
“Whumping :: Physical and/or mental character abuse. There always seems to be a golden whumpee in each fandom… when I was still in Stargate fandom, I managed to do terrible things to Daniel Jackson on an almost daily basis. Nowadays, Hawkeye seems to hold that position.”
LJ comment by loneraven from 2003-02-09, imported to DW. Someone else in the comments asks the definition of ‘whumping’.
Fear the Wrath of the Ranty Whumper!!!, 2002-06-06 post by scorpionmars in mash_slash LJ com, later imported to DW.
There are various other uses by people in this same friend group from 2002-2006 if you search DW. (IDK how LJ search looks these days, but it’s sometimes easier to find things by searching DW’s imported LJ content.)
‘Whumper’ looks like it’s being used for the fic author or as a description of a type of fic (”Jack-whumper”, “Danny-whumper”) rather than for the antagonist, but ‘whumpee’ is being used for the victim.
Ah, thank you so much! This is great!
The next step would be to track down mailing lists. Two I see in the yahoo metadata that was recently released by the preservation project are:
StargateStorySearch, which I have a download of. I’ve unzipped it and opened it in a mail program. I don’t see any mention of ‘whumpee’, and ‘whumper’ is being used for stories (”Jack-whumper” again). ‘Whump’, however, is showing up plenty from 2002 when the list started on. (Note how ‘whump’ is explicitly mentioned in the list description on that Wayback page, though who knows what year that description was written.)
JackWhumping, which I don’t have a download of. Somebody else might though. This one dates from 2002 also.
I don’t see any mention of a Dannywhump mailing list in this set of metadata. I don’t know whether that means it was a non-yahoo list, we missed it, or people misremembered that popular recs list of dannywhump as a mailing list.
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Usenet is a pain in the ass to search, but that would be another likely place to track down very early 00s terminology. I’m not seeing much for ‘whumpee’. alt.tv.stargate-sg1 appears to be the major SG1 group, though IDK if there was another one for fic. I’m also not sure how complete google’s archive of groups is.
Here’s an example of what kind of ‘whump’ mentions were happening, which don’t have the terms above, but maybe the fact that they don’t is significant?
“end of march / beginning of april, we’ll bring a new sg-1 magazine online, covering various aspects of the show and the fandom. (well. at least we try our best). be prepared for 6 issues a year, and we encourage your participation.this new thingy will be called"PINK KHAKI"and yes, we’re serious about it.as for now, we do some research on the following topic, and that’s where we need your help.
WHUMPING!
we would be grateful if authors, no matter if gen/het/slash/whatever and no matter who’s whumped, could drop us a line and let us know about the why’s and how’s. how important is the hurt/comfort aspect for you? where do you draw the line? where’s the limit - is there a limit at all? why do you “whump” a certain character? also reader’s opinions are very welcome.”
Feb 20, 2002, alt.tv.stargate-sg1, post by Pink Khaki
“Yeah, that was original, wasn’t it? Is it just me, or is this all getting faintly ludicrous? I’ve never been in a fandom before where a character got whumped more often by the script writers than the fan writers. And gee look, Jack’s lost his brain again… wonder how that happened.”
Sep 23, 2000, alt.tv.stargate-sg1, post by rd
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‘Caretaker’ is new to me. I don’t recall ever seeing it used in discussions of h/c or whump in the past. (I mean, maybe as a general word of English it might have come up, but if you’d asked me if it was fannish slang, I’d have said “no” until reading this post.)
It occurs to me to search for ‘hurtee’, which gets me this Dreamwidth post:
“One of the few hurt/comfort fics I like. Rare in that it doesn’t protray the hurtee as weak or helpless or self absorbed and the comforter doesn’t have to assume the role of diaperchanger, nanny or person without any personal desires other than to make others content. Both characters had wants and needs and acted on them, not the boo-boo.”
Admittedly, I haven’t thought a lot about the terminology for h/c, whump, etc., but ‘hurtee’ and ‘comforter’ are the terms that would come to mind if you asked me what the standard jargon used to be.
“Hurtee” is interesting – I’d never thought to search that because I’d never heard that term before. I’ll definitely have to look into that more. The example from LJ you included is from someone who admits they didn’t read much h/c – I wonder if “whumpee” was the in-group term and “hurtee” made an occasional appearance by outsiders who weren’t familiar with the common lingo.
Fanlore holds that the term “whump” originated in the Stargate SG-1 forums:
“Whump, as a term, is believed to have originated in the Stargate SG-1 fandom. Ff.net user OXBastedXO states in her profile that one of her minor claims to fame is coining the term Danny Whumping in the fandom.”
But at least one person claims “whump” was used as early as 1996 in the Earth 2 fandom. (This comes from a fan who claims that the term “whump” predates “hurt/comfort”, which I am confident is false, so I’m not sure how much weight I’d give to that opinion.)
I would be seriously interested where the word came from, what’s it’s etymology? My first thought is that it’s simple onomatopoeia (”When X is hurt, it sounds like WUMP!”) but it could be more complex than that. The only true way to know would be to ask the person who coined it, whomever they may be.
