In the BBU/WRUinverse, the party line is that Pets chose that status, and that seems to be fairly well integrated into their public perception.

But what is the public view on their designations? Do they think expressed preferences are honored? Or are they aware that someone may volunteer for one designation and end up in a different one entirely?

In the BBU I write, "everyone knows" that people sign up and you get whatever designation you asked for.

It's in all the commercials, and besides, the anti-Pet lawyers would be on that like mad if WRU didn't give people what they signed up for!

It'd be illegal to do otherwise! WRU works strictly under the established Pet laws, entirely by consent. Anyone who has gone and actually toured a facility will tell you...

In my verse I can imagine the contract having a no responsibility clause about which designation they end up being, as that is assigned by the buyer. And because every single pet is a volunteer, nobody knows beforehand what their designation is gonna be, so they receive general training. All pets are in the system before they go to their forever homes. :) there’s no need to worry about those rumors about special orders. Every one of them was in the system before the client’s request was submitted. :)) owners may have specific tastes, but PCS has a wide variety in their catalogue :):):) after all, PCS exists to give everyone a chance :) :) :)) to live happily with someone, together:):))))

Sudden thought, but what about a couple in the bbu that get a divorce and are fighting over their boxie. Their favorite owner gives in to the pressure and lets the other, crueler one take them. The other owner is obviously devastated to lose boxie, but after a month, they receive a call from their ex asking what the hell should they do with this disobedient lazy leech who keeps messing everything in the kitchen and refusing to do their job, ruining their clothes and breaking anything they can get away with, lying and making up stories to everyone who calls and the most unbelievable is sitting on their bed with a glass of wine and a book turned upside down.

So just a few days later they drop boxie with the other owner, a little bruised and thinner than they remembered, but with such a genuine happiness to be back with them, boxie never misbehaves again.

“God fine okay you get the boxie”

“Splendid, let’s go little pet thing”

Boxie: :0

Boxie: >8(

Lies are unsustainable - part 2

This goddamned chapter has been in the back burner FOR SO FUCKING LONG. IM SO HAPPY I FINALLY CAN WRITE IT!!

Anyways, there´s a lot of things that changed. Please, please, go read the first part to get a refresher. 

We start on the whump fest that is the chapter Broken Bridges. :)))

Taglist: ask to be added or removed!

@castielamigos-whump-side-blog @giggly-evil-puppy @cowboysrappin @haro-whumps @burtlederp @neuro-whump @comfortforthepain @whumps-the-word​ @whole-and-apart-and-between @broken-horn​ @rosesareviolentlyread​ @starnight-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @as-a-matter-of-whump  @whumpasaurus101 @grizzlie70 @boxboysandotherwhump @unicornscotty

CW// Pet whump, shock collar, dehumanization, human trafficking, angst, BBU conditioning, hurt comfort, death and funerals, PTSD, nightmares, creepy Whumper and mute whumpee. 

Inside the thick walls of the Facility, Robert´s steps melted into silence. He knew the building and the people inside didn’t care that it was past midnight. For half of them the day had just started a few minutes ago, and they would go through their shift as usual. Yawning, Robert walked past a group of trainees on cleaning duty.

Robert´s eyes fixated on a freckled boxie´s neck. No scars on his neck, but just a black nylon shock collar wrapped around it.

It was odd to say he missed him sometimes. It was a lot less fun without him. He exhaled a humorless laugh. Being alone had never intimidated him so much. That’s why he had agreed to go to the archives to find what the doctor had asked for, as he promised he would stay a bit longer and make him company after the funeral.

After recognizing him as the guy who shared his Cuban cigars with them, the guards allowed him to get inside the maze of shelves with archives that led to a single computer inside the room. Once sat, he just needed to type the date, the company’s password, his password and then, the pet or handler´s number to get their files.

With just a click, he would gain full access to their training videos, their signing video, acquisition details, full medical report and accidents, the handler´s qualification exam scores and percentage of successful trainees.

All of PCS´s information would appear before his eyes. Unfiltered.

Robert doubted a second when the pop up for the pet´s number came up. The man looked over his shoulder to the surveillance camera in the corner, and took a deep breath.

“7, 9, 3, 0, 0, 3” he mumbled under his breath, as he typed and then pressed enter. 

What was a little indulgence?

When the window showed his face, it was comforting in a very strange way. Robert smirked at the name.

“Guess you got really lucky with my name choices” he giggled to himself, noticing the name written on the computer wasn´t the same he heard when he saw his introduction video.

Seguir leyendo

The Offer

So now we get into the tick of things! Hope the new additions make the story even more enjoyable! ^^ There´s a lot of new things I´m so excited to show you!

Some of the changes are: WRU HAS BEEN CHANGED TO PCS (Permanent Companion Service) Zarai has been changed to Sarahi (rip me having to go and edit everything again alsjdf) More info about the process of buying a pet and Albus training.

Taglist:  @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @giggly-evil-puppy @cowboysrappin @haro-whumps @burtlederp @neuro-whump @comfortforthepain @whumps-the-word @whole-and-apart-and-between @broken-horn @ashintheairlikesnow @rosesareviolentlyread​ @starnight-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @as-a-matter-of-whump  @whumpasaurus101 @grizzlie70​ @twistedcaretaker

TW:// pet whump, slavery, captivity, dehumanization, it as pronoun, human trafficking, grieving, implied chronic pain (lady whump), dehumanization and alcohol. 

The music, loud and strident, suddenly stopped to a halt. Eyes moved towards the newly promoted president of the marketing department. 

She took the microphone and gave a short speech about the changes the team would perceive with her as the head of the department. It was a bang of applause when she finished and the microphone changed hands to another person, just as enthusiastic for their promotion as her. 

The stark difference in the reception of their speech compared to hers was nothing she would bother worrying about. There was no point in giving unimportant matters attention, when there were far more important things to take care of. For example, the data about the upcoming project she would lead starting next year. 

As the party went on, the woman sat on a table far from the commotion. Among the chaos of papers, a laptop, a tablet and a bottle of wine, she sat profusely focused on her job. 

That was until a man`s figure sat on the chair next to her with two glasses of champagne. 

“Congratulations on your promotion, Sarahi” He smiled, handing her the glass.

“Thanks, Rob” She said, clinking her glass when he extended his and drinking a sip of it. 

“What an honor. For the CEO to come to congratulate me in person.”

“Former, CEO, Sarahi” he corrected her, slight irritation in his tone. “Right now, I´m just here as a proud friend of the new president of the marketing department”

Keep reading

I have rewritten this chapter so many times and I just didn´t get as satisfied as I am with this one faklsjdf

So few changes from now on!

Zarai has been changed to Sarahi, which is the more normal spelling. xD

WRU HAS BEEN CHANGED TO PCS (Permanent Companion Service)

And I have added the super amazing idea I think it was @boxboysandotherwhump who first said it?? about an introduction video to promote sales. 

It´s too bothersome to make the whole script, but I hope this is good enough for y´all to get the whumperflies.

Hope you enjoy!

Stanford prison experiment was a set up from the get go, but environmental factors do affect behavior. So, I wouldn't put it past from something like that being a thing in bbu. Humans are pretty great at normalizing stuff to a concerning degree, besides just look at bigotry doesn't take much for humans to see someone as lesser.

Mostly just wanting to point out the controversial nature of Stanford prison experiment.

Thank you @professional-idiocy! That is really interesting! I knew that there has been some criticism of the experiment, but I didn’t know any details.

Reading this and this about the experiment I kinda think that it is an even better comparison to the BBU - if you are given a role you are likely to want to live up to it.

I’m thinking about how people used to train dogs (and unfortunately still do in many places) with hash methods and thinking that they had to keep them in line and in the bottom of the hierarchy and all sorts of things, even though we now know that that idea of hierarchy is just wrong and that positive reinforcement is much better in all sorts of ways. Probably lots of people wanted to have good relationships with their dogs and were affectionate and loving towards them and still used hash training methods because that was the only thing they knew.

(And yes, dehumanisation of real people in the real world is happening with frightening efficiency.)

You know? Yeah, good owners are surely more abundant than bad ones. However, I have seen “good” cats and dogs owners physically punish their beloved dogs so harshly they give them anxiety. I have seen bad owners who kick their dogs on the side of the street, let the dog sleep with them in their beds.

I’m not getting into questioning morality, but I will question why someone would like to own a person as a pet if not to be able to have a human mind under control? Pets are animals who can’t communicate what they feel and have different behavioral patterns. When humans get pets what function are they serving? Company? For show? Safety and guarding? Herding? Sniffers? For breeding and get more money than they’re worth?

As op said, people have roles, and usually, they try to live up to them. However, a pet is thrown or even born, just to play the role their owner wants them to play and for that, they will train them to behave a certain way, or keep them in conditions that serve to ingrain the purpose they wish to give them. A pet is not in charge of what happens to them and so, aren’t allowed to question or demand anything different because they’re not above their owner’s wishes and decisions. However upsetting, they’re still dependent on them.

I think, at heart, nobody wants to purposely torture a living being you keep and care for, so what makes a bad owner is how extreme their punishments are. And that…how far someone will go is something unique to each person. As well as what type of rewards they will give.

Unless the pets are not something they have an emotional connection to.

It’s been proven time and time again, that the Stanford experiment and similar scenarios to Lord of the flies, which are famous for “showing people’s true internal evilness”, are generalizing bullshit experiments.

Why? Because people are so different and group dynamics change accordingly.

Group dynamics are severely fascinating. Because depending on the combinations of each individual’s role inside the team, it will pull a different result every time. Just try it out or remember your group projects and how the results were different with 1 friend and 2 strangers. One stranger and the capable guy. The dinamite guy, the serious one and the class clown. Your personality defines your role in a group because the mix of yours with others will create a dynamic, therefore, whatever role you take inside the group will be directly influenced by the people surrounding you, but will not depend solely on others.

Blame that on our social needs and skills.

And how unique we think ourselves to be. XD

If you add bigotry to the group, or “reasons” to justify alienating someone from the group, it will also change the role of that person within the group and how others treat them to socialize with the rest.

So, even if we can see how bad someone treats their pet, in the bbu, there might be a different standard simply because of the change of context, but in a detailed manner, because every pet and owner dynamic will define “how bad” is “bad” and will change from one another.

i don’t even think i have to caption this

I need to @ @ashintheairlikesnow and @albino-whumpee specifically for this one

LISTEN

BBU and Pet Welfare

So to preface this, I love the BBU. It's a fantastic shared sandbox with tons of amazing ideas and some really fantastic stories. It's a look into what human greed and corruption can produce when left unchecked, when you start seeing people as commodities rather than as people.

That said. I do have one issue. And I didn't even come up with this myself; it was brought to my attention by my lovely SO. I was trying to explain what the BBU was to them, and all the abuses that the pets experience.

SO, who is a vet student: yeah, except pets don't work that way.

Me: ???

SO: there are animal rights and animal welfare groups going nuts about our animal pets. There would absolutely be pets' rights/welfare groups in that setting.

Which. Is absolutely sound logic, and also something that I had never considered before. Because we don't just let people do whatever they want with their pets. There are groups like the ASPCA and RSPCA that go in and get involved if pets are being abused or neglected. They will seize animals that aren't being properly treated.

So why wouldn't there be anything like that for Pets?

Looking at it from a Doylist perspective, it feels like the answer is "because that doesn't make for as good of whump". But what's the Watsonian answer? What's the in-universe reason why there aren't protections for Pets? I find it hard to believe that WRU would manage to squash all of the dissent; in fact, it could be good for their image to help Pet welfare groups (or at least look like they're helping them). It could make people believe that they really do care about the pets that they train.

Obviously, having Pet welfare groups wouldn't solve everything. It would get really murky with Romantics, because consent from a brainwashed pet is... dubious at best. But I have trouble seeing any reason why Pet welfare groups wouldn't step in for things like physical abuse, or 'dog' fighting rings.

Is there a reason already developed about this that I just have missed? Or is this an avenue that the BBU could expand in?

Tagging some BBU writers that I know have great worldbuilding: @maracujatangerine, @ashintheairlikesnow, @haro-whumps, @the-host-and-colton, @cubeswhump

I think this is a really interesting question!

I think there are several parts to this (at least in the way I imagine it in my worldbuilding).

First, human Pets are normally only for the wealthy. Most people don’t personally know a pet and have rarely seen one in real life. There aren’t huge numbers of pets out there and that is because the training and acquisition process is so expensive and because only some of the candidates qualify (they want beautiful people, preferably ones without a lot of vocal family members and friends who might raise a fuss). I imagine that most of the WRU pets are volunteers, even if a few might be tricked or kidnapped. Of course, they don’t know what they actually are volunteering for.

Second, WRU has a lot of funding and a lot of influence on a global scale. The people buying their pets are rich and powerful and want to keep their fun to themselves. They lobby politicians, do lots of marketing and portray themselves as the good guys who would never mistreat their clients. Perhaps sometimes, they even let a carefully curated story of pet abuse escape, only to then take the poor, poor pet to be ‘rehabilitated’ at one of their facilities and then show it off to the media when they place it in its ‘forever home’. They deny the allegations of abuse.

Third. Most people have never met pets, but they have seen pets on TV. They are a staple in lots of tv series and movies (more often than not played by actors who are not pets themselves). Because WRU has lots of influence and funding the pets are always portrayed in a positive light, like happy and loyal friends and companions, servants and confidantes. (I recently have gotten into watching K-dramas and ‘the loyal secretary’ seems to be a staple, though that probably does not reflect real life in South Korea in any meaningful way. I think of human pets on TV like that.)

Fourth. The pet industry are seen as a solution to a real social problem. Automatisation, globalisation and other global changes have made manual jobs kinda scarce and created fairly large unemployment numbers. In combination with lacking social safety nets worldwide lots of people have it hard. To be accepted into the pet program is seen as a fairly good deal.

Fifth. Just like people unfortunately look at immigrants or people going on welfare with prejudice, people also have those prejudices against people who choose to become pets. That they are weak and can’t handle living in the world. Lydia decided to buy Coriander after having seen a WRU-sponsored documentary about how people who become pets are naturally ill-suited to manage life by themselves and how they need someone to take care of them. If someone complains about being mistreated, people can just say that that was a choice they made themselves and now they have to live with the consequences.

Lastly, I think there are some groups that try to raise the issue, but it isn’t something that the general public is very aware about.

Thanks for a great question!

You know, there was a case in Mexico about a lady who kept over 50 dogs in the same place and for some unfortunate reasons they began cannibalizing. It was videotaped and went viral, ending up in her going to jail for a while. Somehow, I know this lady personally. I spare you the details for the sake of the real reason of me bringing this up being animal rights activists taking up the case and viralizing even more similar cases.

Regardless of how animals can be known to be treated harshly, there will be outraging cases that will end up (in the most hopeful cases) making laws stricter and shifting people’s view on how to treat their pets.

Just as how shelters won’t let people adopt black cats in October and novemeber and sometimes, the most dedicated ones, will ask for a background checkup and constant updates, BBU universe could act the same. In fact in my own verse it’s mentioned how WRU keeps track of their sold pets, as they’re shady and is normal practice to kidnap people to fit the client’s order. However, in my verse, what’s seen as completely inhuman and cruel to make to a pet, is in a while different level. Some mutilation is seen as normal and even acceptable to ask from WRU, so welfare would only come to take the pet away if they were in a pretty horrible state where they’re stripped of their controlled autonomy entirely. For example, limb mutilation and permanent mental deterioration.

Sounds extreme, but following the “people won’t move unless the standard is lowered” statement, the qualifications to take a pet away lower after showing what “normal” treatment of pets with bad and cruel owners is like. So this welfare groups soar with new rules and promises of better quality of life by demanding better conditions and prerequisites to acquire pets.

However, what happens to the pets that have already gone past the point of no return? Or the ones hat are severely traumatized after their mistreatment? They’re silenced by WRU. Abandoned in pet only hospitals that compared to the shadiest hospital, the latter looks like a luxurious hotel. Besides that, there’s always gonna be cases with second hand shops, with laws from other countries and a long big etc, that means some pets will still be treated horribly and being “saved” from welfare groups that seem independent but are just a facade for WRU and others to look “good” with taking this poor pets in and giving them better training, better treatment, better owners what would make them look as the marvelous best enterprise to buy from.

Oh, and if we’re going into that, welfare groups would have such a hard time dealing with breeders. Because if pets are so popularized, there’s gotta be a second, cheaper option. Maybe a third. But that option must guarantee good results with no chance of failing by choosing only the very best of their products. Give people the chance to brag about impecable pedigree and you have a business.

Regardless of their origins, if welfare is searching for better quality of life for pets in a system that doesn’t truly care because of their perceptions about pets, then things like hospitals and procedures will be widely affected, thus, how they move and what they use to justify their actions against the industry will have to be reciprocal.

Also fun question to make to this welfare groups, but are they providing (or trying to) this better conditions to pets because they are pets and should at least be guaranteed a safe place or because regardless of their legal status they’re still people and should be treated with the minimum of respect as you would a fellow person? That subtle difference makes a world of difference in the whump.

Merry Christmas, @albino-whumpee!

From your Secret Santa:

Dear Moya! Merry Christmas! I hope you like your gift, it has been so fun reading up about your boys. Love from your whumpy secret santa!!

It’s so cool to see others writing about your characters and getting them right.nkdhkdhon I’m so in love with this! Ahhhh I’m gonna print it. Can I print it? I’m gonna do it anyways. Thank you so much secret Santa! This is the best thing to wake up to! :D

The way Sann talks about Albus when he’s unconscious it’s so him and I’m so glad What I tried to ay during the moments he mentions, came across well. The way he has the bitterness to wish for better is *muac* perfect.

And Albus straight up falling unconscious as he enters panic mode! I loved it!

Thank you so much! 💗 😭

What about a boxboy universe scenario where whumpee thinks caretaker is their new owner except they actually are.

In bbu's owning Pets is normal right? Bbu caretakers seem to be the one exception in those worlds who see through how fucked up it all is, but what if this time they werent? They were just a normal owner? And whumpee went from an extremely abusive owner to this one? Whumpee goes through all the motions of learning that this is a safe environment, but is still treated as a pet, as is normal to both of them. They still wear collars and they still follow commands. Caretaker loves whumpee, but doesn't decondition them into being human cause they still see them as less.