Lungs

On conditioned whumpees...

Y'know, I think one of the things that people get wrong with conditioned whumpees is their rules. Specifically, when a whumpee was in long term captivity/training and they later get released or escape.

Most people write them as latching onto a caretaker or new whumper, and begging for new rules so they know they're doing something right. A new set of laws to live by, a new framework to behave to.

And that's... not really how conditioning works.

Conditioning means automatic reactions. Your body doing something that was trained into you without consulting your brain first.

There is no decision making. There is no choice. The trigger hits, and you are immediately performing the correct action regardless of anything else.

You're told to kneel? Your knees have already hit the ground. You're supposed to be standing in one part of the house when a certain noise is made? You've launched into movement before you even realize what you heard.

These rules are woven into the fabric of your body. And they are insurmountable. The conditioning overrides emotion, internal conflict, hesitation, beliefs, wants... everything.

Your whumpee may very well hate what is being done to them, and after the moment has passed they're cursing themself and their whumper. They're still a person on the inside. And that person is still very much alive. Most of the time, they will have some level of awareness that what's being done to them is wrong. They'll be angry. They'll be hurt. And they will hate that there is nothing they can do about it.

But the next time that trigger occurs, the response still hits them exactly the same.

So now take your whumpee out of that situation. They ran away, were rescued, were sold. They got out. Now they're with new people, a new caretaker, a new whumper. Or they're on their own and trying to make their own way in the world.

But those conditioned responses are still there.

There's no turning them off. You don't just replace them with new rules. They are in your every fibre. They have been built into the very framework of who you are.

The next time someone says the word "kneel", your knees are on the ground again. No matter where you are, or who you're with. The response happens before you can stop it. If they don't know why, everyone looks at you like you're insane. And you feel like you are.

Deconditioning is an agonizing process that takes more effort than I can even begin to describe to someone who's never experienced it.

Every time they hit that trigger, that response will still be there. Over, and over, and over, and over.

Breaking those rules down takes YEARS. And it is a constant effort that the whumpee has to choose to undergo every single time. Progress is measured milimeter by milimeter. You're told to kneel, and you kneel. You're told to kneel, and your mind catches up with the fact that you already did it— but a little sooner than it did before. Then a split second sooner. Then as you're doing it. Then you feel the impulse just before your knees hit the ground. Then you have a split-second of resistance before you go down. On and on and on and on, inching toward progress despite the fact that you're fighting with all your might. And that progress is anything but linear.

You don't just start obeying new rules. You don't latch on to your caretaker's new way of doing things and drop everything that you were conditioned to do before. These rules don't just get replaced.

Conditioning is not a belief system. It's a flinch response. Programmed deeper than the instincts you were born with.

You can be ordered not to obey the old command, and moments later when the trigger comes, you will anyway. Because in conditioning, the action comes before the choice.

These rules, these laws of your existence, come above everything else. And if your new whumper wants to replace them, they are going to have to beat the new rules into you so often and so severely that the pain becomes stronger than the old conditioning. At which point, the newly desired response will very, very slowly start to take over.

You're not swapping out new rules. You're layering new, worse conditioning on top of the old. And your brain will spend time stuck in that split-second between both responses before one finally grows stronger than the other. And even then, the change will not happen quickly.

That is what your conditioned whumpee is up against. That is what makes it such a horrible—HORRIBLE— and powerful tool.

WOW this post blew up! I am so glad that so many of you are finding it useful, your comments have been making my day.

Since I have a huge new influx of people seeing my blog, I wanted to take the chance to say something about it.

I know that the whump that I write and talk about is more realistic and gritty than what many in the community like to write/read. And I want to remind you that there is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying whump that's more comforting and escape-fantasy oriented. For those of you who write caretakers and many of you in the pet whump community especially, I know that whump is a way to get away. And there is nothing wrong with deciding not to bring the real-life horror into it.

(There is no wrong way to enjoy whump. Remember that.)

But in my own stories, I am writing for someone else entirely. I am writing for the people like me.

I am going to include the horrible, grinding, gritty, and ugly parts of whump, because I know what it feels like to finally discover someone else who knows.

I know what it's like to catch a glimpse of yourself in something like this. To see the flare of indignity in a whumpee answered by a familiar tug behind your sternum. To remember that flinch with your whole body. To know the horrible tug of having to keep your head down because you had to, no matter how badly you burned to push back. To know, to truly know, fear.

I know what it's like to realize that most of the people in the whump community can't imagine these things happening to someone in real life. Things that did happen to you.

I know you're out there.

I see you.

You are not alone.

Every story I write is TO YOU. I will keep calling out into the dark until I find as many of you as I can. Not only to show you that you're not alone, but to promise you that it's going to be okay.

whumper making their whumpee beg to not be punished in public. making the humiliation of groveling for mercy in front of everyone a punishment of its own.

Tying up an angel is difficult, aestheticly and practically. Those wings are not easy to bind without causing damage, and generally it doesn't end up looking that good anyway.

Nevertheless you must always try.

It's about free will for them. It's a thing. They're more like tools than men, they don't have any agency. Telling an angel to do something is like picking up a hammer, rather than asking a fellow human. You still have all the agency in this situation. You made the choices, you accepted the consequences, they merely carried out the action, as inevitably as the physics of the hammer moving. To borrow from Star Wars, they're all Do, and no Try.

Which is why you must always tie them up. Limiting their mobility and senses causes them to be unable to Do. They're a car that can't drive, a gun that can't fire, a hammer that can't ham.

The inability to do their job, their entire purpose... It's a conflict, inside a being that has never known the meaning of impossibility. I tease them "oh holy one, you can't do this? But why? Doing is what you are for, and what you are".

That conflict is the closest they can get to self-awareness. For a brief moment it's almost as if they have free will: they just can't exercise it at the moment.

So yeah. If you meet an angel on the road, you must tie them up. It's for their own good.

It's funny if you compare it with why a lot of humans like submission: it's relaxing to give up control, to not have to choose, to just obey.

We want less free will. They want more. We're starting at two ends of the spectrum and headed towards the opposite end.

Let's kiss in the middle.

one of my greatest pet peeves in fiction, and it is truly stupid I know, is that no one seems to understand how genuinely hard it is to kill someone via stabbing. stab wounds have a mortality rate of like 5%. especially abdominal stabbing. tv shows and movies show dudes getting stabbed one time in the lower abdomen with a tiny knife and then they fall over. like what did he die of precisely. that man died of Small Knife

the knife was discreetly laced with a point blank gunshot to the head

People have survived getting stabbed like 30+ times. Remember the Slenderman stabbing years back? The girl survived.

So here's the thing about writing stab wounds...if the person is going to die, make it brutal. Huge, serrated butcher's knife. Multiple stab wounds. Stabbed in multiple organs. Or, hell, use a small knife but cut up multiple arteries, or slice through veins length-wise. And is it a sharp knife? A kitchen knife? Hell, maybe a fruit knife. And most kitchen knives are pretty worn down so if you wanna kill someone with it it can take a while. Make it BRUTAL. And long. And painful. Make it obvious that the victim tried so hard and long to survive but they just didn't make it.

I'm a writer here, and depending on your intentions for a stab wound, you gotta do research on all sorts of things. How brutal do you want it to be? Painful? Heart-wrenching? Gory? Sometimes you gotta describe someone holding in their intestines after getting stabbed, you know how it is. I once heard of a woman who got stabbed like 30+ and had her head basically cut off to the point that she had to hold in her insides and her head and she STILL somehow survived.

Write about the indomitable human spirit and how sometimes, even that's not enough.

To Teach an Old Dog: #1

re re re re re re uploaded bc tumblr keeps fucking it up

TW: BBU/pet whump, casual mentions of dehumanization, institutionalized slavery, and suicide idealization, and me being very pretentious

Kavan’s back hurts. Of the numerous things wrong with his situation, this is what he decided to focus on in an attempt to stave off the impeding sensory overload— and this is the only familiar, non-Pet-fuckery problem he has.

A character who has given in and become submissive feeling disgust at themself, shame at what they have become. They lost whatever fight they had within them, whatever strength they had.

They can’t try to fight back anymore, now that they’ve debased themself completely. It is far too easy for their captor to remind them of their place, to laugh in their face at any display of courage. They are small and weak and pathetic and both of them know it. There’s no use in fighting that image. Now that the mask has slipped, they can’t believe in their own strength anymore.

The humiliation pulls them deep, deep down into shame and self-loathing. They are not the person they always thought they were, the person they desperately wanted, needed to be.

Their self image is broken. All they can see in themself anymore is weakness - and it’s reflected in the way everyone else looks at them too, like they’re some broken, helpless thing. How can they ever try to be strong again when they can’t see any strength within themself?