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It's hc bingo season again! \o/
I always LOVE getting a bingo card.
So that I can then stare at it and cry and wonder if I picked the wrong prompts to veto. XD
It's all part of the charm.
This year's card is a bit meh as far as tropes I really like. On the other hand, it looks like we have about a half-dozen hilariously appropriate Bucky prompts (brainwashing/deprogramming! amnesia! tyranny/rebellion! plus a bunch of others - I guess Bucky is basically a walking h/c bingo card). There's one that I already know EXACTLY what I'm going to write for it (heat stroke! I was already planning something along those lines!), plus a couple of prompts that are completely wtf ones for me (begging? tentacles? HELP). "Mutation" works well for the MCU. "Arrest" sounds like a good one for White Collar.
Anyone want to offer ideas/suggestions/commiseration? :D "Heat stroke" is taken but I'm open to suggestions for any of the others (not promising to write them, but interested if people have ideas for them!). I'd be especially interested in any ideas for the "difficult" squares, which right now I think are begging, tentacles, cursed, noncon, runaways. Unusual or different takes on any of the prompts are welcome.
MCU and White Collar seem to be mostly what I'm writing, though you could also throw out ideas for other stuff I'm into (OUaT, Orphan Black, Dresden Files...).
So that I can then stare at it and cry and wonder if I picked the wrong prompts to veto. XD
It's all part of the charm.
| brainwashing / deprogramming | begging | surgery | skeletons in the closet | arrest |
| severe / life-threatening illness | lacerations / knife wounds | rape / non-con | falling | family |
| hallucinations | mutation | WILD CARD | telepathic trauma | hiding an injury / illness |
| sacrifice | exhaustion | abuse | nervous breakdown | amnesia |
| heat stroke | cursed | tyranny / rebellion | runaways | tentacles |
This year's card is a bit meh as far as tropes I really like. On the other hand, it looks like we have about a half-dozen hilariously appropriate Bucky prompts (brainwashing/deprogramming! amnesia! tyranny/rebellion! plus a bunch of others - I guess Bucky is basically a walking h/c bingo card). There's one that I already know EXACTLY what I'm going to write for it (heat stroke! I was already planning something along those lines!), plus a couple of prompts that are completely wtf ones for me (begging? tentacles? HELP). "Mutation" works well for the MCU. "Arrest" sounds like a good one for White Collar.
Anyone want to offer ideas/suggestions/commiseration? :D "Heat stroke" is taken but I'm open to suggestions for any of the others (not promising to write them, but interested if people have ideas for them!). I'd be especially interested in any ideas for the "difficult" squares, which right now I think are begging, tentacles, cursed, noncon, runaways. Unusual or different takes on any of the prompts are welcome.
MCU and White Collar seem to be mostly what I'm writing, though you could also throw out ideas for other stuff I'm into (OUaT, Orphan Black, Dresden Files...).
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... also "cursed", for that matter!
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I was just now talking about my card to frith-in-thorns in chat, and she suggested that "begging" can be used as "begging for the life of a friend", which hits my kinks much better than the most literal interpretation of the trope. ^_^
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I'm not one for tentacles, so no help there, but, well, not to sound like a broken record, but Sarah from Orphan Black would fit the runaways space. (Honestly, you could do medical violation and/or diminished consent in Orphan Black for the non-con space. It is a canon that asks, "What happens when your body is not your own?" after all.)
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Though I'm not sure if it could even remotely fit under the umbrella of "h/c" ...
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Once I catch up on Orphan Black, I hope you'll write some. I can't prompt for it now because I'm still on season one and desperately trying to avoid spoilers.
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I'm liking my card much better now that I've had some time to look at the squares and think about what I might do with them. There are some good ones on there!
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I can also pretty easily imagine a scenario in the MCU in which someone ends up with accidental tentacles.
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.... Also, wow, "archaic medical treatment" - if there was ever a perfect Steve prompt ...
(The sheer amount of fic I have seen that fails to grasp the difference between medicine circa 1930s and medicine circa 2010s is truly boggling.)
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Right? Hey did you know in the 30s they thought asthma was psychosomatic?* Have an asthma attack, get psychoanalized. And that was the LEAST damaging "treatment" for asthma of the period.
I once made a whole big rant about how much current medicine we take for granted - specifically targeted at diseases in a post-apocalyptic context, but touching on everything else. Modern medicine is fucking amazing and seriously people take it so much for granted. I loved the moment in CA:TFA where they gave him penicillin before the procedure, because it's so pointless: there is absolutely no use for penicillin there from a modern POV. But to the people of the time penicillin was a WONDEROUS thing, all amazing and new and almost magical. It was this wonderful little moment that cracked me the fuck up.
Asthma? No longer disqualifies you for military service, as long as it's controllable. (Some people are very unlucky and have asthma severe enough to be difficult to control even with modern inhalers. In 1930s, these people would be very dead.)
. . . YEAH I HAVE FEELINGS ON THIS TOPIC and then you add to that the part where regardless of what was AVAILABLE for his various conditions and treatment of how often he got sick (which was not very damn much at all), Steve was dirt poor and all of them were bloody expensive which means that no basically his resources whenever he got sick were prayer, hot soup and tea, some folk remedies, and whatever his mom could covertly steal from work.
*I have some sympathy for this because they didn't HAVE the knowledge/instruments to actually see the physiology of an asthma attack, and some things go the other direction: many men with panic attacks are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they're having cardiac events because it feels exactly like that description. But sympathy aside, AHAHAHAHAHA OH GOD NO.
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>"begging, tentacles, cursed, noncon, runaways"
Well, "begging" brings to mind Nick admitting, "They were always our prey," to Natalie in FK's "Dark Knight." Vampires always fed on the homeless, the beggars, the overlooked. Only Nick ever cared. He tried to take care of Jeannie and Topper, but Topper was murdered and Jeannie gruesomely attacked. Enough hurt for someone to comfort?
"Runaways" also evokes Jeannie and Topper, of course, as well as many of Nick's flights from Lacroix (a la Janette giving him her jewelry and her trunk in "Father's Day" as he flees to America)... but Nick on his own is not a plural runaways. It would have to be a time that Janette fled with him... or Natalie, or someone else.
"Begging" also brings to mind Lacroix's preference for Nick admitting when Nick needs Lacroix's help. Lacroix revels in making him ask and admit, if not outright beg. That's another kind of hurt inflicted. And a kind of "noncon." Lacroix is skilled at inflicting "noncon" in ways that nevertheless have a mere PG13 rating because they're not physical sex and violence, instead brutalizing a soul. (Not that he doesn't do the rest off-screen.)
"Cursed" speaks for itself. "Now, he wants to be mortal again..." considers himself cursed, and willingly picks up the "cursed" Black Buddha statue, the living harp, and whatever else.
"Tentacles" ... could be metaphorical? How about the strangling "octopus" of late nineteenth-century US capitalism, a la Frank Norris? :-)
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I missed the bit with penicillin in TFA! Or don't remember, anyway. That's a great touch on the part of the writers, though. (And reminds me I should watch the movie again. For, uh, research. Yeah.)
... and really, that's one of the things that bugs me so much about people writing fic set in Brooklyn in the 1920s/30s and not even bothering to do basic research, because for me, aside from just being terribly detail-oriented and prone to getting knocked out of the story by stuff I know is wrong ... the worldbuilding is the fun part! Writing about (or reading about) a historical era is not too different from sci-fi/fantasy for me, in that a big part of the fun and the challenge is to become immersed in a different world and worldview. I love those little details; I love running into them in fiction. And Steve's canonical issues are an absolute wonderland for exploring interesting details of historical medical treatments, class issues, etc.
And yeah, it's changed SO MUCH in just a few decades. Actually, the fact that so many fanfic writers seem to have difficulty imagining a pre-antibiotic, pre-inhaler, pre-ubiquitous-lethal-childhood-disease world is a testament to how very quickly those changes have become embedded in the fabric of society.
... One thing I find slightly puzzling is that, while Steve's asthma crops up in basically every single pre-war fic out there, no one ever seems to deal with his other ailments, which according to the list in TFA includes heart trouble (possibly stemming from rheumatic fever). I'm not trying to downplay his asthma, which must certainly have been terrifying and potentially life-threatening, but can you even IMAGINE how much Steve's heart issues must have terrified Bucky, especially given Steve's tenacity and inability to admit when things are too much for his physical limitations. No wonder Bucky is clearly convinced that being in the Army is going to kill him.
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Actually, the fact that so many fanfic writers seem to have difficulty imagining a pre-antibiotic, pre-inhaler, pre-ubiquitous-lethal-childhood-disease world is a testament to how very quickly those changes have become embedded in the fabric of society.
Agree 100%.
Oh Steve was a walking timebomb of death, especially since TB can actually lurk dormant for a long time (years) before flaring up into an active infection. Honestly it IS a miracle he didn't die in training. My friends and I tend to shout out subtext/our take on the character's inner thoughts and thus "translations" of what they're saying when cowatching familiar movies; the one for the scene at the recruiting center tends to be:
Steve: DAMN IT I WANT TO DIE FOR SOMETHING MEANINGFUL AND IMPORTANT. :|
Bucky: FUCK YOU I DON'T WANT YOU TO DIE PERIOD. :|
So like, not only would being in the Army kill him, but there's almost this suspicion/unspoken terror that this possibility not only doesn't BOTHER Steve, but may in fact be a bonus, since he will die MATTERING.
Which makes me ponder about comparing MCU!Steve to book!Eowyn, but I digress.
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Bucky: FUCK YOU I DON'T WANT YOU TO DIE PERIOD. :|
..... AWWW BABIES.
But this brings up something really interesting about Steve, which is that he probably grew up expecting to die young. There's almost no way he could not, especially in the world he grew up in, a world in which he would surely have known other children who died and wasn't surrounded by a social climate in which medicine was expected to cure even the worst things. No wonder it was so important to him to make his death (and life) matter, since he would've known that one or another of his health issues was going to get him sooner or later, whether Bucky believed it or not.
Outliving Bucky must have thrown him for a loop in ways even beyond the emotional devastation of losing the person closest to him, because it would've been so deeply ingrained from childhood that Bucky was going to outlive him. This just isn't the way the world works.
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That's a really good point - especially since I don't actually think Peggy's speech stopped him from seeing Bucky's death as his fault. (I love her a lot, but, well. He did leave a live, armed enemy behind him. I wouldn't stop blaming myself, either.)
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Although I also get the impression that up until Bucky died (or "died"), there's a part of Steve that couldn't believe things weren't going to work out for the best, no matter what. It seems like a big piece of his innocence died along with Bucky, because up to that point, things had worked out -- the Commandos montage gives the impression that they lived a kind of charmed existence, where even the craziest, most unwise stunts they pulled somehow worked. There was no hail-Mary ploy so bizarre, insane or unlikely that they couldn't pull it off. And then that tendency to play fast and loose with the rules, to ignore the little voice that says "this is impossible, we can't do it" came back and bit him in the most awful possible way.
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