minxy

Two quick John/Rodney recs:

cesperanza: Learn Something New, not worksafe.

cottontail73: As The Stars Fade Out. Actually, you could probably read this at work. The kissing is described, the rest isn't explicit.

Pimping a challenge:

The darkside challenge, open to gen, het and slash at

dark_gate, looks amazing, and it was apparently spurred by this discussion of the domino effect within the team of going darkside. As people are musing about it in posts, though, talking about what a darkside character would do, how they would get there, I'm reminded of the discussions of non-con, and the recs I made for PTSD aftermath fics. I also recced a couple of just darkside-ish fics to

princessofg yesterday, and it's bringing me to a long-brewing meta on trauma, pain, flesh wounds and the timescales of healing.

It's completely tangential to the darkside discussion, but hey.

Because healing and recovery are fade to black things on screen, and I think part of what gets my goat about insubstantial non-con fics is that the author seems to be unnecessarily escalating the hurt just to validate the comfort which might reasonably be explained by some much less complicated trauma than rape.

So, for the record, if a person receives a flesh wound that really isn't going to slow them down, but might look reasonably bad to onlookers, you'd probably be talking about a gash or a laceration that is restricted to the outer layers of the skin. Heads and hands and feet bleed a lot more than you'd think a given wound is likely to. Feet and legs have a bit less circulation, and can take a long time to heal or scar over; also if you don't elevate the wound, it'll keep bleeding for a long time in that part of the body. There are arteries in the upper arm (on the inside, just under the bicep) which, when pressed, will minimize circulation to an arm if bleeding isn't slowing with compression and elevation. There is also an artery in the upper leg, in the soft crease between the thigh and stomach, just under the hip bone. It's named the femoral artery, for it's proximity to the femur bone. Pressing this artery with the heel of your hand will slow circulation to the legs in the event of a determined bleeder, and the position is fairly intimate (one's fingers would be rather near the groin area, which takes trust.) That's sort of a sexy wound treatment.

Anything deeper than the surface skin (deeper than, say, a bite wound from an animal's canine teeth less than an inch long, provided there's no tearing) isn't just going to bleed a lot and look bad, it's going to bleed dangerously and refuse to be stabilized without surgery to sew the separated bits back together and tie off severed veins, etc. Even then, a deep puncture (like a spear wound) will need resting, if in a particularly mobile part of the body, and any tugs to the area will most likely be hella distracting to the patient.

On the upside, an actively bleeding wound is clean of bacteria: movement is all outwards, there isn't a chance for bugs and viruses to climb in. You still want to stop the bleeding, of course, but with sterile bandages so the wound stays uninfected, and that's why you don't have to wash a bleeding wound first. I've always wondered if anyone ever considered bacterial infections on other worlds and how they differ. For the record, my opinion is that bacteria might evolve slightly differently (STDs are sort of a first world problem, after all, and most Goa'uld influenced planets had their development to that stage stunted, poor things) but they would be essentially the same except they would be free of antibiotic resistance, so drugs like penicillin would be effective again, until the bugs got home and had a chance to mutate, of course.

Wounds like broken bones or various other internal injuries, even if not open or compound, are really dangerous in their own right. Broken bones hurt and bleed internally. A broken femur (thigh bone) is immediately life threatening because it's a weight bearing bone. Others you can splint and immobilize; your victim will be in pain and deeply uncomfortable, to the point of distraction and inability to do anything else, but it will be a lot worse if that bone isn't stabilized (every movement will cause lots, and I mean lots, more pain). Fractures are good for a while like this, but breaks that need to be set need attention before the bone starts healing incorrectly, or the patient faces it being re-broken or a permanent limp/loss of function in a worse case scenario. And that's a clean break. Any shattering of bone? Multiple fractures or breaks that need to be set? Surgery required ASAP. Probably pins to align the bone fragments and hold them in place, possibly a plate if the bone is wide like a skull or scapula (shoulder blade) or pelvis (but that would really impede future sexcapades for a long time, so Not Sexy Injury).

Now, there are other kinds of injury that can be substantial and surprising. Dehydration, for example. Just a little distraction, failure to notice thirst (the thirst mechanism isn't enough, anyway, most people are chronically mildly dehydrated) and an unusual situation or two, like traveling or medication, could cause a person to pass out, get dizzy or even throw up, which is really surprising in a healthy person. Upside is that a reasonably first aid trained and alert companion would get them some water and they would recover really pretty snappily. Burns, if they are bad, require some plastic surgery care sometimes, and infection prevention a lot. Burns to a substantial portion of the skin can be life threatening, and burns are some of the most painful injuries ever. There are NERVES in the skin, and when nerves are burned, they scream.

The most alarming injuries to me are nerve based, because there isn't a lot that can be done. Chronic back pain, for example, is easily caused and difficult to fix. A trauma (sudden injury) might be treated with immobilization to wait for the inflammation to go down and hope that's enough, but a patient is effectively helpless during that time and the potential that the problem won't fix itself is frightening in it's implications. A patient would not be released from nursing care in that instance, he wouldn't be transported in a way that would compromise the spine, likely, if the injury was bad. On the mild side, it might be just an annoyance that wouldn't compromise movement (wait and see approach, with icing and rest), or, alternatively, muscle spasms might knock a patient out for days at a time, requiring some medications, care and help, but allow for full recovery once the spasm was over (very like a cramp in your calf: hurts liek hell, but when it's over, it's over.) If that were all it was, you could let a patient go home, as long as they lived with someone who could take care of them. Folks are not cute when they're in that much pain, though. They hurt. They snap. They feel helpless and guilty and bored and hurt. Nursing care is difficult.

Which is not to say that a fic writer needs to write in every doctors consult, but I'm just saying that even small injuries have large impacts. If you were wanting to write psychological trauma, consider fears, consider taking a life, seeing the face of someone dying, *failure*, or success leading to overlooking something else... all these things could have enormous existential consequences for a given character, especially if they'd defined themselves by a parameter that is being challenged.

I'd also encourage fic writers to consider that injuries, trauma, recovery, failures, disappointments and the like build up over time. A character could snap and go darkside over something that appeared small at the time, but was the last straw. *koff*TEAL'C*koff*

There are sexy injuries, though. Injuries that require small mercies, that you can't do yourself and require other people to do for you: taping gauze over a cleaned wound, for example, or someone looking in your eyes for pupil dialation or feeling your skin for a fever. Touching is addictive and people need to trust you before they'll let you near an injury they are twitchy about, so if you're caring for them, you might start feeling around farther away from the site of the suspected injury so the person relaxes and gets used to your touch before you deliberately hurt them to find out how bad it is.

And remember that Kolya and his minions are not master torturers. Cameron is much better at breaking Teal'c than any other person has ever been, right? The really good (?) torturers wouldn't risk killing a valuable person by letting a wraith feed on them. Nor would they try to physically break a person or let them slide into escape (like sleep or unconsciousness or numbness). They are out for the psychology of it; they want your mind active and seeking a way out of the situation. What I've read of torture indicates sleep deprivation, pulling fingernails, water torture, consistent small hurts, or threats to someone else to appeal to their compassion... not broken bones and destroyed knees. That's poor technique, and impatience and crass behavior. Not characteristic of evil races that habitually use energy stunning weapons that (conveniently) leave no marks and leave you whole and functional afterwards, although there's fanwank in them thar subjects.

I've always wondered if there were cumulative effects of ribbon devices, or zats, or lingering symptoms of sarcophagus use that don't fade over time, or if naquada could ultimately act like heavy metal poisoning in a person's blood... Somebody write me that story?

All of which is to say, injuries hurt, even little ones that the show never let us see effect the characters and didn't last the week to the next episode. I might suggest that exploiting the subtleties of pain or fear would be a much more novel and often entirely appropriate way of exploring character than resorting to sexual violence purely as a way of showing the seriousness of the hurt.

Of course, write what you want to write (caveat caveat). I'm just sayin'.

Seems to be the meta-ing hour in my head, as

rydra_wong is collecting another round of fantastic posts and discussions about race and discussion and people's egotistical and defensive reactions to same, even when their personal racism or lack thereof is completely beside the point... but I think it might just inform what I'm writing at the moment, as I tend to get sarcastic about the loadedness of the race question and the white inability to discuss the topic and not our intentions. Maybe I can say what I want to say a little more subtley another way, without, you know, resorting to satirical verbal bitch-slapping.