Hi y'all, let's talk about the stories we tell about trauma
Trauma is a bit of a buzzword. For the purposes of this project, it's any event or type of event that negatively and massively disrupts a person's wellbeing and/or sense of safety.
Trauma can include physical and/or sexual assault, genocide, the suicide attempt of a loved one, emotional domestic violence, living as the target of racism, homelessness, growing up hungry, torture, etc, etc, etc. (If you hadn't noticed yet, we're going to get into a lot of heavy stuff here, so please tread with caution.)
Proceed to discuss how fanfiction both reflects and shapes our understanding of trauma. We'll also break down topics like whump, savior narratives, fanfic's love affair with emotionally broken men, and what to do with all of that.
My focus
In writing this, I am coming from the perspective of a white, queer, woman from the U.S. who has had minimal personal experience with trauma. Most of my expertise in the areas I discuss is purely academic.
I will be working with fanfiction on An Archive of Our Own (AO3) using examples from Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fanfics.
Note that my ideas have been shaped by which fandoms I have been exposed to. I have observed all of these patterns cross-fandom, but I can’t say that they are universal because I haven’t spent serious time with more than fifteen of the thousands of fandoms out there.
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I also have little to no exposure to fanfiction outside of AO3 and Fanfiction.net, so I'm not going to include features of fanfiction spaces from Wattpad, Tumblr, etc. in these analyses.