#**i know a lot of people whose illnesses/disabilities hit critical mass out of nowhere

[whumpfish]

So, I have been in a very long, very hot shower because I hurt like a bitch, and I think I have narrowed down the basis of my major whump pet peeve, and I'm going to be using my pet fav series Word of Honor to do it.

You cannot survive sustained/chronic/severe pain if you don't develop a relationship with it. The first couple episodes of Word of Honor aren't about Zhou Zishu x Wen Kexing, they're about Zhou Zishu x Zhou Zishu's pain/condition. And that latter relationship continues to evolve and stay at the forefront on a parallel path to the development of the former.

He saddles himself with this thing as penance, because when he makes that decision, he believes that being crippled is "a fate worse than death." And then he goes on living, and discovers that life goes on, so he makes an increasingly-less-guarded peace with it. So when he meets Wen Kexing and Gu Xiang, he's doing his own thing, enjoying the good parts of what remains of his life even though his condition remains at the forefront, and will for the rest of the series. He's integrated it into his life to such an extent that Gu Xiang readily dubs him "Sick Man."*

That's what gets my goat every time: whumpees that aren't allowed to develop a relationship with their pain and are instead thrust into relationships with "caretakers" who don't do much more than provide warm blankets and snuggles and therapy-approved conversation on demand, and be "heartbroken" over how broken and pathetic the whumpee is in their eyes. Because the reality is that the relationship with pain has to be established before any other relationships can go anywhere.

Pain/illness kills relationships. People leave. They just do. It becomes too much of a bother to make changes to their own lives, and they jet.** And it's just you and your pain/condition until you can find the few truly good people who will give you love and reasonable help. You have to develop a relationship with it. It's your new roommate for the rest of your life.

You and your pain are going to be in the wars. You're going to get mad and scream and throw things at it. You're going to resent it for being the only one who's there with you every day. You're going to think about all the shit you can't do anymore, and you'll be frustrated to tears.

But eventually - if you're allowed - you make peace. You stop hating your roommate for holding you back from parties, you just find someone who can drive you home, or stay in with you. You'll find other people who have the same kind of roommate, and then you'll all get along.

And if you are very, very, galactically, fictionally lucky, you find a partner who will help you stand your ground against life and what your roommate pain has made of it. This is what happens in Word of Honor.

Wen Kexing is by no stretch Zhou Zishu's perma-caretaker, or "Caretaker" in the sense that plagues new wave whump. But he cares, and offers what help he can, when he can, without hovering and without kid gloves. He looks for a cure earnestly but without coddling or pitying Zhou Zishu for being a Sick Man. It's a more honest and realistic portrayal of someone ill/disabled and someone not who loves them than I've seen anywhere else.

My relationship with my pain is ongoing and continues to evolve. It takes things from me, but it gives me things, too. My love of whump, the Pain Genre, is one of those things. Whenever my pain spikes like this, my tolerance for fluff in the whump zone plummets, so just know that whenever you get ornery meta from me, my pain and I are sitting around having wine (gingerbeer, can't have wine with the new meds, thanks a lot pain) and bitching.

The reason there's no good chronic pain rep outside of WOH is that characters are not being allowed to develop relationships with their pain, and are only allowed to have relationships with other things and people, and those relationships are inevitably trainwrecks, or insultingly unrealistic and saccharine, because an entire segment of the character's life and personality and identity is being masked or exploited instead of embraced. So let your whumpee have a relationship with their pain/conditions/traumas. Chronic pain/illness havers the world over will thank you.