Little Wip

If you have a team, let only one suffer;

have the team captured and let the whumper or villain chosen only a single person to suffer for everyone

let the chosen whumpee have to beg for something as basic as water and food for the group

have them kneel and humiliate themselves in front of the team to slowly start breaking their pride and ego (especially if it's the team leader or a super strong whumpee who's very proud and confident in themselves)

have them lick the whumper/ villains boots, kiss their hand, act like an animal or let them get whipped or hurt for those basic things but which are necessary for the groups survival

bonus if when the desired goods arrive and are given, the chosen whimper gets nothing and has to starve and be thirsty for the groups survival and well being

...

let only one be taken away for questioning or to be tortured

have the team watch how the chosen whumpee is whipped, beaten, hurt in unimaginable painful ways, have them watch them starve and be slowly broken

let the team be eaten alive by guilt as they watch the once so confident whumpee get broken down methodically

have the team beg and cry when after another session the limo body of the whumpee get thrown carelessly back into the cell, have them beg to be replaced by another

it's cruel physical torture for the chosen one and psychological torture for the helpless rest who can't do anything but watch

im obsessed with medics.

amateur medic who doesnt yet know how to help, fumbling with syringes and IVs

experienced medic who has seen too many die

enemy medic who is treating whumpee begrudgingly

injured medic who has to rely on others for once instead of the opposite

malicious medic whos tired of helping and now want to use their extensive anatomy knowledge for nefarious purposes

softie medic whos crying on the job daily but trying to stay strong

exhausted medic who doesnt have the energy to take care of themself at the end of the day

just... medics

the difference between these scenes is killing meeeeee

votes republican bc of this tumblr ad i just got

Couldn't stop thinking abt this song during their date for sum reason

Further Notes on Writing Signed Language

So I had a good think about this, based off of what I have written lately. As I go further into my novel, do even more research into different types of sign, and start on the arc that is written solely from the POV of my deaf character, I’ve begun to realize some other differences between signed and spoken dialogue.

For one thing, punctuation doesn’t apply in the same way. There is punctuation in sign language, but as I’ve talked about before, it is mostly facial; therefore, you describe it as a part of the dialogue tags. So then, what do about the commas, colons and semi-colons? In this case, the n-dash is your friend! The aforementioned punctuation marks indicate changes in tone, alterations of pace and pauses. Therefore, they can be replaced with an  n-dash, like so

“You and I – I don’t think we can continue.”

And fingerspelled words would be written as single letters, hyphenated into a word:

”You and I - going to L-O-N-D-O-N.”

For another, the syntax of your translated signed dialogue is subtly different. One sign can ususally mean several different words and filler words are absent. If someone were to say “really big.” in sign, they might just make the sign for “big” and super over-exaggerate.

So, verbal dialogue version:

“It was really, really big!” Lottie jumped and down in excitement, her eyes shining. 

And the signed dialogue version:

“The dog was huge!” Lottie flung out her hands into the word, making it larger than it needed to be, bouncing on her heels.

Keeping in mind that large, big, huge, bountiful (and other connected synonyms) are all the same sign.

I don’t like to write signed language in the syntax that it would be signed in (Name, yours, what instead of “what is your name”). Not only is this confusing for non-signing readers, but it also reads as childish or overly-simplistic for readers who don’t understand sign, which reinforces the harmful stereotype of deaf people being stupid/infantilisation of deaf people. It is impossible to truly do signed language justice in writing, because it’s a language made for hands, bodies and faces.

This all comes together to mean that the sentence structure of dialogue in sign will be different. You would use less contractions (isn’t, you’re, might’ve etc), fewer modifiers and shorter chunks of dialogue with the description of the sign in between.

If it reads differently or feels strange, that’s okay: signed language is different to verbal language and so they won’t sound the same as one another in writing. They’re more like cousins or step-siblings than part of the same direct family group. You’re utilizing different descriptors and tools.

Hopefully, this also answers the repeated issue of differentiation, which has come up time and time again from various people. Best of luck to you all with your writing x