Curate, connect, and discover
For me it’s all about how you make the initially awful situation a comfort compared to other stuff, and I don’t mean this in terms of just torture vs worse torture. It’s about the way a cramped closet in the dark feels like hell at first but has since become comforting now that it’s the only place they feel safe because at least here they’re left alone. Or how a whumper can’t help but keep thinking that they’d rather be actively hurt than try to recon with the mind games and forced intimacy because at least when they’re being hurt they feel like they know how to feel about whumper. Or even little things they took for granted like a rag they used as a blanket, or disgusting food that was they’re only option, being taken away.
It’s escalation sure, but in a way that makes recovery for whumper so much harder, because of those constants, and those sources of comfort that make you feel as soon as your snapped back to the reality that it isn’t normal. in constantly choosing between the bad and the worse in their head, wishing things would go back to just being not as awful, they later realise they completely forgot about anything else. And with those few scraps of comfort being the only thing that makes them feel safe anymore, even after being rescued, can lead to some interesting and possibly harmful coping mechanisms as they try to feel normal again.
What feels comforting is often what us familiar, but sometimes what is familiar to whumper can be the furthest thing from comforting to caretaker.
But then again it really comes down to just balancing reader experiences. Too much of the same isn’t fun, you gotta dangle that hope that things can be better even if whumpee doesn’t believe it in the moment. To me they’re stories about how people survive, regardless of how different they come out the other side of it all, and that struggle will always be more interesting to me than everything constantly getting worse with no promise of resolution. Surprises are fun, but the same set up with different unique ways of whumping the whumpee can get tedious.
Idk just my thoughts.
I feel like total discomfort/ constant complete suffering can become sort of numbing for a character, taking away the impact of escalation at a certain point. It's the scraps of comfort the character gets or finds that hit harder then some of the most brutal scenes I've read/seen. That's just me though, what are yalls thoughts on this?