See, the thing I disagree with about

this post - which seems to be causing some degree of consternation and/or soul-searching on my FList - is that it doesn't really distinguish between bad trope and bad writing.

I happen to love exactly these kind of whumpage stories and I refuse to apologize for it no matter how juvenile the fantasy - and yes, I agree, it's a juvenile fantasy. But it's a very popular one that runs through a ton of fics, including many excellent ones. The difference between the good fics and the bad fics isn't the trope but the writing. I mean, aside from basic construction issues like grammar, etc, a good whumpage fic along these lines manages to dial it back a bit, add some plot, give the hero the occasional thing to think about besides his own misery, gives the hero some agency instead of having him be an entirely passive victim, gives characterizations to the victimizers so they aren't just randomly or irrationally evil, etc. A bad whumpage fic - and even those can still hit the id the right way, depending - is much more over the top.

Which isn't to say that these are to everyone's taste - clearly, they aren't, IDIC, etc. But I feel as though the OP is describing badfic even as she identifies a trope, and at least some of the commenters are doing the same.

So, for example, a really excellent story that's very well-written and very popular in SPN fandom is leonidaslion's The Light of Munin. It's classic whumpage, with exactly the tropes the OP describes, but it's also a wonderful story. And Lanning Cook's deeply wonderful Highlander story, Sacred Trust, also follows the same trope pretty closely - and it's brilliant.

My brief Dirty Dancing post

Brief because I'm pretty sure I said this before.

Anyhoo, in honor of Patrick Swayze, I've seen a bunch of posts in the blogosphere about the surprising feminism of Dirty Dancing. These posts focus on Baby's career ambitions and the fact that the film addressed such topics as class and abortion.

I also think it's a surprisingly feminist film, but for a different reason - it's about the female gaze. The most dominant visual images are the fairly endless shots of Jennifer Grey staring hungrily at Patrick Swayze as he puts his body on open display. The camera almost never lingers on the female form; instead, it's Swayze whose body is fetishized. I honestly can't think of another movie like it, and certainly not out of mainstream Hollywood.

Okay, I'm done now.