Hurt/Comfort - Fanlore

Hurt/Comfort

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Synonyms:
See also: Smarm, Angst, Woobie, Character Bashing, Muldertorture, rapefic, Disability fic, Darkfic, Story Tropes,Get 'em
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Contents

Definition

Hurt/comfort is a fan fiction genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. The injury, sickness or other kind of hurt allows an exploration of the characters and their relationship.

Hurt/comfort may be abbreviated as H/C. If the emphasis is on the hurt aspect of the story, then H/c may be used instead. If there is absolutely no comfort and a lot of hurt, then the term Hurt/Hurt has been used. Get, as in "Get Spock!", was a term used in Star Trek fandom to indicate a story with a lot of physical hurt and minimal comfort. The amount of hurt portrayed may edge into torture, another sub-genre of Hurt/comfort.[1]

Like Get, the term whumping (or whump) also refers to a form of H/C that is heavy on the hurt, has little comfort, and focuses on gen stories; it is similar to Muldertorture in X-Files fandom. It was coined in Stargate SG-1 fandom as Danny Whumping[2][3] where it is a fandom specific expression for the practice of physically and psychologically abusing one's favorite character in fanfiction. Daniel was the character a lot of fans loved most, which means he was the one they loved to hurt the most. Danny whumping was extremely popular, especially in gen fiction. There is a Daniel Jackson Whumping Society[4] and the Whumpalicious Archaeologist[5] page is dedicated to Danny whumping fanfic and vids. For a list of Danny whumping recs see lorien_79's Daniel whump FF-List.[6] One fan's response to the question of what makes Daniel so whumpable sheds some light on the popularity of whumping as a gen kink: Because it's so damn sexy. Watching Daniel get beat up, crying, screaming, I love all of it. It gives me tingles and makes me grin madly.[7] By now the term whumping has spread to several other fandoms that like to hurt their woobies. Whumping sometimes gets confused with character bashing, but while whumping implies that the character being hurt is a favorite, character bashing is motivated by hatred of the character being bashed.

Depending on the fandom and/or the author, H/C stories may also encompass BDSM elements to varying degrees.

Brief History

Hurt/comfort is one of the earliest genres of fan fiction. Originally, they were called "get" stories—Get-Spock, Get-Kirk—possibly this was American slang at the time, like "Get Smart" [8] and "Get Christie Love!" [9](Sidenote: According to KLangly, the earliest versions of what would today be called "het" fiction were called "lay" stories—lay-Spock, lay-Kirk, and so forth [10]) "Get-" stories were frequently gen, and often light on the comfort. The Star Trek zine Contact contained both 'Get-' style and 'Hurt/comfort' style stories, as well as both friendship and slash stories between Kirk and Spock.[11]. The intermixed relationship between the 'Get-' style story and the 'Hurt/comfort' style was pointed out by KLangly, when she mentioned the editorial in Contact #4, which used both of the terms interchangeably:

Interestingly, the editorial for #4 states, "CONTACT seems to have become known as the 'get-em' zine of fandom. It abounds with pain and the hurt/comfort syndrome. This was never our original intention. Granted, we all have that masochistic streak that loves to see our heroes suffer…but four issues of ONLY this may have run its course.[10]

By 1979 when The End of the Hurt Comfort Syndrome by Leslie Fish parody of the genre was produced, the term 'Get-' had fallen out of use and the term Hurt/Comfort was primarily being used. As one of the first Kirk/Spock stories ever published to make the leap from Gen to Slash[12], the tropes of Hurt/Comfort were well recognized.

H/C as a Trope Played Out in Slash Stories

Hurt/comfort often plays a specific role in the plot of slash. Hurt in first time slash stories generally exists to make one the caretaker of the other (often isolating the two of them together), which breaks down both physical and mental boundaries between them, which leads to realizations about each other, which leads to slash. Joanna Russ has said about these types of stories that:


The nurturance in these stories is quite unreal, just as the misunderstandings, the scrupulousnesses, and the worries that keep the lovers from declaring themselves, are pure ritual, manufactured for the occasion. By "unreal" I don't mean simply glamorized or idealized but TOTALLY UNLIKE REALITY; if your beloved appears at your door bleeding and battered in real life, you probably don't feel a rush of erotic tendresse. In fact, once you've called for an ambulance, covered said beloved with a blanket, made sure the patient's head is lower than the patient's feet, and administered what medical help you can, you are far more likely to go into your bathroom and throw up. The nurturance in these tales is like Bette Davis's resolution in Jezebel to care for Henry Fond, who has yellow fever, while she looks heavenward (in a very becoming gown) and the sweetness of a thousand violins swells up on the sound-track. Nowhere do you see, for example, Fonda vomiting blood or Davis ugly with lack of sleep or resentful of her never-ending, grueling contact with such romantic objects as full bedpans.[13]


To the dismay of fans who feel it is poor characterization, over time in many slash pairings the 'smaller guy' (usually the more popular character in a pairing) becomes more and more likely to be the one hurt, to the point that he actually seems to be shrinking in the descriptions used for him in fanfic.[14] H/C written in a well-established slash fandom often goes to one of two extremes: either the littler character is routinely getting hurt over and over in ways that would kill normal people, or perhaps worse, he overreacts to the application of paper cuts, and must be saved/cured by his all powerful partner.[15] This dynamic is larger than hurt/comfort, but is definitely related to it.

Specific H/C Tropes in Fanfic

Not all stories with these elements are H/C, but they can frequently be found in H/C stories.

  • Amnesia: Usually including the partner's pain in being forgotten.
  • Disability fic: Includes blindness, amputation, paralysis, and other permanent injury.
  • Coma: One of the partners is in a coma for a brief or extended period of time. Example: Distant Shores, an epic Starsky & Hutch slash novel by April Valentine, wherein Hutch is kidnapped, presumed dead by Starsky and everyone else, but is in fact in a coma in Australia for several years.
  • Brain damage: Sometimes seen as a subset of disability fic, these are stories where one BSO is made permanently child-like. Examples include: "Gentle on my Mind" and sequels in The Professionals, the Highlander "Teddy Bear" stories, "Changes" in The Sentinel, "Goodbye to Dreams" in SG-1. Since these stories often include sex, some people have said they fulfill the same needs as chanslash in other fandoms. There are however also brain damage stories in which the BSO doesn't end up child-like, but with other effects from a brain injury, such as aphasia, seizures, partial paralysis, etc.
  • Death stories: Sometimes written as all hurt, no comfort; sometimes the comfort is aimed at the BSO who didn't die.
  • Presumed Dead: Deathfic with a happy ending, when the dead character turns out to be alive.
  • Sniffle fic (sometimes called Sick!fic): Stories with very minor hurt, in which the point was the comfort: putting them to bed, making them tea, seeing them cossetted. First used about the Pam Rose story, Fever, in The Professionals. May also be called comfortfic if the emphasis is very heavily on the comfort.
  • Torture fic: Injuring the character over and over again using extreme measures. Very popular in Highlander fandom, as the main characters were immortal and regenerated.

H/C in Academic Writing About Fandom

Camille Bacon-Smith, famously, decided that h/c was the secret cornerstone of fanfiction in Enterprising Women.[16]

In "Queering Popular Culture", Susanne Jung says, Mirna Cicioni discusses similar instances of comforting in her analysis of the "hurt/comfort" genre which she characterizes as an "eroticization of nurturance." With one partner satisfying a basic need of the other - providing warmth, food or emotional reassurance - elements like warmth or food, "although not specifically sexual in themselves [. . .] are eroticised because they give a physical dimension to the closeness of the bond between the partners and lead to, or become a part of, an intimacy that also has a sexual component". [17][18]

In her essay, "Women Reading Men," feminist film critic Christine Gledhill discusses the figure of "The Wounded Man," who "may cross over the gender divide, playing to a fantasy of similarity and rapproachment." Gledhill further notes that: "one attraction to this figure is its capacity to redress the power balance between the sexes--to force the male into the position of the woman. In so doing the wounding of the man, whether physical or psychological, makes the male figure accessible to the female imagination." [19]

Common H/C Types by Fandom

Fannish essays and meta about H/C

References

  1. ↑ Rosa's Hurtin' For Comfort rec page circa April 2002 (via Wayback Machine) Accessed October 12, 2008
  2. ↑ OXBastedXO says in her FF.net profile that one of her minor claims to fame is coining the term Danny Whumping in SG-1 fandom. (Accessed 13 November 2008)
  3. ↑ The Whumping article at Fan History Wiki credits OXBastedXO and @Yum equally. (Accessed 13 November 2008)
  4. ↑ Daniel Jackson Whumping Society
  5. ↑ Whumpalicious Archaeologist
  6. ↑ lorien_79. FF-List (Daniel whump)
  7. ↑ Angy. Whumpalicious Archaeologist, added 15 August 2005. (Accessed 13 November 2008)
  8. ↑ Get Smart on IMDB
  9. ↑ Get Christie Love! on IMDB
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Discussion of early Hurt/Comfort in LJ
  11. ↑ Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967 - 1987
  12. ↑ epic recs on This Deadly Innocence
  13. ↑ Russ, Joanna in the essay Pornography, by women, for women in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts
  14. ↑ Rana Eros, Travel Size for Your Convenience. Hosted at the Fanfic Symposium, 21 January 2002, accessed 20 October 2008.
  15. ↑ Lorelei Jones, The Damsel in Distress Syndrome. Hosted at the Fanfic Symposium, 17 November 1999, accessed 20 October 2008.
  16. ↑ Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women. Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.
  17. ↑ Queering Popular Culture: Female Spectators and the Appeal of Writing Slash Fan Fiction, by Susanne Jung, University of Tübingen, Germany
  18. ↑ Cicioni, Mirna. "Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing." Theorizing Fandom. Fans, Subculture, and Identity. Ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 1998. 153-77.
  19. ↑ Christine Gledhill, "Women Reading Men," Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women, ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumen. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.) 86-7.
  20. ↑ Blake's 7 Fanzine terminology (Accessed October 16, 2008)
  21. ↑ FrodoHealers Yahoo! group. Accessed Oct. 27, 2008.
  22. ↑ Lucy Gillam. The Death of Smarm. Posted 26 September 1999. (Accessed 21 October 2008)
  23. ↑ We Always Hurt the One We Love... and then turn him into a sorry-ass, emasculated, mentally unstable, whiny, co-dependent tag-along (Accessed 27 October 2008)
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