Hurt/Comfort: A Confession and a Celebration

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Title:	Hurt/Comfort: A Confession and a Celebration
Creator:	Renae
Date(s):	June 5, 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction, Hurt/Comfort
External Links:	Hurt/Comfort: A Confession and a Celebration
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Hurt/Comfort: A Confession and a Celebration is an essay by Renae.

It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.

Excerpts

A word about Hurt/Comfort. I love it. I love it for all the wrong reasons. I don't only use it to make the stoic types more vulnerable; I adore taking the most open character (who is usually my favorite) and trashing him until he is a devastated, whimpering wreck. I can get into trashing the stoic one, too, but he's usually my second helping.

There doesn't have to be a point. There doesn't have to be any character growth. I don't particularly favor stories where the hurt character rescues himself, either - rescue-by-partner being one of my favorite kinks. Sure, I want them to be resourceful, to come up with clever escape plans - but then I want them to *fail.*

This is not to say I have anything *against* stories where the character grows - I love those, too. But I'm honest with myself that they are *not* the main reason I read HC. I spent many years trying to convince *myself* that they were - but lately I've been able to say, "I read trash, for no constructive reason, and I love it." (There's still a bit of artistic guilt there, but I tell myself it's all right as long as I don't fool myself that good trash is the same as good fic.)

I have some standards - I love pain, I love despair and bitterness and terror, but I'm not all that fond of degradation or humiliation. I say that the character doesn't have to grow, but if he's shoved into a situation from which he *should grow (given his character) and doesn't, that vexes me mightily. I kinda like when a strong, independent hero (for the open, vulnerable characters I favor are not wimps, after all) is reduced to tears and mentally begging for rescue to arrive - but if this moment occurs on page three, before anything terrible has actually happened, I am SO out of there. Likewise if every minor character on the show comes forward to say how much they really cared for the missing guy, despite apparent antagonism. Sap, sap, sap.

Take my partner-rescue kink. Watching Wild Wild West, it always annoyed me that Artie or Jim would find a way to save themselves so often. I mean, I loved their resourcefulness, but I hated that the situation allowed them to bootstrap themselves out of Deathtrap #142 with no rescue scene. Far better if the character had been resourceful, had almost gotten themselves out, but the villain turned out to be cleverer than he/she seemed, and thwarted the attempt. I found myself (since I could hardly blame the heroes for being admirable, clever men) cursing the villains for their inconvenient stupidity. And the show's writers for their insensitivity to my needs. ;-> Partly, I know I do have a thing for the "get" plot, where everything bad conceivable happens to the main character and he must - somehow - survive it. Survive with his essential self, as well as his body, intact. This isn't exactly growth - it's more "getting back to zero" after being carried into the negative numbers. But to me, since life does sometimes seem to be an incomprehensible collection of disasters descending with no rhyme or reason, seeing someone cope with this is very inspiring.

It's a tricky thing, to do HC well, for the same reason it's tricky to do slash well - the greater the emotional extremes, the greater the chance the writer will have to stumble, and the more embarrassing the results if she does. We all know how pain feels (more of us than know how sex feels <g>), so we have a deep instinctive understanding of the reactions to it. That can be a help or a hindrance. A help, because we can "write what we know" more effectively than what we don't know, and because we know our readers will understand and identify with this. A hindrance, because we can let our own reactions override our sense of the character's reactions. Nothing ruins HC as fast as a grown man acting like a teenaged girl.

When we hurt our favorite hero, we're hurting ourselves, and yet we're also coping with that hurt, comforting it, and saving ourselves in the nick of time from worse. We get to play all three sides of the equation - victim, tormentor, and rescuer. Some people go so far on the hurt that you feel repelled - the infamous ex-Sentinel writer "Sharon", for instance, who has removed her stories from the 'Net - but for my money it's better if we work out these things on paper than if we let them bleed (so to speak) over into our real lives. That doesn't create good fiction, but like journal writing, perhaps it serves another purpose. And like journals, some of them can be good for others to read afterwards.

Fan Comments

A nice, personal essay explaining in great detail what it is about h/c that appeals to Renae. Several different fandoms and examples are used to paint the picture. I found myself nodding a lot while reading this. I read it for the first time years ago but it's timeless.