Talk:Hurt/Comfort

Somehow the capital H/C and Hurt/Comfort means that lowercase h/c and hurt/comfort don't link back here; should this be Hurt/comfort or hurt/comfort?

I'd say Hurt/Comfort, and go back and edit the links to point here. --Betty 03:09, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Whump? Really? Can I get a cite? I ask not because I doubt, but because I am intrigued! --Betty 03:08, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Some whump links

I did a random search on whumpers, and pulled up a lot of links, most of it from SGA and SG-1. Here's a ff.net community whumpers, Stargate Atlantis Whumpers, and whumpers, a manual, and Joag's Stargate Stories.

synonyms?

I don't think "rape recovery" is a synonym for h/c. Maybe a subgenre. Also if we merge things like "whump" into h/c (which I feel is somewhat distinct in its aesthetic, though I have a hard time pinning it down), hurt/hurt should also get a mention as a term some use (or used maybe? it has become less popular with the rise of "whump" I think) for hurt without comfort.

I'm actually not sure the underlying motivation is the same. E.g. I love hurt, whump and torture fic, but have little patience for h/c, because I'm not really interested in the comfort part, but many h/c fans want at least equal wieght given to the comfort. I'm really not sure the genres are the same.--RatCreature 15:24, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

You're right. Rape Recovery is a subgenre, not a synonym, of H/C. Hurt/Hurt is also a subgenre though, and Whump is a synonym of that. (I think 'get-em' was an old gen term for Hurt-without-comfort as well). If the details get large--lots of controversies documented, lots of special mailing lists that are whump-only and no hurt-comfort, seminal fanworks that have no relationship between the two--then yeah, we might need to split them out, or make whump a subpage. Conceptually, what I am doing is making Hurt/Comfort the Fandom-level page name, and filing the variations under that. So if you look at The Professionals page, I'd like the Hurt/Comfort page to end up kinda like that, but where it has the characters listed, we'd have the different flavors of Hurt/Comfort, like Hurt/Hurt. --rache 16:10, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

yeah sure, I agree that it makes sense to bundle related things. I just don't want someone who doesn't know the term "whump" because it isn't used in their fandom end up thinking that it is the same as h/c. I think the hurt-only or hurt-mostly stories have a label distinct from h/c in so many fandoms because h/c-fans feel robbed if there isn't a comfort "pay-off" (at least I've seen many statements to that effect in fanfic discussions), so they'd like to know right away that it isn't "classic" h/c (I remember reading meta about ratios of hurt to comfort, even, to make something qualify). And vise versa hurt fans really aren't interested in twenty pages of cuddling while a character recovers from merely a bout of sniffles.--RatCreature 16:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm with Rat in that I dont' think whump is a subgenre of H/C - the merging bothers me. Hurt/Hurt is not a subgenre of H/C, if you think it's the same as whump - it's only a way to call whump that is derived from the existence of the genre H/C because it can compare to it. In other words, there must be places where whump-like fiction was born without the need for H/C fic to precede and frame it, imo. Hence why the merging bothers me.

Metafandoms are tough to define, and Hurt/Comfort goes back to TOS--the gen side of TOS, which I don't have a ton of familiarity with. Skimming the foresmutters archive, I don't know if "Shelter" in 1976 was the first K/S H/c story or not, but it was right up there. (It absolutely was the first K/S cave story.) I don't know when we started to differentiate Hurt/comfort and 'get -em's' (Hurt/hurt, 'whump') from each other; I don't even know if 'get em' was a real term that other people used, or if it was just something that my little fan community at the time used to describe H/c stories where there was no comfort involved. Both labels are part of a big morass of themes we (as in generic 'media fandom') wrote about, right from the early days. Having a newer term for it doesn't change the fact that it has existed since the dawn of time, and personally, I would like to keep the flavors of the fandom together, rather than leaving it broken out into component pieces on individual fandom/character/pairing pages. Hurt/cmfort is a fandom in and of itself, and it has a history and set of terms unique to it, and new terms have been added over time. I would like to make this the main page for that fandom, and treat it just like a regular fandom page, and tie all of the terms and history to it. --rache 17:37, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I know I have seen 'get 'em' as a term for stories that were all about the hurt rather than the comfort, and I think it was in TOS fandom, maybe some of the older zines or discussion on alt.startrek.creative. --Mary Crawford 18:32, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

But why then deserves "smarm" its own page as a genre even though it is more or less comfort without (most of) the hurt, but "whump" or "hurt/hurt" or "get em" or "torture" or whatever you call hurt without (most of) the comgort doesn't? To me these are more or less mirror cases. --RatCreature 18:45, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I was just thinking that, and wondering if I should move Smarm into this page as well. So that's the plan, unless someone can come up with a good reason not to do it. --rache 18:50, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I still think it will be confusing to smoosh the explanations all into one instead of referring to each other. The smarm page as already the start of a history section, so that would have to be merged into the history of the h/c term (which I assume will grow) and the history of whump as term, and the history of who calls it torture, and that's the history of three admittedly related cross fandom genre terms mushed into one history section. I think it would be clearer to have articles for the sub genres separately.--RatCreature 18:56, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm got some feedback from the Smarm talk page that no hurt is required for Smarm, in which case, it doesn't meet the Hurt/comfort criteria (which is Hurt, but not always comfort.) I'm asking them to go into more detail about the non-hurt aspects, so it may stay a separate page after all. --rache 19:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to move the "Get-" section off this page and onto 'whump' since it seems to me to not require any comfort, just hurt. --Betty 21:17, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

That's the thing, not all hurt/comfort involves comfort. But I've got to track down the sources for that. The links I have in this so far are hurt/comfort fans talking about hurt/comfort, and the original version of that being called 'get'. I have no idea when the comfort portion appeared, but by "the end of the hurt-comfort syndrome" by lezlie fish in the 1970s (again, something I need to track down), the genre included both components, called by different names. ::sigh:: there's just a lot of work to bring all of this together. --rache 00:25, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Rache, I understand what you're saying about H?C being "a fandom of its own" but when you get into fandoms defined by the same name as something that gets listed as "genre" in headers for fics across multiple fandoms, imo, you cannot treat their page as "the base page for that fandom". In other words, if there is a H/C fandom, yes it needs a page or an explanation about that, but considering that it is also a glossary term like "wingfic" or "angst" or "femslash", you can't use the "it is a fandom with a history" reason to fold into it many other glossary entries. That's just not right and will never make sense to me. Whump and Smarm deserve their own entry, not just a mention in H/C - there are many, MANY ways to interlink stuff and make sure the connections are not lost. you can duplicate content, you can write about the parentage of H/C in the whump entry, you have "see also" etc etc etc- but obscuring the glossary function completely with multiple redirects is doing some words and notions a great disservice. Not to mention that my using the H/C page as uniquely for the media fandom that you know exists around it you negate the possibility for other fandoms or communities to list their own meanings for whump or H/C. In my mind that's just wrong.--anatsuno 01:36, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

The smarm people made some good points, so I'm no longer planning on adding that. We're going to run into the same problem with a lot of other glossary-level fandoms, just as you say. If other communities come on board and use a term, we'll have to create a disambig page and have a structure for that, which could easily involve renaming pages and things. But I figure we do that then, when we need to, but at the moment there isn't a real need to have a separate page for it. When there is a need, you bet I'll be behind it. --rache 02:32, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

tropes/disability fic?

I'm not sure all these different story types in the tropes are necessarily h/c fic. For me disability fic that is listed as tropes in h/c is a separate genre, appealing to a different narrative kink than h/c fic, only sometimes it is also h/c on top of that. so I think the disability tropes should go on their own page, disability fic for example, and in the h/c tropes list just a general link to disability fic saying that much of it is h/c, and the specific examples then over there along with disability fic that isn't h/c, but maybe just fic about a character dealing with a disability or just having one as an AU, without the two person h/c setup as center. That would also give room cover the controversies over using disabilities as kink, over the problematics of the magic cure, and the inaccuracies in the portrayal of disabilities in fanfic, and all that meta that isn't h/c meta. --Ratcreature 22:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan to me. I was realizing how huge this is going to get, so IMO, you can go for it and split those out. --rache 22:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Degenerative Illness:

What's the Em story in SN where Casey gets cancer? It's the perfect example for this section

Dancing on Glass. (Still unfinished, I believe. Woe.) It really is perfect. --Arduinna 23:51, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

paraplegia/amputation rare?

The thematic disability fic list list over 65 stories with paralysis: http://www.geocities.com/disability_fanfic/paralysis.html and a number of amputation stories too: http://www.geocities.com/disability_fanfic/amputation.html

Granted, fandom-wide that may not be so much compared to the overall h/c numbers, but I'm not sure it's really rare, especially since the mental disabilities in that list number also only 16 stories, so assuming they tracked the same sample size of fanfic in their fandoms for both disabilities and the proportions were comparable, mental disabilities aren't more common.

Painless-j's HP list for disablilites lists a number of paralysis stories too (the above don't list HP ones): http://painless-j.net/2007/08/30/themed-list-disability/ --Ratcreature 00:09, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree, and it does vary by fandom -- in my experience, Age of Sail fandoms have a fair amount of amputation fic (both as hurt/comfort and disability fic), what with a fairly unforgiving setting where serious injuries are common and medical care is minimal. (Which I can say something about on whichever page amputation fic ends up.)--Penknife 13:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Moved! You can go ahead and add the information to Disability fic. I put in a reference on the Singular Tropes By Fandom as well. --rache 14:12, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You're right that both of those should be story tropes on this page. They're not really anything covered so far, so they should be added. --rache 00:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe the disability tropes could be moved to the disability fic page I created? I did short definition and a section with links to meta about disability fic and a couple of quotes about the problems, so maybe the tropes could now go there instead of being expanded further here?--Ratcreature 00:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Good point. I will add it to by todo list kept on my talk page, but if you get to it first, thank you. --rache 02:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

On Smarm

What, no "Beach"??? *shocked* --Speranza 02:53, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Quote Correction

There's something weird in the section that's "In "Queering Popular Culture", Susanne Jung says, [11] Mirna Cicioni discusses"--what does Susanne Jung say? Is she talking about Mirna or are these two passages?--Speranza 02:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll go look at it. But fwiw, here's the whole quote: "Smarm does not necessarily have to have an element of sexual tension. Rather, it tries to imagine a different idea of masculinity, one in which traditionally feminine traits such as nurturing and the open declaration of feelings are extended onto male characters. It can, however, serve as a starting point for a sexual relationship in a slash story. Mirna Cicioni discusses similar instances of comforting in her analysis of the "hurt/comfort" genre which she characterizes as an "eroticization of nurturance." I tried to go closer to the source and find Mirna's writing, but it's not easily available on line.

What have the whammy awards to do with whump?

I thought the Whammy Awards were the X-Files slash awards. They had many different categories, among them humour, best sex scene, best unsual location, etc., and best angst was just another category. I don't see how this translates to one of X-Files slash fandoms many awards was the Whammy awards for best angsty stories of each year. --Doro 10:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

yeah, I think that's a mistake, over name similarities maybe. I just deleted that sentence.--Ratcreature 11:24, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Whumping

The definition of whumping on this page was a bit misleading and not entirely correct. I copied the part about whumping from the SG-1 page and modified it to fit better into this article. The part about torture that was originally connected to the whump definition now follows the line about hurt/hurt; I didn't know where else to put it. Unrelated to the whump edit, I removed Original Slash and soulbond from "see also". Original slash is as general a term as slash and I couldn't see the connection there and soulbond is a specific story trope that doesn't require a h/c element. Even if it did, Story Tropes is already listed as a "see also" which means soulbond is covered anyway.--Doro 09:17, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Question about "get'm"

The Fan History Wiki explicitly says about whumping: It is not synonymous with a "get'm" story. "Get'm" stories have a very negative connotation that has never been part of "whumping" as a sub genre. The whumping part is right, but is what she says about the negative connotation of "Get" stories true? Or does it have the same positive connotations as whumping? --Doro 15:43, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, they have the same positive connotations, and I have no clue what the negative ones are that would be specific to get'ems and that wouldn't apply to all hurt/comfort overall. I think that she has confused a 'get em' with grovelfic there, but I'm not 100% sure, since I don't know what connotations she's talking about and am making guesses. --rache 15:54, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Splitting out the "hurts"

Over in the Talk:Moresome page, the notion of splitting hurt/hurt out from hurt/comfort was raised, and I agree; the two are very different things. I think the problem is that hurt/comfort is being seen as the base, when even according to this page, the base is really *hurt*, and how fans like that in different ways, with and without comfort. So I think what we need to do is to actually make a Hurt page with most of the overview from this page, with Hurt/Comfort and Hurt/Hurt as more detailed subpages on those particular subjects, linking back to Hurt as the overview of the wider fan appeal of hurting characters. Y/N? --Arduinna 18:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

That could work. Stuff like torture fic and certain whump that really has no comfort relationship but just aims to break a character down certainly would fit better with a Hurt page than merging it as weirdly comfort-deficient type of H/C.--Ratcreature 18:22, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm fine with having a unified Hurt page, and then splitting out the two types of stories. ----rache 03:14, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

That sounds good to me.--Penknife 12:08, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

There've been recent posts on the dreamwidth community about how to organize trope pages that might be useful for this case. As Speranza pointed out in the comments, there's no limit on the number of pages in the wiki, so there's no reason why we can't have a whump page, a hurt/hurt page, a hurt/comfort page, and a general Hurt page to link to all of them and make comparisons. Or use the h/c page as the main discussion page, but give each glossary term its own page as well and link it here.--æthel 12:49, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

I added Whump as a synonym as that term redirects to this page, but this doesn't seem right. It's not a synonym, at all. How to fix this snarl? --Mrs. Potato Head 19:56, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I still think Whump should have it's own page, then redirecting wouldn't be necessary. --Doro 20:01, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I know there was discussion on this aways back. I think someone typing it into a search should find it has it's own page. Go for it, Doro. --Mrs. Potato Head 20:12, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I also still think that either all terms should get their own glossary entry (not just whump also torture) or at least a page bundling all the hurt-only genres that aren't about comfort at all. I really think that there is a fundamental difference in that for one type the pay-off is the comfort (that's what I usually understand as "h/c") and for another type of fic the pay-off is to just break the character down, and enjoy the suffering or see what happens etc. I mean, I like torturefic, but I don't care much about X comforting Y through the sniffles. I don't think these two are still the same genre.--RatCreature 20:43, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Can we get on with splitting the glossary parts so that terms get their own pages? We can still mention them in the genre history here after all, that some want to keep centralize. I went ahead and made one for torture, and linked that from here.--RatCreature 10:09, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

image placement

I think you were still in the process of collecting, arranging the images, and I didn't want to disrupt, but the image dump at the beginning was making the page unreadable, imo, so I collected them into a gallery below for now. Maybe one image could be put nearer to the top, or images spread, but not this many as the very first thing, even before any text.--RatCreature 21:24, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

no problem, I'm just in the hunting around stage. I'll put others in a gallery next time. --Mrs. Potato Head 21:35, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Get and Lay

In the Brief History section, I'd vote for removing the sidenote: "(Sidenote: According to K.S. Langley, the earliest versions of what would today be called "het" fiction were sometimes called "lay" stories—lay-Spock, lay-Kirk, and so forth.)" While interesting, it's kind of distracting and not on topic ("get" meaning "hurt" and "lay" meaning "sex.) What do others think?--Mrs. Potato Head 12:30, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

It looks like the text has been revised so it fits better. I copied some of it to the het article if anyone wants to expand on "lay" there...--æþel 01:43, 20 April 2011 (UTC)