regshoe

A big yes to all of this, h/c is the best trope!

What I love is that in fandom we have words and language for all of this. Young teenage me spent years wandering through libraries trying to find stories that scratched this particular itch with no real way to articulate what I was looking for or why. Some genres were more promising than others, and every so often I would stumble upon an author, like Rosemary Sutcliff or DK Broster, who were fundamentally on the right wavelength, or else find scenes in books that weren’t otherwise very h/c-oriented, like that bit of Kidnapped you quote (which my copy used to fall open to), but I wasn’t really even sure what I was looking for, I just knew it when I found it.