Why I love hurt/comfort

[regshoe]

snowflake_challenge #11 is to talk about your favourite trope, cliché, kink, motif or theme.

Now, as I'm sure will be absolutely shocking to anyone familiar with my fandoms, my favourite trope is hurt/comfort! I love how hurt/comfort situations can bring out strong emotions in various ways—reacting to another character getting hurt, showing emotion through comfort, realising how much the person comforting them really cares about them... And I love how the high stakes and emotional intensity of a hurt/comfort scenario can break down barriers between characters, or between characters and their own emotions, revealing feelings that would otherwise have remained hidden—because the characters are nominal enemies on opposite sides of a war, because of external or internalised homophobia, because one character has a tragic backstory and/or a terrible brain and is convinced they can never truly love or be loved.

As that suggests, it's mostly about the comfort for me. I'm not really into whump as such, and while the hurt may well be very serious I don't like it to be too brutal. My favourite kinds of hurt/comfort scenarios are those that provide the best opportunities for those emotional revelations and breaking down of barriers: huddling for warmth, bandaging someone's injuries or helping them to eat and drink, wrapping them in your coat/plaid as a blanket, abandoning other priorities to go and help the hurt character instead out of Philanthropy... I also like characters being comforted for something they didn't consciously realise was hurting them, like exhaustion from pushing themselves to work too hard or emotional pain caused by a tragic backstory/terrible brain to which they've inured themselves over the years—that's its own lovely kind of emotional revelation. And I love all sorts of little expressions of intimacy during hurt/comfort scenarios: handholding, reading aloud to the hurt character, keeping a vigil at their bedside during a fever, little forehead kisses—especially when done by a character who doesn't quite yet understand the emotions behind their comforting actions.

For any given pairing I don't tend to have strong preferences about who gets hurt and who comforts them, but I do like appreciating the different configurations. One of my favourite things about Flight of the Heron is that it has multiple significant hurt/comfort scenes in both directions, with various emotional complications in each case. There are different opportunities for fic, too, especially if the canon is more imbalanced—so a Wounded Name fic with hurt Aymar is 'yay, more canon-style deliciousness' while with hurt Laurent you would get 'ooh, interesting role reversal'.

I'd just like to quote Davie Balfour, a very wise person, deliberately invoking the power of hurt/comfort to resolve his quarrel with Alan:

No apology could blot out what I had said; it was needless to think of one, none could cover the offence; but where an apology was vain, a mere cry for help might bring Alan back to my side. I put my pride away from me. “Alan!” I said; “if ye cannae help me, I must just die here.”

And it totally works <3

Finally, if you are reading this post because you too love hurt/comfort and you have not yet read The Flight of the Heron or The Wounded Name, I highly recommend that you do—both are incredible gifts to hurt/comfort fans!

Comments

[philomytha]

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.

[regshoe]

:D

That's a very good point about fandom having words for these things! It is lovely how fandom as a community has worked out this system of concepts and structure that cater to fans. I think my own tastes for things like hurt/comfort have developed more as I've been in fandom, just because it's explicitly articulated and made so easy to find relevant canons and fanworks.

that bit of Kidnapped you quote (which my copy used to fall open to)

Aww! :D