regshoe

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of crystal snowflakes on green leaves on a dark blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

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!