If you love someone, set them free. Off the edge of a cliff.

[taste_is_sweet]

Raise your hand if you like Hurt/Comfort, which I'm sure you all do because anything else is as inconceivable as hating kittens (I love kittens; The icon is an in-joke with my sister squeakyoflight. No kittens were hurt during the writing of this post).

We love you, Bucky!

For anyone not up on the fannish lingo, "Hurt/Comfort" stands for the wonderful creative exercise of tormenting the shit out of a favorite character--this is called 'whumping'--and then having your other favorite character(s) take care of him.

Often the whumpee is the hero. Almost equally often he's the Lancer, The Darkhorse, The Co-Hero and/or that one beloved character whom nobody else understands. But if he's popular, at some point someone is going to hurt him. Very, very badly. Occasionally even the writers of the original material, though rarely as frequently or as terribly as the fans would like.

Not bad, but he's still standing.

(And I'm using 'him' because I think I've read a fic where a female character was the whumpee maybe once since I started reading fanfiction. Not that I read fanfiction...Okay, yes. Yes I do.)

I'm bringing this up because the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out recently (You may have seen it). And after watching, my brilliant and adorable 12 year-old niece, who previously said that Captain America was her favorite, has now switched her allegiance entirely to the eponymous anti-hero of the subtitle. Why? Because of the suffering.

Yep, she's within throwing distance of her teens, and she has already understood that, while horrible to witness in real life, physical and mental injuries improve the attractiveness of a fictional character exponentially. And the Fighting Man for Lousy Climates gets that in spades. Like the kind you could use to dig a deep hole to pitch him into.

I love my niece, and I love that she's been bitten by the H/C bug. I love that there's this wonderful fangurl in the making. I love that she will probably write fanfic herself someday, and I'll get to share it with her. I love how she makes me remember being a kid and telling my sister fanfic stories for hours on end without knowing what fanfic even was, and populating them with my fictional crushes at the time. And, yes, treating them mercilessly and loving every second.

I have a hypothesis on why, exactly, H/C is so awesome (and I'm sure especially awesome among women), but you should probably just read this instead. I admit, however, that most of the time I don't really care about the why. I just love it.

Like kittens. And don't we all love kittens?

Picture of Bucky having a very bad day courtesy of lastsongs at grande_caps; Picture of Steve's moderately-acceptable injuries courtesy of Swannee's Screencaps.

Comments

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

I <3 your posting brain so hard it hurts…but when I continue to read it will be comforted.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

LOL I see what you did there. ;)

[brumeier.livejournal.com]

Hurt/comfort. So horribly mean, yet so necessary to my enjoyment of pretty much anything. LOL! My hubby is always asking why I have to torture my beloved characters. Um, because what doesn't kill us makes us stronger? Plus, it's an excellent way to bring my OTP together because of FEELINGS and ALMOST LOST YOU and NO MORE REGRETS.

TV almost never gets it right. There are never consequences. Steve fell off a cliff and broke his arm. For like two eps. Steve was hung up and tortured in North Korea for DAYS, but he was good to go once they got home. We get the hurt, almost never get the comfort.

Farscape, though. They did that right a lot. Aurora Chair, anyone?

I think it's awesome that your niece is turning into a fangirl. It's good to cultivate the next generation. ::grins::

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I've seen all of one ep of Farscape, so I don't know about the Aurora Chair, but I'm assuming it did lasting damage? Cool. ;) Though in all honesty, I don't really like my heroes fucked up forever, you know? They also need to be fixed. :D (Yes, I'm inconsistent.)

[brumeier.livejournal.com]

The Aurora Chair ep is what got me watching Farscape. Crichton got the crap tortured out of him and there was no running and escaping afterward a la Super Steve in North Korea. He was wrecked. I prefer that in a torture sequence.

He wasn't messed up forever, but long enough to be plausible.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Huh. Good for the series producers/writers. And also, ::shudder::. ;)

[frith_in_thorns]

Haha, I was your niece's age when I watched The Two Towers in a cinema and realised that I really enjoyed all of Aragorn's pre-Helm's Deep suffering :P

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

That is so fantastic. Girls burgeoning into womanhood, and discovering H/C. Awesome. :D

[sholio]

Well, I suppose my fanfic makes it abundantly clear where I stand on the h/c issue (and, more recently, on the Winter Soldier issue as well). *g* I'm happy that your niece is enjoying herself!

I do find it interesting that fanfic writers so rarely write h/c for female characters. It's not nonexistent by any means, and it's more common in het and (presumably) femslash, but pretty rare in gen -- rarer than just the relative prevalence of male to female characters would suggest (there are quite a few gen fics with female characters in the comforter role, but rarely as the comfortee). I'm not entirely sure what explain it -- if we're less comfortable putting women in the powerless role, if it's sexual and most h/c writers are heterosexual women (except they're not; at least, many of the ones I know aren't), or what. Anyway, it's interesting to me that most of the h/c with female characters that I've run across is het or poly.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Just read your first WS fic. Loved it. :D

I agree with you, btw, about feeling a bit overwhelmed by the amount of post-Winter Soldier movie fic. I'm writing one too--because I love feral, weaponized boys in need of rescuing as much as you do ;)--but for the first time in years (ever, in fandom?) I'm worried that I'm getting it wrong and no one will like it. Or no one will read it, with the glut of similar fic out there.

But! To actually respond to your comment, I appreciate your happiness on my niece's behalf. :) I'm looking forward to talking with her about the movie when I visit in May.

My hypothesis about the prevalence of men being the ones H in need of C is that women are culturally taught (in all cultures) to be the comforters and caretakers, whereas men are the protectors and providers. I think, therefore, that it becomes an automatic response to want to see a favorite (male) character in a position to be comforted and taken care of.

You also have a good point about how often women are portrayed as helpless in fiction. I certainly don't want to add to that, but honestly I find slinging hell at the men far more interesting. It might be a way to level the field, as it were, just as it's been suggested that so many het female writers find slash satisfying because there is not automatic M/f patriarchal power dynamic.

[draycevixen.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to think about it but I don't think I've ever known personally a fan girl who didn't love h/c, at least somewhere on the spectrum, be it middle ground, heavy on the hurt or heavy on the comfort. That might of course be a product of the fandoms I've been in that offer ample opportunities for it.

I actually think it may be the most universally loved of all the tropes.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you, and I can't really think of a fandom that doesn't lend itself to at least a little H/C, even if it's all emotional.

I'm wondering if fan boys like H/C too, and if it'd be different for het or gay fan boys.

[mcparrot.livejournal.com]

I too was sharing my "stories" with my best girlfriend, completely unaware that it was fanfiction or whump slash h/c for that matter, back when i was about 12. Imagine my delight at age 30 something to discover this thing called fanfiction - when The X Files was in its height, and there were thousands of people out there doing all sorts of dreadful, painful stuff to Mulder.

!!! I was NORMAL!!! Oh my god.

It was extraordinary.

And on the subject of the X Files - there was a lot of Scully torture, both in canon and in fic, but that is probably about the only place I've seen the femme torture. I hadn't noticed that until you mentioned it. I was into the Mulder H/C which had it's own name - Mulder torture or MT. There were whole sites devoted to it.

I have a soft spot for whumping those who are usually difficult to whump. The immortal,rapid healing, Jack Harkness is a real challenge and I must say I got quite good at it. But mainly I have a "type", the tall dark and slightly goofy do it for me all the time - hence: Jack H, Steve McGarrett, and lately John Sheppard. Oh and rewatching the X Files from the beginning and yeah Mulder fits in there too - what a surprise.

I don't agree with most of that post about why I like h/c. I think there is something to the physical pain in the chest, some actual hormone reaction in the reader (and the writer) that leads to that feeling of satisfaction from a well written fic. I gave this a bit of thought, right about that time I discovered all that X Files stuff so long ago.

My husband suffers from depression. There is nothing fun, enjoyable, or sexy about any of that in real life. Same with blood, broken bones, vomiting, or extreme mental anguish. There should be no reason for it to be pleasurable in fiction, but it is.

So other than that one idea up there, no real idea. I have heard of proper PhD type studies being done on the phenomenon. Can't be bothered tracking them down though. I suspect it would be like reading about what makes comedy funny. It's boring as bat shit. Better just to read, enjoy and leave comments so the author keeps writing.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea. Certainly humans have evolved to feel happy and closer to their loved ones via physical contact. Maybe the C part of the H/C offers that by proxy. Thank you for introducing me to that nifty hypothesis. :D

Now I'm tempted to go read some MT. The first fanfic I ever wrote was about Krycek, but for a while there I loved reading X-Files stuff, but at the time I didn't have access to the internet with my home computer, so I couldn't find very much.

I sympathize very much with your husband. I suffer from depression too, and I would never wish it on a real person. Same with any other physical or mental injury or ailment. But do it to someone fictional (and for me, at least, with the knowledge that they'll be rescued and healed) and I'm all over it. :)

[anna-bird.livejournal.com]

I like all these points. :) I think my own love for H/C also comes from a love for melodrama, and how close H/C comes to melodrama. It's so swoony when it's done well, and depending on your frame of mind, it can also be giggled at or held up as an example of bad, overdone melodrama.

I hope you finish the fic you mention in the comments! In times of post-movie fic deluges like these, I love it when reliably awesome writers jump into the fray. <3

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that lovely compliment! I've gotten around 6k words so far. I have no idea when it'll be finished, unfortunately, and I've hit a bit of a logistics snag. Not that that's unusual. I may have to add a scene...

Anyway! Melodrama, huh? I've definitely heard of the term but I looked it up to make sure I knew exactly what you meant. :) And yeah, I get you. It actually seems that most 'blockbuster'-type movies are made as melodrama anyway, so the H/C is right in line with that. :)

You need to be online more so I can chat with you!