must there be a title

Hurt/Comfort is such an interesting thing. It’s basically an entire genre of fanfiction. I’d argue it satisfies a very basic, vital need–the same way that horror satisfies the basic need to be scared in a safe, controllable space. 

And yet it doesn’t really have an equivalent outside of fan culture. "Tearjerkers” can sometimes come close, they’re probably the closest thing to a mainstream hurt/comfort genre that there is. But those types of books and movies don’t usually focus on the “comfort” aspect in the same way, and don’t make use of tension and release.

I think every good hurt/comfort fic makes use of tension and release just as horror does, whether the writer is consciously aware of it or not. Though of course the tension and release in h/c comes from different sources than in horror. Instead of anticipating something frightening, you anticipate the intimacy and/or validation that comes from the “comfort” part you know is eventually coming. That’s what provides release of the tension built up during the “hurt” scenes.

I could write a goddamned essay about this it’s so fascinating. 

This is a great definition/analysis of it! I’ve been interested in this too. It’s always been my favorite fanfiction genre. It’s to the point where reading just angst is not enough, there is something left unfulfilled if the character does not have the ‘tension and release’ and just remains under whatever stressor at the end. I think part of the reason I like it so much, is often in mainstream media characters DO NOT have that ‘healing moment’, shall we say. Too often, there may be a sad/traumatic/stressful event and the character is shown to just pick themselves up from it and move on like nothing happened. Which is not realistic as we all know, so I think the hurt/comfort genre in fanfiction is a kind of a response to that. The “filling in the blanks” of when a character needs a moment of healing or validation to continue onward, because that in a sense is more relatable then the “super hero” character who can move through it like nothing damaged them. 

imo h/c is also built on the trust between two or more people. that when one of them falls there WILL be someone to validate their pain, soothe their wounds (physical or emotional), and not only pick them back up but remain with them even when they’re back on they’re feet. it’s not hurt/recovery; it’s not the super-human, masochist bullshit mentioned above. 

h/c builds a world in which we (as readers and in part as the parts of characters we identify with) are given permission to fall apart. h/c is the freedom to show pain because you know that there are people who will notice you being hurt – and will do their best to not only comfort you, but will also validate your reasons for being hurt, take your side completely, and help you get to the place you need to be to recover. 

if you’re ever in the position to choose between giving up and accepting defeat, and actually trying to fight the ancient unkillable god that is about to peel apart reality like a string cheese, remember this: scientifically speaking, you might as well give it a shot!

1.there were trees at the beginning of the world! there were trees so long ago that they predate bacteria that causes wood to decay. when a tree fell, it would lie there in stasis and there wasn’t any way of breaking down wood xylem on a molecular level in that way.

2. it seems obvious to say, but wood eating bacteria are literally incapable of comprehending what they’re breaking down. It’s just not information conciously available to a microorganism. they don’t know what they’re deconstructing, where it came from, bacteria have no way to even fathom the existence of a tree as a concept.

3. Regardless of the facts above, the world we live in today is a world where wood inevitably decomposes

it is worth fighting the unkillable god no matter how pointless it seems. it is worth taking the risk even though youre trying to accomplish something impossible. the reality in which you live was also once reality in which trees didn’t rot. You live in a reality that allows for existence before the possibility of destruction. you live in a reality where uncomprehending microbes break down matter that is so far beyond the scope of their comprehension that it feels comical to specify something so obvious. you live in a reality that occasionally allows unshakeable physical truths to be altered with no warning.

It is worth fighting the unkillable god because trees are so old they predate the source of their destruction, and it still did not spare them. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because bacteria rots unthinkingly, because there is room in our cosmos for destruction without comprehension on the part of the destroyer. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because now and then reality retracts the promise of immortality without fanfare, and when that happens there is no mercy for the ancient. the unmaking is not softer for the desecrators ignorance. for all things, existence is endless until the exact point where it ends.

so you might as well try to kill the unkillable god. it doesn’t seem likely, but at the beginning of the world, trees didn’t rot. so you never know! you never know

I do think it's pretty funny that fanfic premises based on illegitimate kids as an excuse for crossovers over the years have gone from "Mom character CHEATED on Dad character 😡" to "once upon a time, mommy and daddy had a threesome and now we have YOU!" lmaoooo. People don't want marital discord they just want a third parent

This post is "three parents living happily in one house" erasure smh

Only two parents? In *this* economy?

I love this post. I LOVE this post. When I was in Kindergarten, my teacher wanted to show my family a drawing we were supposed to do if our parents or family members (something like that). At that time, I was living in the house with my mother, my aunt, my grandparents, and my dad would visit sometimes on the weekend. As a baby, my mom was involved with a gay man who even after he came out stayed close with the family (there’s tons of pictures of him holding me as a baby). Anyway, they showed the picture I drew, where I told my teacher I had FIVE PARENTS.

I was an only child, but I was never lonely. My aunt was like the cool big sister, my grandpa pushed me on the swing and taught me about yardwork and exposed me to classic musicals, my grandma is the reason I can cook and bake.

It doesn’t matter how they get there: more people in your child’s life is a good thing.

Fast forward to when I am 15. My grandparents adopt me. My aunt legally becomes my sister, her children legally become my niece and nephew, my grandfather, almost near retirement, gets to joke around with his office that he has a teenager at home and she’s accomplishing xyz insert whatever activity they were keeping me busy with. My grandparents wouldn’t have it any other way.

You know who “gave me away” at my wedding? Six different people all in unison agreeing to help me and my husband on our journey.

I had TWO father/daughter dances that night. No one batted an eye.

More people doesn’t make your kid’s life complicated. It makes it better, I promise. It takes a village. Whether that village comes about organically, legally, through marriage, or polyamory.

I didn't initially tap this post as good poly rep (you can tell it was my second thought), but I am always of the opinion that you can have as many parents in your life as are there are people willing to raise you. There is no such thing as 'replacing a rightful role'; there are only people who love you and are willing to put the time in to be there for you, and your willingness to receive them. Likewise, I imagine, come partners and children.

Thank you for adding your experience.

[Image: a comic.

Panel 1: red haired man is praying next to a green wall, "Dear God, what makes an ideal marriage?" A voice from above answers, "Three people, minimum."

Panel 2: man is confused, "I thought you weren't down with that sort of thing." God responds, "Think of the children!"

Panel 3: god goes on above man's head, "You guys have been doubling parental childcare responsibilities every twenty years for the last century, but the standard total number of parents has stayed at two!'

Panel 4: continues, "Are you insane? You're gonna hands-on raise a family having only two adults who both have full time jobs? Do you hate yourselves?" Man now has a serious face on.

Panel 5: distant look at the man standing in a green bedroom and clenching his fists.

Panel 6: man is striding with purpose through a corridor.

Panel 7: man says, "Wife! I was praying tonight and I think we need to add a dude to our marriage who likes childcare and baking." He's pointing at a woman with brown hair and a pink shirt. She raises her hands and proclaims "God is good! God is good!" There are two smaller characters next to each other in the background. Probably the children.

/End description.]

horror writer: but get this, the killer didn’t know they were the killer because they were mentally ill the whole time!!

me: okay, great, wow, but you know what is equally stupid but a much better concept than that? The Ratatouille twist

the killer was a rat the entire time

Alternate concept killer is secretly the police chief who has some sort of mental disorder but instead of it being undiagnosed and he doesn’t know it

He knows he’s actually the killer

Is trying to frame someone else who got away from him in the past

Leaves passive aggressive notes to his alternate personality

Befriends and possibly dates someone who kills serial abusers

Gets away with it and lives happily ever after

Until the post credits scene or epilogue where another body pops up and he just grabs a sticky note walks to his mirror and writes SCREW YOU and walks away.

[Image: a light source behind a tall chef's hat is illuminating the silhouette of a rat, sitting inside and on top of the person's head. /End description.]

horror writer: but get this, the killer didn’t know they were the killer because they were mentally ill the whole time!!

me: okay, great, wow, but you know what is equally stupid but a much better concept than that? The Ratatouille twist

the killer was a rat the entire time

[Image: a tall chef's hat on someone's head. A light source somewhere behind it is illuminating the silhouette of a rat, that's sitting on top of the person's head, inside the hat. /End description.]

the “parents favor the sick child” stereotype is so utterly fucking untrue . I’ve literally seen parents make their teen kid babysit their 3 younger siblings while getting chemotherapy for aggressive cancer

the myth that when you’re sick you’re given everything you want is such insane made up bullshit 95% fabricated by jealous abled siblings and peers who will go on to disown you the microsecond you don’t get them attention anymore

the great part about being a disabled child is that not only do you get abused and neglected by your parents, but you also get blamed for the abuse and neglect of your siblings. everything is your fucking fault, even when it’s not

everybody’s always on writing prompts like “what if there was a world where everyone had a timer ticking down to their death… but you met someone whose timer said infinity!” or “what if everyone had their cause of death tattooed across their forehead… but you met someone whose forehead said THE CREATURE!” Enough -

enough. stop with the shock value. there is no need to insert THE CREATURE; the benign concept of such a world is horrifying enough. not even in urgency, but just in banal, everyday interaction. imagine you meet someone and their timer says two years. not tomorrow, not urgently soon, but two years. enough to do quite a lot. they could fall in love in that time - could they get engaged? have a baby? you might otherwise get to know them, befriend them, but perhaps you opt not to, make a conscious choice not to invest in your own grief. what balancing act would every individual person have to participate in - I have ten years, is that long enough to be a good mother to children? is that long enough to secure a caretaker for my own mother? my wife will die a few months before me. my newborn’s timer reads nineteen years.

and cause of death. you interview for a job and emblazoned across the healthy, smiling face of the HR lady is MALNUTRITION. your country is prospering, safe, but every person you meet on the street from the babies to the old women read BOMB. BOMB. what kind of havoc would fate wreak on the world? what about the loss of privacy? how would that shape our notions of hope? idk man I think a lot of those ancient poems were right, and the fates are monsters. I’m interested by the framing of these ideas as trite horror tales when the premises themselves are so much more disturbing if simply taken to their logical ends

Petition to sit down all the people who make coma theories about Adventure Time and tell them “listen, this fucking show is about the last human living in a post-apocalyptic world where deadly magic has been reawakened following a global thermonuclear war that wiped out the rest of the human species, how much fucking darker do you want it to be”

Even though I thought my first Creative Writing professor was kind of a douche, he made a good point about this. One of our first assignments was to write in this eerie, otherworldly style (we were mimicking a specific author whose name escapes me), so we had to write about eerie otherworldly things happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that more than half the class had a “big reveal” where we find out that the story’s strange events and themes are all in the mind of some person in an insane asylum, or someone having a drug trip.

My professor said something like, “you just successfully wrote a world that feels separate from our own, but got frightened last minute and shoe-horned in normalcy. You showed that you were afraid to commit to something different and interesting.” Though I’m typically a contrarian and a piece of garbage, I am inclined to agree with my professor. I feel like people who write coma theories and the like are afraid to accept that the world of the story is separate from our own. They like everything wrapped up in this crazy little realism box where nothing out of the ordinary happens in fiction.

you win the Best Addition to a Post prize

Thank you :)

I love the tension of “you can’t possibly want to be with someone like me” in queer stories, and the unbearable tension that results from someone saying “yes I very much do”

think a lot of straight stories get their tension from “is he safe? is he trustworthy?” versus like. hardly daring to believe that something this good could be happening to you of all people, as stigmatized as you are. and once you believe it you have to keep believing it, and dismantle every internal defense that keeps haranguing on that of course this isn’t happening to you because you’ve imagined the whole thing from top to bottom. the internal horror movie that goes on every time a queer person allows themselves to acknowledge something powerfully good in their lives and how much they stand to lose if it gets taken away from them.

it’s just different.

More random tropes that I fucking love: Becoming the mask you wore.

Like oh shit, this character who was sent to spy somewhere under a false identity suddenly realises they've started to genuinely become the person they claimed to be? Someone who's been telling the same lies about who they are for so long that they're actually forgetting that the story isn't true? Finding themselves genuinely doing the things they pretend to do in front of people, when they're alone and nobody's watching? Answering to a name that wasn't supposed to be theirs without thinking?

Ooohh-hoh-hoh, you lost track of yourself in pretending to be someone else? You were only supposed to impersonate somebody, a plausible background and a name you came up with on the spot, and now that the people you were supposed to infiltrate have become your true companions? You lost yourself in the game you played, and no you no longer know who you truly are, and where your true loyalties lie? And both sides would mark you a traitor if you came out with the truth. On a scale of one to ten, how bad did you fuck up.

Fuck that is a good trope. Never seen it done badly. Pour that shit on a table and I'll chop it into lines and snort it.

Once you fully appreciate the fact that the whole business with fairy food in certain folkloric traditions is generally more about the fairies abusing hospitality law than it is about magic food, a lot of standard tropes about aliens start to look like fairy tale tropes in sci-fi clothing. Like, consider how many standard sci-fi plots boil down to one of:

a. The human protagonist unwittingly transgresses some obscure hospitality law while visiting or trespassing in an alien’s dwelling, and is obliged to pay a weird and disproportionate restitution; or

b. The human protagonist unwittingly fulfills some obscure hospitality law and places an alien in their debt, who proceeds to repay that debt in a weird and disproportionate manner.

You could totally swap “alien” with “elf” and absolutely nothing would change.

“oh no we need to practice for our fake dating” is the funniest trope to me cause like. there are so many people who force themselves into a shitty relationship they hate just because of amatonormatiivity that it’s an ingrained part of popular culture to joke about hating your partner.

which is to say, oh my god you dont need to hold hands and go on fake dates, you don’t even need to agree on a single detail of your cover story beforehand. you can literally stand 6 feet apart at all times and look profoundly uncomfortable and all anyone will think is “yikes™. not my problem”

actually people should address this in fanfic more because “i know we could half-ass it, but i would never fake mistreat my fake husband, how dare you” is absolutely delightful

New trope: fake dating for spite.

“Look, my only goal here is for our pretend relationship to be demonstrably healthier than Aunt Rita and Uncle Carl’s fifteen year, three child marriage - which means the bar is so low we probably can’t fuck this up”

“My baby cousins are probably screwed when it comes to their chances of turning out normal, but I’d like them to have one healthy example in their life that isn’t Great Aunt Helen of the ‘some times the answer is arsenic’ advice.”

Concept: a mermaid who collects human artifacts, but, like, exclusively objects that humans have dramatically cast into the sea in moments of high emotion, catharsis, or personal revelation. Each item is carefully mounted above a little index card that outlines the circumstances of its hurling in terse, clinical prose.

How many outdated cellphones does she have from businessmen who realize that Family is more important?

Fewer than you’d think. For a variety of fascinating demographic and cultural reasons, importance-of-family cell phones are considerably more likely to be hurled into lakes than oceans. She’s co-authored a paper on the subject that’s due to be published next month.

I hope it’s been pier reviewed

very broadly speaking I think that audience members tend to conflate the gap between "certain pieces of information are technically available to this character" and "this character should know this and should act on this knowledge"

Like there's a whole genre in mystery/detective fics where The Detective lays out every piece of information available to them, reviews them, and then Makes Connections! But the fact that this IS a trope in detective fiction really highlights that this is not the way that human beings process available knowledge under normal circumstances

human beings can and absolutely will carry around two pieces of information that are actually highly relevant to each other in their heads, for years, and never ever make any kind of connection between them until something externally prompts that connection, simply because they picked up these two pieces of knowledge in different contexts

Hate that trope in fiction which is like “omg u guys were in a romantic relationship this whole time and just didn’t realise it haha friends don’t act like that w each other!!! ur sooo oblivious 🙄” like no.

If they didn’t label their relationship as romantic it is not a romantic relationship. ppl not involved in the relationship don’t get to determine the nature of a relationship for the people involved in it.

-> “they’re living together” ok? people have roommates?

-> “they have a pet/are raising a child together” yeah co-parenting exists?? plenty of ppl raise children who aren’t romantically involved

-> “they hold hands” so do friends and family :/ what’s ur point

-> “they have sex” friends w benefits exist buddy

None of these actions are inherently romantic. there is no action that is inherently “romantic” - that is only determined by the intent behind the action, not the action itself; nothing is romantic unless you want it to be

Also qprs exist. plenty of qpps do things that could be traditionally labelled “romantic” with no romantic intention behind them, like co-parenting children and living together. plenty of qpps “look” like romantic relationships from the outside even though the ppl involved in the qpr would not label it as such!

I’m not saying that this trope can’t be done well or that ppl can’t realise they have latent romantic feelings for each other once they’ve settled into a domestic routine . however. i think often it reinforces the idea that all relationships have to follow certain rules/appear a certain way or they’re not really valid. trying to force a label onto someone else’s relationship bc it “looks” like what u think a certain relationship type should look like is dumb - there is no one way for a romantic relationship/friendship/qpr to look!

tldr; u can’t label other ppls relationships for them and trying to force a label onto them when they haven’t put that label onto themselves is annoying and obnoxious

You know what would make a GREAT plot twist? Fidelity.

And yes I mean in the context of romantic relationships, but not only in the context of romantic relationships. Or did AND ROHAN WILL ANSWER mean nothing to you?