“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.”

–Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1981

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“In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy—as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh—as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege—as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover—as long as he is riddled with bullets. Violence makes the homo-eroticism of many ‘male’ genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.”

–Tarantino’s Incarnational Theology: Reservoir Dogs, Crucifixions, and Spectacular Violence. Kent L. Brintnall.

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(Expanding on this reddit AMA and the Right Here Write Queer podcast episode with Luna Daye, Noah Hawthorne, Sarah Wallace, and S. O. Callahan.)

What is hurt/comfort?

In the simplest terms, hurt/comfort is any scene in a story wherein a character is hurt in some way and subsequently comforted.

Examples of hurt/comfort I’ve enjoyed in fiction include…

Our Flag Means Death, wherein a ferocious pirate captain tenderly looks after his wounded peer, well before any emotional connection has been established between them.

The Terror, wherein a steward nurses his captain through alcohol withdrawals (and—spoiler—is subsequently nursed through scurvy by his captain).

(“Hey, there seems to be a nautical theme here,” you say. Yes. Because of the unique homosocial setting of the Age of Sail removing women from the scene, which forces men to step up into a caretaking role for other men, and also because the isolation of a ship at sea means medical care—including surgery—must occur on location and often at the hands of characters who are already deeply intertwined. Also because I’m the one making this list and I have a problem.)

The trope is particularly popular in fanfiction, for reasons that will be expounded upon later. According to Fanlore, hurt/comfort dates back to the Star Trek fandom of the 1970s. (An earlier term for the trope was “Get ‘em,” as in “attack.” A hurt/comfort fanfic centered around Spock, for example, would be called a “get Spock” story.)

A related term, “whump,” has undergone a curious evolution. Originally it meant a more severe form of hurt/comfort, heavier on the hurt and with less comfort—sometimes even no comfort at all. More recently it has come to be almost synonymous with hurt/comfort; not necessarily because of any changing attitudes towards the trope itself, but simply that tagging systems on most social media platforms struggle to parse the slash in hurt/comfort without breaking the hashtag. (Only very recently has tumblr fixed this issue. Instagram and the like haven’t bothered.) This makes finding hurt/comfort posts on social media extremely difficult. However, since there is significant overlap between hurt/comfort and whump content, users were able to find hurt/comfort content through the whump tag, and so they merged.

In my own works, Fiorenzo has the most hurt/comfort per page; appendicitis, wild animal attack, kidnapping, stabbing, poisoning… the list goes on. Mr Warren’s Profession has its fair share in boiler explosions, burns, broken bones, and sundry others, with bonus pneumonia in its sequel Throw His Heart Over. Hold Fast features horse-riding accidents and gunshot wounds. The Haunting of Heatherhurst Hall has just as much gore as you’d expect from Gothic horror, but probably far more caretaking than most. As for Oak King Holly King, let’s just say, antler-induced migraines—plus hypothermia and still more wild animal attack in the sequel Tales from Blackthorn Briar. It’s fairly obvious that hurt/comfort is my favorite trope and I doubt I’ll ever craft a story without at least a drop of it.

But why?

What makes hurt/comfort so compelling?

For me, hurt/comfort is inextricable from queer romance—and more specifically, from romance between men.

Male characters in Western media generally aren’t permitted to be emotionally vulnerable towards other men. It seems like the only time a man can show weakness is if he’s physically wounded and/or dying.

After a lifetime of absorbing that, the end result is that physical vulnerability and emotional vulnerability go hand-in-hand in my brain.

Furthermore, there’s almost never any catharsis after a man is shown to be wounded in TV/film. We are shown the violence, and we are perhaps even shown the rescue from said violence, but the recovery is limited in scope if it is depicted at all. I find that very unsatisfying. And hurt/comfort is, for me, a satisfying way to dwell in the catharsis that is denied us when we are only shown the “hurt” half of masculine vulnerability.

(This lack of comfort in most media wherein characters are hurt is also why this trope is particularly prominent in fanfiction. Fanfic exists to fill the gaps in existing stories, and comfort is a very common gap.)

To be loved when you are weak, to not have to hide your suffering, to be honest about your pain and have your pain not just witnessed but also sympathized with and empathized with and to the extent that it is possible alleviated, is frankly an exhilarating prospect, and to see it occur in fiction can grant the reader a powerful euphoria.

Hurt/comfort is also very powerful from a technical standpoint as a writer. Your narrative voice can say your characters care about each other. You can even make the characters say it out loud themselves. But nothing will be as effective as showing that care through the characters’ actions, and it is the showing that will make it feel truly real to the reader. And nothing says “I care about you” quite like holding someone’s hair out of their face while they puke, or spoon-feeding them soup while they’re too weak with fever to do for themselves, or picking through the pus and gore to clean their wound and staunch their blood. It’s precisely this unglamorous side of true love that makes it believable. And it’s that believability that compels me far more than a thousand flowery declarations of eternal affection ever could.

What is revealed about a man who tries to keep his walls up but is forced into a position of vulnerability by his circumstances? What might his friend, lover, or even enemy learn of him then? Still more character is revealed in how they react to his plight. If he expects scorn as a reward for what he perceives as a failure of his strength, what would it do to him to receive compassion in its stead? What could this new understanding between them spark?

I write hurt/comfort to answer these questions and to achieve the catharsis denied to me in almost all other media. In a world full of hurt, we all need some comfort.

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