hurting and comforting = torturing and bathing?

[sua_lay]

What makes a person write ultimate hurt/comfort?

I'm not talking about the good old 'Blair is kidnapped, Jim finds him and bathes him' -kind of romantic sludge. Am not even talking about a certain amnesia fic where a certain Uruk-Hai ends up getting his teeth.... yeah. I'm talking about extreme torture and then extreme mush.

I just don't get it.

Years ago, I read a fic in Eroica fandom that made me sick. I'm not very squeamish about stuff (considering my fic taste goes from incest to kink to violence), but that story with its eccessive torture simply disgusted me. In the end, both main characters were scarred both physically (lost arms and eyes, raped) and mentally (I skimmed over the rest of the fic and apparently at least one of them was completely insane or in a vegetative state). Then ladyria showed me a HP fic where the Death Eaters had taken over Hogwarts and raped everyone for months.

Today, I read a CSI fic where the guys were tortured, lost various body parts and by the time 'Nicky' was in a catatonic state, I just ran.

I'm not saying you can't write such fics or post them. With warnings, you can post whatever you want to. I just wonder what's the attraction in these kinds of fics.

Writing about various horrors that are inevitably followed by a trauma is all right, but h/c is a form of art that needs to be treated carefully. If someone is in a car crash, he'll need physical therapy. If he's tortured and/or raped, he'll probably need both physical therapy and then some psychologist to rant to.

Love doesn't cure things.

Some people forget the healing part. [glares at all those Star Wars authors who seem to love the magical Healing Jedi Dick] Or then the story is one huge therapy session (usually written poorly). And I'm still talking about an ordinary h/c here.

Guess what happens when both the hurt and the comfort go where no fanfic has gone before?

Writing bad things happening to people can be artistic and is usually necessary to get the show on the road. I admit it freely! Once I started killing characters in a fic, it was kind of intriguing to watch how other characters reacted and tried to go on. But it's a different thing to hurt or kill a supporting character for the sake of the plot than it's to torment the main characters for no other reason than to make them hurt.

You read a fic because you want to read about these specific characters. I may not love each and every character I read of (as I've said earlier, there are those I like just because for some reason the character I love seems to be stupid enough to want to be with them; Hercules and Duncan MacLeod come to mind immediately), but I care enough to want to make them happy. That means they should have at least some glimmer of hope in the future as independent beings, not as broken toys the other characters take care of.

*fumes*

The thing about extreme h/c also boils down to my ages old pet peeve; charactarization. Most traumas in fic induce even the most crabby character into the teary eyed hand holding lover who murmurs sweet nothings into the other one's ear.

//"God, Blair, if I'd thought you might get a hangnail, I would have bought you cotton gloves and some hand cream ages ago," Jim muttered, his blue eyes filling with tears as he watched Blair struggle with his wound. //

There are characters who indeed have sat by sickbeds and carried their friends across the wilderness/plains of Gorgoroth/whatever. Then there are characters who clench their jaw and go and kick ass while their friend is going all *meep* in the hospital. My problem is, usually all characters in fic react with the 'oh my love, my darling' -way which doesn't fit most of them.

Yes, if your loved one almost dies, you want to coddle them and wrap them in a blanket and hide them from the world. That's perfectly normal. But if you actually do wrap them in a blanket and hide them from the world (and they allow you to), then you're in for some serious trouble. I guess it's all right for a knight in a shining armor to carry his princess to his castle and coddle her, but none of the characters I read of would settle for that kind of life.

/rant

So it's not my kink.

I'm not saying people shouldn't write extreme h/c just because I don't like it. I just wonder what makes people want to treat their characters that way. Is this one of those guilty pleasures; people reading weird crap in secret and not admitting it to anyone, or is there indeed a high regard on these kinds of fics?

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[sua-lay.livejournal.com]

It still makes no sense. :D