Noun: "(fandom slang) a genre of fan fiction, in which a character receives comfort from another after or while suffering injury, illness, or a traumatic experience"[edit]
1991, Roberta Rogow, FutureSpeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of Science Fiction, Paragon House (1991), →ISBN, page 280:
Hurt/comfort stories began as a combination of relationship and action/adventure. The two main characters would be in a life-threatening situation; one would be hurt, while the other would have to give comfort, and the relationship would determine the outcome.
1993, Cynthia Jenkins, "Menage a Deux", SBF 3, November 1993 (quoted in Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, New York University Press (2006), →ISBN, page 84):
Hurt/comfort stories often contain enough gore to send shivers down the back of activists concerned with the conflation of sex and violence.
1998, Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Duke University Press (1998), →ISBN, page 122:
In both "Slash" fiction and "Hurt/Comfort" stories, as well as the friendship stories described earlier, the "male" characters are given a combination of gender traits: Kirk's "feminine" traits are matched to Spock's "masculine" ones and vice versa.
1998, Greg Cox, Battle On!: An Unauthorized, Irreverent Look at Xena: Warrior Princess, Roc (1998), →ISBN, page 188:
The lengthy deathbed scenes, explicitly recalling Xena's near demise in "The Greater Good," feel a lot like fan fiction, where the "hurt/comfort" theme is a recognized and recurring way of exploring the intimate relationship between two fictional characters.
1998, Kazuko Suzuki, "Pornography or Therapy?: Japanese Girls Creating the Yaoi Phenomenon", in Millennium Girls: Today's Girls Around the World (ed. Sherrie A. Inness), Rowman & Littlefield (1998), →ISBN, page 262:
This formula resembles the hurt/comfort theme that is often employed by K/S zine writers to depict the transition from friendship to romance.
2002, Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans, Continuum (2002), →ISBN, page 137:
She proposes that writing slash — specifically the hurt/comfort genre, which involves assault, abuse and recovery — provides a therapeutic outlet for genuine, deep feelings of emotional pain.
2004, Nicholas Sammond, Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Writing, Duke University Press (2004), →ISBN, page 183:
Both h/c (hurt/comfort stories, in which one or both members of a pair are injured in some way, creating emotional closeness) and AU (alternate universe stories, in which the characters are taken out of the source text and placed in a different time or place) are subgenres in their own right, but are also commonly found as elements in slash, het (heterosexual relationship), and gen (nonsexual, or general audience) stories.
2005, Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, Peter Lang (2005), →ISBN, page 72:
A genre such as "hurt/comfort" ("h/c," in which one protagonist is injured and then comforted by the other) is considered slash if the act of offering comfort is sexual.
2005, Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, Wallflower Press (2005), →ISBN, page 171:
Buffy assumes the dominant role in this relationship with Spike, and the Spike/Buffy pairing might be seen as an extended 'hurt/comfort' story which looks like a 'hurt Spike' story for a good part of two seasons.
2006, Elizabeth Woledge, "Intimatopia: Genre Intersections Between Slash and the Mainstream", in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (eds. Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse), McFarland & Company (2006), →ISBN, page 111:
In this way, although it is often tied up with sexual depictions, as in the example I gave above, hurt/comfort can also be used to create a world in which, in contrast to the typical heterosexual romance novel, sex is far from the only way of expressing intimacy.
2008, Dru Pagliassotti, "Better Than Romance? Japanese BL Manga and the Subgenre of Male/Male Romantic Fiction", in Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (eds. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry & Dru Pagliassotti), McFarland & Company (2008), →ISBN, page 68:
Non-con storylines between the romantic protagonists may, therefore, be considered extreme extensions of the hurt/comfort theme common in slash; sexual assault serves as an emotional barrier or point of ritual death and, at the same time, an opportunity for the coercer to comfort and declare his love to the coerced.
2009, Jacob Clifton, "Spreading Disaster: Gender in the Supernatural Universe", in In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural (ed. Supernatural.tv), BenBella Books (2009), →ISBN, page 140:
It's hard to stand separate from the story when the story seems so intent on implicating the viewer in its ethical conundrums, and a lot harder to sexualize or fetishize the boys when their hurt/comfort tropes become more thematic than based in a given episode's particulars.
2010, Sharalyn Orbaugh, "Girls reading Harry Potter, girls writing desire: amateur manga and shōjo reading practices", in Girl Reading Girl in Japan (eds. Tomoko Aoyama & Barbara Hartley), Routledge (2010), →ISBN, page 180:
Stories of rape in yaoi fictions often fit a pattern known in English-language slash as hurt/comfort (or h/c), wherein the male victim of some kind of violence or humiliation (sexual or otherwise) is comforted by a male friend (sometimes also the person who has just committed the assault), leading naturally to scenes of tender intimacy between the comforter and comforted.
2011, Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships, Dutton (2011), →ISBN, unnumbered page:
Hurt/comfort stories typically involve a character who is harmed or suffering in some fashion.
2012, Anissa M. Graham & Jennifer C. Garlen, "Sex and the Single Sleuth", Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations (ed. Lynnette Porter), McFarland & Company (2012), →ISBN, page 30:
While genres for these stories range from drama to mystery, many stories are classified by their authors as romances or as “hurt/comfort” stories.
