For me the most affecting h/c always ends up orienting around safe-not-safe: one character in lack of safety (for whatever reason - physical, mental, emotional) and the other(s) as source or potential source thereof.
... you know, thinking about it, I think that's actually a big part of it for me too. I mean, not always, and maybe not quite in the same way it is for you, but I think there's a very strong element of "finding the person/people who means 'home' to you" in a lot of what I write, and that's a strong aspect of it, and also of hurt/comfort that really works for me.
Which can also run into neutral: like there are scenarios where technically someone is having a hurt tended by someone else that are 100% just . . . there? they might as well be making lunch, because there's no exchange on that emotional level. If that makes any sense.
It does! I've also noticed that I need to have heavy emotional investment in order to really enjoy it, and the characters need to have heavy emotional investment with each other (or the potential for it), and in order to really get to me, the story needs to do something with that, one way or another. That is, it's not the scenario that does it for me so much as the way it affects the characters. This is not to say I can't enjoy anything else; I love a lot of things with no h/c element at all. But that's the perfect storm of factors for it to really hit me in that h/c kind of way. Otherwise it's just ... well, like you said, someone tending someone else's hurts, and not hurt/comfort (for me) in quite the same way.
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... you know, thinking about it, I think that's actually a big part of it for me too. I mean, not always, and maybe not quite in the same way it is for you, but I think there's a very strong element of "finding the person/people who means 'home' to you" in a lot of what I write, and that's a strong aspect of it, and also of hurt/comfort that really works for me.
Which can also run into neutral: like there are scenarios where technically someone is having a hurt tended by someone else that are 100% just . . . there? they might as well be making lunch, because there's no exchange on that emotional level. If that makes any sense.
It does! I've also noticed that I need to have heavy emotional investment in order to really enjoy it, and the characters need to have heavy emotional investment with each other (or the potential for it), and in order to really get to me, the story needs to do something with that, one way or another. That is, it's not the scenario that does it for me so much as the way it affects the characters. This is not to say I can't enjoy anything else; I love a lot of things with no h/c element at all. But that's the perfect storm of factors for it to really hit me in that h/c kind of way. Otherwise it's just ... well, like you said, someone tending someone else's hurts, and not hurt/comfort (for me) in quite the same way.