sholio | (no subject)

Somehow it delights me to find out that S.E. Hinton (of The Outsiders) writes Outsiders fanfic (under a pen name), and also wrote to her favorite Outsiders fanfic author to tell them that she liked their work. ("It took her a while to believe that it was really me." I'll bet.) So in case you're in that fandom, the author is probably reading your fic, and some of the fic you're reading might be by her, too.

I finished a writing project today (a side story planned to be a mailing list extra ... though I might end up incorporating it in the main book; I'm not sure now) and I'm feeling somewhat at loose ends, so - you know what I love talking about and haven't talked about lately? Hurt/comfort. :D

If h/c is not your thing, no worries. If it is your thing ... or if aspects of it are ...

What are your favorite things in hurt/comfort? And is there a type of hurt/comfort you love that nobody ever seems to write?

... you know what I've been thinking about lately that you never seem to see in fic anymore? Comas. This was such a huge trope in '80s TV - it's on my mind because there's a great example in Wiseguy. And I remember a little of this in SGA fic, which was so huge it had everything. But I can't really ever remember seeing it anywhere else, even in White Collar which was a very h/c-intensive fandom that did basically everything to Neal - there MUST have been coma fic, but I don't remember any.

Possibly one reason for this, I guess, is that a realistically written coma isn't actually that much fun, because the recovery is so arduous and the likelihood of permanent, severe long-term health effects is so high. But, then, that's also true of concussions and a bunch of other things fandom really loves.

So yeah. #bringbackcomas2K20

It has also occurred to me that nobody ever writes altitude sickness. The only fic I've ever read that deals with it is the one I wrote; it's not even a canonical tag on AO3. And yet it's so perfectly tailor-made for it! It's debilitating, miserable, and life-threatening, and yet, with the right treatment it's easily curable with no lingering after-effects: get oxygen, go back to normal. If you were going to custom-design a fictional disease for hurt/comfort writers, you couldn't really do better. C'mon, fandom, don't leave me all alone here.

Anyway, favorite things - there's a lot that I love, but I think for me the best-of-the-best really comes down to the general categories of "woozy and out of it", and "desperately worried." And therefore, things that produce one or both of those conditions: head injuries, fevers, and drugs (among other things) in the first case, and for the latter, just about anything really life-threatening: getting shot, getting stabbed, being stranded far from medical help, drowning, heart attacks, etc.

(Oh yeah, that last one is another one I really would enjoy reading more of. Heart attacks. It's another one that rarely seems to get written, but has symptoms that lend themselves excellently to h/c. White Collar did have some, since Peter has one in canon.)

I think I like both of those classes of things because ... well, partly because sometimes you just like things and clearly I am wired that way, but there's just so much you can do with it from a character perspective. They both involve a sort of emotional stripping down of barriers -- pushing people to reveal a little of their inner selves without actually being pushed by the people they're around, if that makes any sense.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I also love that kind of scenario - I mostly don't end up writing it because the fandoms I have where it's plausible that something like that might happen are also the ones where my brain then demands I do worldbuilding on what even that MEANS (what counts as sex? why? why does another PERSON even have to be involved?) and usually trying to get it to the point where two characters actually have to have intercourse is more worldbuilding wrangling than it's worth.

(My brain is really weird about what it will and won't let me handwave, it's Annoying.)

I strongly suspect this is one of the reasons ABO has become popular with a lot of fans, because it comes with pre-explained tropes for this so you don't have to do all the world-building lifting! (unfortunately it comes with other tropes that squick me so it's not something I'm really into, generally.)

When I was writing my fic I thought I could get around the details by having the POV be the character who had no idea what was going on, and his partner (the one affected) not being in any condition to coherently explain it...but then as I wrote it developed and built itself anyway (the canon has both life-energy magic and aliens so it wasn't that difficult a fit anyway...!)

Yeah ABO does . . . . not . . . . solve that problem for me. XD It's not the effort of trope-design period that's the problem with me, it's that there is a part of my brain that cannot not rip wbing apart in writing to a certain extent, and ABO, er.

Basically by the time you've fixed ABO worldbuilding to something I'm not going "that makes no sense and that's not how people deal with that kind of stress situation, and if you put that many people in that stress situation it wouldn't look like that also it would end badly and not in a fun or interesting or sexy way" at, it's a) been even more work than figuring out comic-book-movie-fandom-level sexpollen and also b) probably doesn't look like any of those tropes anymore.

Which is not a problem everyone has and that's legit!

(I am the kind of person who - probably mild tmi - texts a friend in order to rant about how, when one has one hour or less of Private Time, it is REALLY OBNOXIOUS for one's fantasy-brain to decide to be nitpicky about logistical details of one's fantasy, ffs, this is NOT THE TIME, BRAIN. It's a consistent problem with my fictional imagination.)

It's a scenario I also love, FWIW. I suspect it's one of those things that more people are into than you'd think for the amount of fic catering to that particular version, but it falls into an awkward intersection of multiple squicks and kinks.

I think it probably is also very.....like your characters have to have very particular attitudes to sex or you as reader/writer have to have v specific wants in terms of the emotional entanglements.

(I could theoretically write amazing Nat/Clint sexpollen to this mode but then I hit my brains wbing quirks sigh.)