We hurt the ones we love the most.

[kohaku]

A recent entry in lotrips_finders reminded me of something I wondered about for quite some time now:

Why is there such a huge demand for stories where our boys get injured or hurt or suffer in any way? Why do readers want to read about it and why do writers feel the need to write about it?

I have seen those stories in all of my fandoms, and except for Deathfic I did read some of them too. I don't mean to judge those stories, I just want to know if there are essays about it. I have read so many good essays on the subject of fan fiction, but haven't found any theories whatsoever on this particular subject.

So. Please help me. Are there essays, or do you have opinions, thoughts? Anything really. :)

Comments

Continuing my post from above

[fractal-moonshi.livejournal.com]

I think non-genre fiction has more trauma in it than it used to, as well. I recently read a discussion of "Young Adult" novels (read by 12-14 year olds). There was a quote from someone in the business, complaining about the amount of severe problems the characters in these novels faced, eg, incest, abuse, rape, drug addiction, etc. The critic said that in the name of "realism", the authors had created a body of literature where daily life was filled with gothic horrors, that ignored the good in life. But, really, where is the drama in a story where everything is going well?

The first two non-genre recent novels I can think of: can't remember their names. I didn't read them, but I read a number of reviews/excerpts, as they were bestsellers for quite a while. In one, a family suffers when their youngest child disappears from a hotel lobby. In the other, a woman is imprisoned for murder after a neighbor's child she was watching drowns on her farm. She is eventually exculpated, I think, but she and her husband lose the farm, and have to move to Milwaukee.

So, where am I going with all this? There are a lot of examples of hurt, if not always hurt/comfort, in modern literature outside of fanfic. So many authors may be inspired by their favorite original-fic authors. But in a book written by a professional writer, the trauma is usually secondary to other conflicts that arise in a larger plot. Plotting is the hardest part for many fanfic writers. So they may punch up the trauma to create the conflict to be resolved, without relying as much on the whodunit aspects.

Sometimes I've seen fans criticize h/c works as "feminizing" or "infantilizing", because the character cries and falls apart in a way inconsistent with their behavior in canon. But I think part of the appeal may be reading about a character who writers and readers identify with being allowed to break the taboo against expressing dependency. But the trauma must be extraordinary to allow them an exemption from the norm of self-sufficiency.

There is an extra angle when writing slash. Men are not supposed to express emotional or physical vulnerabilities to another man, except in narrowly defined circumstances. Physical or emotional trauma is often used to knock down one or both of the men's normal reserve. Eg, one of them is shot, and they wind up confessing their love to each other in the critical care ward, which they would never have done had not one of them almost died.

I have a Jake/Heath story almost done, and I realized that Jake's breakup with Kirsten was the "hurt" part, that made him open to comfort from Heath in a way that he otherwise probably wouldn't be. Without that, I had a hard time imagining how they would overcome the normal walls two guys put up when dealing with each other.