Femslash and hurt/comfort
May. 4th, 2012 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snowynightHurt/comfort is a genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. It's a very popular in fanfic. I enter hurt/comfort as keyword in del.icio.us and gets 14441 results. However, the trope is not highly represented in femslash. Using AO3 as an example, there're only 269 story tagged as hurt/comfort which contain femslash pairing. Why the disparity?
I don't have concrete answers. But I have hypothesis.
1. Hurt/comfort usually requires adding and extrapolating the hurt endured by a characters. Unfourtunately, in most of the canons, the female characters suffer, lose their power, are deprived of their agency too many time that we don't feel comfortable writing or reading additional hurt piled on the female characters.
2. Because our canon don't necessary pass the Bechtel's test with flying colour, there's often no other female characters that are reasonably available at these points of the hurt character's life to provide comfort. It can be bypassed, but there're effort.
3. As a lot of femslash writers are identified as female, there's not much distance between the hurt on the characters and the writers themselves. It's easier to identify with the character being hurt and thus harder to fetishizes the hurt.
4. In popular narrative, women are supposed to suffer. As their stories're considered not so important by the society, we're less likely to be trained to acknowledge and expand on the woman characters' suffering.
Take me as example, if hurt /comfort exists along on a spectrum, I 'm more inclined to hurt the characters and withhold the comfort because I enjoy characters who stoically and bravely endure the bad things in life. However, for some female characters I love, their life basically are bad. Marvel superhero Carol Danvers experienced enough rape as drama, depowering, addiction problems and such that I admire her for being a surviver, but it hurt me to read the canon myself, not to mention creating fanwork based on it. It's harder to provide comfort because Carol's female friends are often not literally available. I'm also less likely to indulge in hurting female characters because it makes me guilty, as if I were joining the canon writers in depowering the female characters.
It's my hypothesis. What's your opinion?
I don't have concrete answers. But I have hypothesis.
1. Hurt/comfort usually requires adding and extrapolating the hurt endured by a characters. Unfourtunately, in most of the canons, the female characters suffer, lose their power, are deprived of their agency too many time that we don't feel comfortable writing or reading additional hurt piled on the female characters.
2. Because our canon don't necessary pass the Bechtel's test with flying colour, there's often no other female characters that are reasonably available at these points of the hurt character's life to provide comfort. It can be bypassed, but there're effort.
3. As a lot of femslash writers are identified as female, there's not much distance between the hurt on the characters and the writers themselves. It's easier to identify with the character being hurt and thus harder to fetishizes the hurt.
4. In popular narrative, women are supposed to suffer. As their stories're considered not so important by the society, we're less likely to be trained to acknowledge and expand on the woman characters' suffering.
Take me as example, if hurt /comfort exists along on a spectrum, I 'm more inclined to hurt the characters and withhold the comfort because I enjoy characters who stoically and bravely endure the bad things in life. However, for some female characters I love, their life basically are bad. Marvel superhero Carol Danvers experienced enough rape as drama, depowering, addiction problems and such that I admire her for being a surviver, but it hurt me to read the canon myself, not to mention creating fanwork based on it. It's harder to provide comfort because Carol's female friends are often not literally available. I'm also less likely to indulge in hurting female characters because it makes me guilty, as if I were joining the canon writers in depowering the female characters.
It's my hypothesis. What's your opinion?
no subject
Date: 2012-05-10 08:13 pm (UTC)2. seems to me to be one of the reasons for the lack of femslash in general, not especially for hurt/comfort.
Indeed, when I read or write hurt/comfort, I often use canon "hurt" and bother only with the comfort, so for me 1. doesn't really play, I guess. On the contrary, if the hurt is already in canon and I can put some confort on it - even if it means extrapolate before - it's all good.
Have you searched about what are the more frequent "types" of story in femslash, what genres take the place of hurt/comfort? I'm interested now!
no subject
Date: 2012-05-11 06:26 am (UTC)A quick glance on On AO3 reveals: AU (>1000), romance (911), angst (787), fluff (533), action/adventure (137) contains femslash pairing. There may be overlap, but it's the hard number I have now.