dreamer_easy | "It's purely sexual." "No shit?"

Prior to a hasty flocking¹, a naughty nameless person was complaining that my Doctor Who novels are merely an excuse for indulging my fetishes. I protest! I prefer the term "perversions"!

It's hardly the first time someone's pointed out the suspicious link between my perpetual crush on the Doctor and the rougher than usual handling he received in my books for Virgin and the Beeb. I've puzzled about this for years - there are perfectly sensible writerly reasons to kick hell out of your characters, but those scenes of hurt and comfort drove my narratives (to the point where even I started taking the piss). In actual TV episodes, I find them more riveting than any other part of the story.

The thing is, it can't actually be a fetish; bluntly, it doesn't sexually arouse me. I have a few strange little turn-ons, just like anyone (not that you'll be hearing about those in this blog, dear reader), and I can tell the difference between them and, say, 42 or Set Piece. I don't think it's sadism, either - I always end up identifying with the victim, not the other guy. And my heart goes pit-a-pat for, say, the Fourth Doctor getting zapped in The Android Invasion, even though I'm incapable of fancying Tom Baker. In the immortal words of Sonny Crockett: "What the hell is going on here?!"

My current theory is that it's some sort of sublimated parasexual thingumy to do with heroic suffering (something I am crap at myself). Like Christian girls falling in non-sexual love with Jesus. Does this tally with anyone else's experience? Is hurt/comfort an actual turn-on for you, or just a strange fascination?

1 I'm wrong! It's just cut now, which I guess is why it fell off Google Blogs search.

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'the hero must suffer' is a rule that goes back as far as storytelling itself, as is h/c - you mentioned jesus, who's just about the biggest h/c woobie in the anals of religion.

i think it's a myth that h/c appeals mostly to women, though - it's true that women in our culture are conditioned to be rewarded for suffering in silence rather than actively changing their world, so i can sort of see how the martyr aspects would have some appeal. but h/c appeal is most definitely NOT restricted to one gender - just ask any silent movie heroine who's been tied to a railroad track, or any b-movie actress who's been molested by the monster in the rubber suit while screaming for the hero to save her.

i think one of the best explanations for h/c's appeal came from our own frank pembleton, in homicide's best-ever episode (the subway episode): ie, that pain is the only thing that unites us. it's the only thing that all human beings have in common. we may not know how it feels to live in luxury or to have superpowers, but we sure as hell know what it feels like to suffer, to bang our shins, or to have our hearts broken. invulerable heroes are boring. but if they suffer a bit like the rest of us mere mortals, then they've earned our respect.

as for the kink aspect - cleverer folk than i have written extensively about the very real physical and psychological links between sex and aggression, pain and pleasure, and domination and submission. i love me a good bondage scene, but i think that's mostly due to the lead character's submission, and because there's usually nekkidity involved. real pain is a definite turn-off. abstract bondage torture is okay, like if you're zapping them with a laser or something, but any time a character is in real, recognizable distress it always makes me want to change the channel. so i suppose you could say some forms of h/c are a turn-on for me, but others definitely aren't...tied up and nekkid = yum; but i really don't like to hear people screaming unless it's in a good way.

!!!

*suddenly notices an extremely freudian typo in what i just wrote, and considers correcting it...but, upon relfection, decides to leave it just as it is*

*snurk*

Thank you. I appreciated it -- to the point of spitting coffee on the keyboard, but that's my fault, not yours. XD

just ask any silent movie heroine who's been tied to a railroad track

See, I'm not sure that's the same kind of thing. That's suspense, where you wonder if the rescuer will get there in time. Also, for me, at least, an important component of h/c is that the suffering serve some purpose -- the hero is being tortured because his withholding of information will save lives, or he got an injury or an ilness from doing some kind of good deed.

A female hero can certainly do all that, but it's not common. Most female suffering in movies is done quite specifically to make pain look like sexual pleasure. (I remember a woman-written video game review site where one of their benchmarks was how much female characters sound like they're having an orgasm when they die.)

I'm not sure which is your Freudian typo. Woobie? I don't even know what that means or what you were trying to type. ^^;;

See, I'm not sure that's the same kind of thing.

i'd say it is, because h/c is all about the experience of the viewer/reader. in silent films and b-movies, the heroine/woobie (ie the object of the male viewer's sexual desire) is made to suffer - thus the Hurt - until she is gloriously rescued by the male viewer's self-identification character, the hero - thus the Comfort.

woobie n. (also adj.) originally meaning a child's security blanket (see Linus: Peanuts), has since been adopted by fanfic writers to describe the cute, cuddly, and usually obligingly helpless character in a story who gets most of the suffering and hurt/comfort heaped upon them...generally for the gratification of the writer, the hero, or the audience. (see Dickens: Smike, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, etc)

and that wasn't the typo, btw...i accidentally wrote 'the anals of religion', whereas most persons not pleasantly distracted by slash fiction on a daily basis would recognize the more correct spelling of 'annals'. but the typo rather amuses me, so i decided to let it stand. :)

It made me laugh.

Ooh... so you're sort of saying that pretty much any adventure story, where the audience is meant to identify with either the victim or the rescuer, is h/c? That's an interesting thought.

Woobie is an excellent word. I have usually referred to such characters as my whipping-boys. ^^

the genre doesn't really matter; in fact i think it just overcomplicates the issue. h/c can exist in adventure stories, scifi stories, fantasy stories, religious stories, regular prose stories, or any kind of story at all. the definition i've always used for h/c is when a vulnerable but attractive character is made to Hurt in the course of the story, and is then Comforted by the audience's (or usually the author's) self-insertion character. the identification is almost always with the hero/Comforter, although i hadn't thought about possible audience identification with the victim...interesting.

btw, 'whipping boy' works fine too, imo. :)

That is really interesting, because my identification is almost always with the victim. The important elements of my fantasy are that the hero makes the penultimate sacrifice (i.e. suffers but doesn't die) in the name of doing something good, and then is rewarded afterwards with an escape from the pain (which generally has to be provided by a character who is emotionally close to them, either a lover or friend, doesn't matter which).

ah, i see...i think i get what you're saying now. i tend to classify the sort of heroic suffering you're describing as more the requisite hardship the hero must endure to make them more fallible and identifiable to the audience, though - more 'noble sacrifice' than h/c.

it sounds like both our definitions here kind of hinge around whether it's the hero or a supporting character who suffers, and whether the audience identifies with that hero or supporting character. but i think the overall h/c definition is wide enough to cover both variations - sometimes the hero and the woobie can actually be the same character, and sometimes the audience might be meant to identify with someone who's not the obvious hero of the story.

for my definition of h/c, i'm thinking more in terms of dickens' model of the woobie/mary sue relationship: in his books, his identification or self-insertion character (the 'mary sue') doesn't tend to be the hero, but more often the hero's kindly benefactor (david copperfield being a possible exception). for example, in oliver twist, oliver is the hero/woobie and mr brownlow is dickens' self-insertion 'mary sue' benefactor; in bleak house, esther summerson is the hero/woobie and mr jarndyce is the 'mary sue' benefactor.

for a doctor who example, in '42', the doctor is the one who suffers - ie, the hero - but according to rtd, the character the audience is meant to identify with is the companion (so he thinks), and so martha the Comforter is supposed to be the one who we relate to.

so i think the blanket h/c term can be used to apply to all sorts of character variations...it's just that in my own experience, i've seen dickens' 'kick-the-woobie' model of h/c turn up in a lot more stories than the 'suffering/comforted hero' type of h/c, especially in scifi/fantasy fanfiction.

Also: that's what I get for scanning too quickly. ^^

'Anals of religion' makes me think 'the back end of the Bible', some chapter that nobody likes to read, where the sun doesn't shine.

"It's purely sexual." "No shit?"

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