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

[dreamer_easy]

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.

Comments

[mad-march-hare.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say it's a fetish, as there's nothing sexual about it, but I find it a fascinating way to view any kind of heroic character.

Suffering, at least on the scale you mean, tends to strip away anything artificial. All of the pressures that society and others put on us, everything we ourselves try to live up to when we're really not all that good at it... that's all thrown away. And what we're left with is the character himself (or herself) in the purest, distilled form. No masks, no deflection techniques, just core response.

For me, this technique is especially fascinating when done with male heroes. In my (admittedly limited) experience, men seem to close themselves off much more than women, hiding their true emotions from view until you begin to doubt that they feel anything strongly. H/C, by stripping the veneer away, allows the reader to see him not as a male hero with all of the attendant social expectations, but as a living being in all their frailties and insecurities.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. Once that's done, the "comfort" part of H/C is then required to not necessarily "make it all better," but to acknowledge the hero's frailties and reaffirm their self-worth along with their failures. This enables the hero to grow as a character, revealing a dimension hitherto unseen.

I really hope this makes sense. In short, I adore H/C, in a gut-twisting, melancholy sort of way. It's not a turn-on, but I get a real visceral reaction from it and, when it's done properly, I come through it loving the characters even more than I did before.