Hurt/comfort

Hurt/comfort is a genre of fanfiction that heavily focuses on the interaction of a pair of characters; as the name suggests, one character is somehow hurt, and the other character provides comfort. Just as any genre of fanfic, it stands an equal chance to be good or bad.

The illuminating quality of hurt/comfort can be used to explore characterization. The 'hurt' character may exhibit a fall from grace, a personal weakness, or a flaw that they have paid for. The 'comforting' character may show the audience some hidden depth of their characterization, or show how they could relate to another person's suffering.

The goal of hurt/comfort is to display characters overcoming conflict through the strength of a relationship, be it with a best friend, a family member, or a love interest. Many stories incorporate elements of hurt/comfort in them for this reason—overcoming or coping with conflict is the goal of most plots. Due to their single-facet nature, they are usually short: one-shots, vignettes, drabbles, or short stories (7500 words or less).

Hurt/Comfort Badfic
In a badfic, the idea of hurt/comfort becomes a plot device used to pair two characters together without any preexisting reason for them to connect. It forces them into specific roles, regardless of their normal characterization.


 * The hurt character usually becomes the 'weaker' of the two: the oh-so-tragic victim of their plight, which is never self-inflicted even if physical harm is. This character may be woobified, depending on their canonical characterization. Issues like real depression, guilt, post-traumatic stress, and even insanity may be trivialized or misused.


 * The comforting character usually becomes the 'stronger' figure. This character might become a sweet and dutiful nurse, a virtual saint, and able to do no wrong. Another method is to establish them as a dominating character, able to swoop in and take responsibility and fault away from the victimized character. However it happens, this character may come across as creepy and possessive, or at the very least unrealistic.

Additionally, the 'hurt' is often artificial or contrived, existing only to facilitate the interaction without actually having meaning for the characters in question. In the worst offenders, it doesn't even stem from canon conflicts or established character flaws, but invented tragedies or afflictions.


 * Self-injury: the victim character for some reason hurts themselves, by auto-mutilation, developing an eating disorder, or attempting suicide—regardless of whether this fits in with the themes of the home canon or the characterization of the parties involved. Overwhelmingly (and disturbingly), the motive for this behavior in badfic is attention-seeking, often because their love interest doesn't love them. The 'savior' character usually then buys into the attention-seeking threat, confessing magically appropriate romantic feelings that mitigate the 'victim's' despair. Never mind that the 'savior', when in character, probably wouldn't fall for someone so mentally unstable. Or forget to get the 'victim' some proper help.


 * Injury/Illness: the victim character has an accident or is diagnosed with some disease and the savior character nurses them back to health. Regardless of whether the savior even cares about the victim anyway, or if they do, whether they wouldn't more appropriately call a hospital, doctor, or healer. This variation sometimes involves bad medicine.


 * Trauma/Angst: something terrible has happened to the victim character: a bad childhood, dead/missing parents, or even rape. The savior character steps in and kisses the booboo away, disregarding the actual treatment and healing process for psychological and emotional scars. In some extreme, disturbing cases, the savior character will actually do more harm (such as yet more rape, disguised as 'non-con') to the victim character... which mysteriously results in love.

Overall, in bad hurt/comfort, the elements of hurt are merely used in the story to give it a semblance of a plot and move the story to the sexual or romantic content. Apart from being disturbing, this can be just plain disrespectful—a rape victim, an injured person with a cast, or an abuse victim may not want sex or romance to be attached to their problems, and they may not want it at all in such a state of mind or body. Even if they are interested, it is ridiculous to insist that romance/sex will magically fix everything.

Whump
Whump is a sub-genre of hurt/comfort involving a lot of hurt and very little to no comfort. Any comfort included generally comes through friendship and team interaction, not romance or sex. Whump often involves torture or extended suffering of the central character. They are often forced to cope with the physical and mental results of such treatment, so the comfort sections of these fics can be nearly as harsh as the hurt sections.

Whump fics run the typical goodfic/badfic gamut, with poorly researched medical treatments/procedures being one of the most frequent chargeable offenses of whump badfic. A badly done whump!fic can easily necessitate the intervention of the DAVD. Good whump!fic can explore the extremes of human psyche and depict psychologically and medically plausible recoveries.

There tend to be one or two characters in each fandom that are most frequently targeted for whump, such as Colonel Sheppard in Stargate Atlantis, Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1, and Tony DiNozzo in NCIS. Although Supernatural is more even, Dean gets more than his fair share of whump in fanfic, like in canon.

If the term 'whump' did not begin with Stargate Atlantis fans, they have certainly used it most often with over 600 fics on FF.net labeled as such in their summaries, compared to just over 200 in the next most common category of Merlin. The term is much more common in TV show fanfics, with over 2,150 out of about 2,475 listed on FF.net being for television shows. Most of them outside TV shows are in the Marvel movieverse. Whump doesn't have as many entries on AO3—less than 1,500.

Fluff/WAFF
While fluff is a genre of fanfiction in its own right, it often takes hurt/comfort format, but focusing on the comfort rather than the hurt. WAFF (standing for 'warm and fuzzy feelings') is another term for this genre.