Hurt/comfort

Hurt/Comfort is a plot device used to get two characters together. Usually these characters are canonically not involved with each other so the badficcer must come up with a reason to get them together. The plot of the story involves one character getting hurt (victim) in such a way that the other character needs to comfort them (saviour). Hence the name.

The hurt can take many forms:
 * Hurting self: the victim character hurts themselves, by auto-mutilation, developing an eating disorder, or attempting suicide. The motive for this OOC behaviour is that the savior character does not love them. Upon finding out the victim character hurt themselves for their sake, the saviour character confesses their love is mutual and all live happily ever after. Never mind that the saviour character, when in character, would never fall for someone that is mentally unstable.
 * Hurt through injury/illness: the victim character has an accident or is diagnosed with some disease and the saviour character nurses them back to health.
 * Hurt through angst: something terrible has happened to the victim character: a bad childhood, dead/missing parents, or more recently being raped. The saviour character steps in and kisses the booboo away. In some extreme cases (that, despite being extreme, are unfortunately not rare) it is the saviour character that rapes victim character. After which they fall mysteriously in love.

Hurt/comfort almost always ends up involving healing sex. As can be derived from these short descriptions, hurt/comfort often trivialises illness, mental problems, and even rape. The elements of hurt are merely used in the story to give it a semblance of a plot and get to the sexxing part. Badficcers often don't seem to realise that rape victims, or even people with a broken leg that was put in a cast mere hours previously, are not all that interested in having sex right away. Not even with their Twu Wuv.

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 twu luv or sex. Whump often involves severe torture of the character that the Whump is focused on. 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. If the term Whump fics 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 100 in the next most common category of Supernatural. The term is also almost exclusive to TV show fanfics, with almost 1,300 out of about 1,350 listed on FF.net being for television shows. 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.