Pain & Agony

[happyshep]

I think I recall asking this before but I can't seem to find it now.

I'd just like to ask what people think about the actual agony which a protagonist suffers in your typical 'whump' fic.
Is physical abuse just a means of reaching the comfort, or have you experienced instances when the pain on its own was enjoyable to read/write in some way?

[mpbrennan]

In my fics I tend to use physical pain as a conduit to (or a distraction from) emotional pain. I personally find it difficult to write about a character's injuries in detail unless it is relevant to the character's emotional arc. I have read whump fic that is quite engrossing, but even then I tend to zero in on the character growth more than the actual pain. So, for me pain is a plot device, but it could mean something entirely different for someone else.

I'm assuming that for the purposes of this thread you draw a distinction between physical pain and emotional pain (which I find fascinating in its own right).

[happyshep]

Sorry for not clarifying; Yes, I'm referring to physical pain and violence.

[E Fish]

Most of my stories tend to focus on the psychological destruction that occurs as a result of physical pain, rather than physical pain itself. I've always felt that psychological damage is worse than physical damage. Harder to deal with, harder to recover from. However, when I use physical pain/violence, I want it to be accurately portrayed (although usually not especially graphically) because I feel that there should be a degree of realism. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it shouldn't be accurate. Thus, I do a lot of research for my stories and I don't shy away from explaining the damage that can be done from a bullet or from electric shock or from being drowned (and yes, I have used all those).

I've written...three...maybe four stories about torture. In most cases, it was the use of physical pain in order to break down the mind and the remainder of the story is less about the healing of the physical self as the rebuilding of the psychological self. The physical healing takes place within the context of the psychological healing. In fact, often, the physical healing comes in the midst of an incomplete psychological healing and is almost discounted by the characters within the story. Man cannot live without the mind.

I'll admit to having a kind of morbid fascination in seeing what human beings can do to each other. It's horrifying, degrading, sickening stuff...but I look at it and I wonder how a person can bring himself to inflict that kind of damage...and so I read about it. I've seen pictures, and that helps me infuse the sense of shock and horror into the stories I write. Until you've seen the damage done by electrical burns, you don't really get what that kind of torture does.

I suppose what I write could be looked upon as "whumping" but I feel that I use the physical violence to a deeper purpose. I don't hurt someone just to hurt them. There is a story to be told. That story can evolve through the use of pain or through the use of comfort. Often, it comes through both. For me, the story is almost telling itself through the medium of my fingers typing on the keyboard. I have less control to say that I want to hurt someone so that they can be comforted. It's more that something horrible is going to happen and how can I keep this from ending in the death of the characters I favor...if you see the difference. I don't like to read/write pain unless there is a way out of it. Even in death fics, those who die, those who are left behind, they have to have something to keep them going, some kind of meaning.

Hmmm...reading what I've written, I'm not sure if I'm actually answering your question. You may regret asking for input.

[taylorgibbs]

I have one story with outright torture, and it began as that actual scene. the scene wouldn't let go of me. It was absolutely necessary to character development for this particular story and the physical and emotional scars from the event are going to wear on all the characters.

Strangely enough, the torture aspect wrote itself. I could see it unfold visually in my head, but the emotional aspects and the fallout are so much harder to write. I would have expected it to be the opposite before I actually wrote the story.

[stealthdragon]

For me, I'd have to say pain and agony is a plot device. It's the means not only to get to the comfort, but also to study a character outside the usual stoicism presented to us on the show.

I'm a sucker for kindness stories - a character has been hurt by someone else, so their friends and/or family do what they can to help him. However, I wrote a story a while back meant to be one long kindness fic, but ended up being one massive character study that was both difficult but intriguing to write. The character in question is one usually portrayed as fairly stoic, with a high pain threshold, who deals with trauma internally and moves on as quick as he can. So it was interesting putting him in a situation that broke him, then to put him back together. There was hurt, there was comfort, but the majority of my focus was on the character himself, taking what I knew of him and figuring out how he would overcome trauma and what it would require.

Before discovering Fanfic, I'd always considered myself someone into whump for whumping's sake. On discovering fanfic and then after a time, I came to realize that, for me, it wasn't about the hurt, it was about the comfort, and that the H/C as a whole was more preferable when it was a plot device rather than the plot itself.

But I do know authors that, for them, it's all about the whumping. It's the hurt they enjoy, with the comfort on the side, or no comfort, just rescue.

[dontquoteme]

Wow, I joined up ages ago but I don't thin k I've actually written anything. Better start talking, huh?

Preamble: I enjoy reading h/c a lot, but I haven't ever written a real h/c before. I dunno why, but I can't seem to do it. I have all these scenarios in my head which I explore in my imagination, but when it comes to actually putting them on paper, for some reason it doesn't work. So whatever I say on here, I'm talking about reading, not writing.

For me the hurt is just a means to get to the comfort, but at the same time, I can't read something that's just the comfort, and there has to be a balance. I see h/c fics where one of the character is suffering from a cold or something, and it's like, that's not too likely to lead to massive amounts of comfort, and if it does, then that doesn't work for me. The level of comfort has to be equal to the level of hurt otherwise it feels false.
I saw an episode of Grey's Anatomy (which I don't actually watch mostly, it was just on at the time) which made my obsession with h/c just sorta click into place for me. One of the characters asked the question "why do we hurt ourselves?", at the begining of the episode, and at the end of the episode she repeated the question and answered it, saying "because it feels so good when we stop." And that's it exactly. I read about the characters being hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and I just CAN'T WAIT until they get rescued by the love interest (it always has to be the love interest for me, and in fact I get kinda squicked when it's a family member. IDK, maybe the comfort is kinda sexualised for me too *shrug*). And then when they finally, at long last are rescued and it's time for the comfort, it just makes it that much more satisfying. And although I said earlier that the comfort had a secual element, I don't tend to like it when the comfort leads straight to sex. I like the healing process, and the idea of the love interest being incredibly patient and waiting till the hurt character is completely ready.

[E Fish]

None of my stories have any sexual element to them. I don't like that because I think people are way too focused on that kind of thing. I like showing strong emotional bonds forming between people who are friends or who are becoming friends...or just realizing that they are friends. For me, H/C is not about sexual love. It's about something deeper, something that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with caring about another human being. I generally dislike romances because that seems to be all the writers care about, i.e. getting the two characters into bed. Sorry, but that doesn't interest me in the slightest. That's not what real love is. So...when I write a story that involves copious amounts of H/C, I want it to be about forming new or stronger bonds between the characters. Too often we, as human beings, tend to devalue the people in our lives unless something happens that almost takes them away. Only then, do we really see what we had and what we're losing.