On Whump (well, mostly H/C)
A number of years ago, when I was in the Supernatural fandom, a post came up on a blog for fic requests. The person wrote that they were having a terrible day, so “could someone please rec a fic where Dean assaults Sam?” I laughed, both because the request looked ridiculous (this person was a Sam fan) and because I absolutely understood it: when my day is hard, I love nothing more than a fic where my current favourite is put through the wringer, and this is a pretty common sentiment in fandom.
So when I got matched with @boopboop800 for the #dontburnaloneexchange, I decided to do a little research on whump for the person whose blog proudly proclaims “Here for the whump.” There isn’t a lot on whump in and of itself, but there has been work done on hurt/comfort as a genre, so most of what I present here will be looking at the larger category. I am not presenting these ideas as my own; to be perfectly honest, I haven’t decided yet what I think whump and h/c are about for me as a reader, and I don’t fully agree with all of the arguments put forward here. But I thought it would be interesting to see what academics have been saying about a genre that is so essential to fan fiction as a whole.
Section 1: Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Intimacy
A lot of the research focuses on hurt/comfort as a means of subverting heteronormative masculinity, particularly invulnerability and stoicism. Chera Kee’s essay, “Poe Dameron Hurts So Prettily,” quotes a Tumblr user who states,
“There is, then, something appealing about...seeing the untouchable become touchable, the unhurtable become hurt, the invulnerable made vulnerable... seeing someone who usually shrugs off any kind of trauma or pain having to actually deal with that pain, and become vulnerable and more real as a result...”
Early fan scholars similarly linked the H/C genre to a broader homophobic culture; Camille Bacon-Smith argues in Enterprising Women (1992) that “Sex and pain are the two situations in which masculine culture allows physical and emotional intimacy between adults of the opposite sex. If sex is prohibited by the social constraints under which the writer works, either because the participants are not of opposite sexes or because the writer feels constrained to limit sexual material of any kind in her work, she may substitute the only symbolic alternative to sexual intimacy available to her” (256).
While I do not know how relevant this still is to h/c stories today, this argument does fit in with narrative tropes in mainstream action film and television, which have often relied on violence and torture to create vulnerability / intimacy between men that is not allowed without the presence of pain. Henry Jenkins’s description of h/c stories largely aligns with Bacon-Smith’s: “Such stories provide a plausible reason for these ‘men of action’ to overcome their stoicism. The evoked emotions may be fraternal, maternal, romantic, or erotic, depending on the fan’s interpretation of the series; what matters is that affect gains overt expression within scenarios of growing intimacy and trust between the two protagonists” (174).
This movement from vulnerability to intimacy seems to be a major focus of many theorists. Elizabeth Woledge presents the “hurt” part of the binary as almost secondary to the “comfort”: for her, the pain is there simply to aid in the "eroticization of intimacy”: “Hurt/comfort provides a plausible way for any author to depict increasing closeness between two men, because when the hero is hurt, he is at his most vulnerable. The element of hurt permits him to share intimacies that would otherwise be kept private" (2006, 110).
[What’s interesting to me about these theories is how much they want to ignore/avoid the pain at the heart of this genre. There seems to be a disavowal of writerly/audience pleasure in the representation of pain itself; in Bacon-Smith’s case in particular, she quite openly expresses her distaste for the genre, and all of them are more interested in the pain as an excuse for the intimacy.]
Section 2: Projection and Identification
While the theorists I’ve discussed so far have focused on h/c as a way of challenging masculine stereotypes and norms, other critics think through the genre as a form of projection: that we write and read about the suffering of our favourites as a way of navigating and exploring our own pain and need for comfort. Such analyses rely on Cornel Sandvoss’s identification of fandom as narcissistic [note: he is referring to narcissism as a normal part of the human psyche, and not to the disorder.]
“the object of fandom [is] experienced not in relation to the self, but as part of the self, despite constituting an external object. The basic premise of my argument, then, is that the object of fandom, whether it is a sports team, a television programme, a film or pop star, is intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self, with who we are, would like to be, and think we are” (96).
[So if you have ever wondered why, as fans, we sometimes perceive any criticism of our favourites as a personal attack on ourselves, this might be what’s at work.]
Judith May Fathallah’s essay, “H/c and me: An autoethnographic account of a troubled love affair,” acknowledges this specific aspect of the genre:
“"One of the things I love most about reading and writing hurt/comfort," says fan fiction writer Mokibobolink, "is that it gives my favorite characters a chance to be the center of attention" (2010). I like this aspect too—and I suspect, given that I like the hurt party to be the character I identify strongly with, that it fulfills my perpetual younger-child need to be noticed and valued in comparison with other people.” [3.3].
The point being made here is an important one. For the Supernatural fan I mentioned who was hurting, and who wanted a story of her favourite being hurt, the connection makes complete sense through this logic: the pain of the character leading to them being a source of attention can be understood as the pain of the writer/reader wanting to be seen, to be important, and perhaps, to be comforted.
Fathallah states further that “I like the attention and appreciation bestowed on the hurt character to equalize differences of rank, race, class. I do not want the characters I see as privileged to be hurt; I want them to do the comforting and the worrying and the appreciating.” [3.3]. I think this is a common sentiment; Jan Radway argued back in the 90s that women reading romance novels in which heroines were hurt or assaulted weren’t so much reveling in violence against women, as they were fantasizing about being the object of care, especially for women who were expected to do all of the caring in their day-to-day lives. So while the narrative around whump and intimacy as about challenging masculinity focus on strong men made vulnerable, the argument about projection might account for why we want to read about already vulnerable people being made more vulnerable.
Conclusion: Pain and Power and the Pleasure of Writing
These readings of whump and h/c link the genre to explorations of power relations, and many of them rely on Elaine Scarry’s excellent The Body in Pain (1985), a text that focuses on both the inexpressibility of pain (pain escapes language, and one’s own pain is often not believed by or legible to others), while at the same time, there is nothing more real than pain for those who are experiencing it. While I think there is some efficacy to the theories I’ve put forward, I lean toward the idea that writing pain provides a challenge to writers; for Rachel Linn, h/c stories are “explorations of power and metaphysical knowledge”; by putting characters through extremities of pain and suffering, h/c and extreme whump authors “reconstruct the universe in light of a horrible new knowledge that they are subject and object, person and corpse. The struggle to find meaning in light of this knowledge fuels horrifying h/c and draws in readers who want to see whether words can tear apart the world and remake it. They want to see whether pain's crushing power and the resulting abjection can be breached and remolded. It is this optimistic promise that one can face the void and return that gives horrifying h/c its strange fascination.” [7.9].
This makes sense for me, particularly in terms of Interview with the Vampire fandom; Anne Rice herself puts characters like Armand and Lestat through continual torture and suffering as an exploration of identity being unmade and remade again and again.
Maybe we read h/c because we have a fascination with violence, even those of us with an extreme distaste for it in real life. We want to look into the abyss, safely, and whether that satisfies a psychological need, a sexual one, an emotional one, or an intellectual one, really doesn’t matter. I have to agree with Fathallah’s conclusion: “This is why I cannot—and think I should not—attempt a totalizing theory of h/c. Its affect needs to be interpreted through these social/personal histories, parts of which must necessarily escape us. We can theorize its potential and effects; we can describe our experiences of it to each other, look for more or less frequently recurring patterns in its pleasures and problems, and try to understand what that tells us about ourselves and our communities in the context in which we live. But the attempt to say what it is, and why people like it, will only lead us back to the exhausted, self-consuming mystery of an individual human nature detached from politics.” [3.7]
