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A few more thoughts on "hurt-comfort," the dynamic whereby female readers tend to become erotically interested in male characters who suffer, provided that this suffering is depicted in certain specific ways.
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Why don't all characters partaking of the hurt-comfort dynamic appeal equally to all readers?
Irene asked:
If "Hurt-Comfort" is all it takes, how would you explain then the almost perfect dichotomy of Sirius and Snape fan clubs? I know 1 (one) person who likes them both, for the rest they appear quite incompatible.
The Catlady objected:
I am only one of the myriad of HPfGU women who rush, whenever someone claims that there is a dichotomy between fancying Severus and fancying Sirius, that I fancy both. But I don't fancy Sirius as Hurt-Comfort...
[The Catlady also later explained that her attraction to Lupin wasn't based on hurt-comfort either]
Don't worry, Catlady. I believe you. (And what a terrific job you did of describing the entire wretched romantic dynamic in more detail, too! As well as of explaining why poor hurt little woobie Neville doesn't really qualify for membership in the Hurt-Comfort club. Great job!)
I do think that the hurt-comfort dynamic is probably what has made Snape, Sirius and Lupin all so very popular as crush objects, but obviously there can be (and are) lots of people who are attracted to them on other grounds as well.
Me, I like both of them myself, but I don't actually fancy either one of them. In fact, I was genuinely surprised when I first learned that so many people were drooling over Sirius and Snape. It honestly hadn't even occurred to me to view anyone but Lupin as a crush object. But then I sat back and thought about for a while and went: "Oh! Oh, yeah, okay, I guess that does make sense." I think that I get the appeal now, even if neither of them happens to do anything for me.
Then, I don't find any of the kids erotically interesting either. I think that I can see where the Draco drooling (or the Harry drooling, for that matter) comes from, but it doesn't really have much effect on me. This is probably due to the age difference that Eloise cited. I've got two decades on Harry and his peers, and I tend to think of them as, well, as little kids. But once again, this is far from universal. Plenty of adult readers manage to get crushy about them anyway -- or about their own mental projections of the sorts of adults that they are likely to become.
But to get back to Irene's question, I think that the dichotomy probably has a lot to do with what you want to be left with, once you have Healed The Broken Man And Made Him Whole. What sort of finished product best fulfills your inner model of the ideal fantasy lover?
Fixed-up Sirius and Fixed-up Snape wouldn't really be at all the same sort of person. Fixed-Up Lupin (who really isn't for the hard-core DIYer anyway, as he only actually needs a tiny bit of tinkering), wouldn't be the same as either of them, but his appeal touches on aspects of both, making it far more likely that the same person might fancy both Snape and Lupin or both Sirius and Lupin than both Snape and Sirius.
But of course, as the Catlady pointed out, there are still plenty of exceptions even to that general rule.
And human nature being what it is, there probably are people out there who have a thing for Neville (or for Hagrid, or for Moody, or for whomever) in spite of these characters' disqualifying characteristics. Hey, for all I know, there could even be someone out there who lusts after Pettigrew. People can be very, uh, diverse that way. I'm just making broad sweeping generalizations here. ;-)
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Hey, so what about Ron, huh? What's wrong with Ron? He suffers, doesn't he?
Penny asked:
How does Ron fit into this? Because I don't think he gets hurt so very much ...
Pippin immediately objected:
Poor ickle Ronniekins...not only does he suffer, but his suffering goes ignored.
And then itemized all of the places in canon we are witness to poor Ron's suffering.
Hmmm. You know what's wrong with poor ickle Ronniekins? The author has it in for him, that's what! She just doesn't want Ron to see any action at all. She's always knocking his feet out from under him just when he rightfully should be racking up the crush points.
Other characters in states of shock get to be "pale." Ron, even while struggling manfully and heroically with his broken leg, gets hit with "green." He defends Hermione -- and then winds up belching up slugs. He confronts his worst phobia -- and then vomits.
I mean, it's just terrible. Just when the reader is all primed for developing a crush on Ron, the author smacks her in the face with something profoundly unerotic. It's downright cruel of her.
Someone needs to send JKR a CRAB badge, that's what I say.
Pippin:
I can't help but feel, you know, that Ron appeals to a more mature taste (assuming he grows out of the jealousy thing), as he's a character that can give comfort as well as receive it.
Well, that ties into what the Catlady was saying before, I think, about her own attraction to Lupin being based on his own capacity for kindness and compassion, rather than to his need for the same. It's a different dynamic -- and a far less embarrassing one, IMO. Hurt-comfort really is pretty twisted, when it comes right down to it.
As the Catlady wrote:
So the romantic heroine is Even More Bent: a masochist as well as a sadist!
Yeah. Hurt-comfort is kind of messed up, all right. But it's not really our fault, you know.
It's society! Society is to blame!
—Elkins, who is herself sufficiently Bent that when she first saw the thread title "Imperius and Hurt-Comfort" she got all excited...and then noticed the addendum "(not at the same time)" and was so profoundly disappointed!
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on May 30, 2002 1:02 PM
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