Citations:h/c

Initialism: "(fandom slang) hurt/comfort"

 * 2002, Fee Folay, quoted in Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans, Continuum (2002), ISBN 0826452876, page 137:
 * I have never heard this given as a reason for writing H/C fanfic from those authors I have met or spoken to ... certainly, in my case, I am not aware of using my fanfic to work out personal problems, even though much of what I have written falls into the H/C category.
 * 2004, Nicholas Sammond, Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Writing, Duke University Press (2004), ISBN 9780822334033, page 183:
 * Both h/c (hurt/comfort stories, in which one or both members of a pair are injured in some way, creating emotional closeness) and AU (alternate universe stories, in which the characters are taken out of the source text and placed in a different time or place) are subgenres in their own right, but are also commonly found as elements in slash, het (heterosexual relationship), and gen (nonsexual, or general audience) stories.
 * 2005, Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, Peter Lang (2005), ISBN 0820471186, page 72:
 * A genre such as "hurt/comfort" ("h/c," in which one protagonist is injured and then comforted by the other) is considered slash if the act of offering comfort is sexual.
 * 2008, "Glossary", in Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (eds. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry & Dru Pagliassotti), McFarland & Company (2008), ISBN 9780786441952, page 259:
 * In boys' love and slash, h/c is also a way to add a homoerotic dimension to an otherwise ostensibly homosocial relationship.
 * 2010, Sharalyn Orbaugh, "Girls reading Harry Potter, girls writing desire: amateur manga and shōjo reading practices", in Girl Reading Girl in Japan (eds. Tomoko Aoyama & Barbara Hartley), Routledge (2010), ISBN 9780415547420, page 180:
 * Stories of rape in yaoi fictions often fit a pattern known in English-language slash as hurt/comfort (or h/c), wherein the male victim of some kind of violence or humiliation (sexual or otherwise) is comforted by a male friend (sometimes also the person who has just committed the assault), leading naturally to scenes of tender intimacy between the comforter and comforted.