2002, Fee Folay, quoted in Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans, Continuum (2002), →ISBN, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.
