Shelley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cousinshelley) wrote2023-01-21 10:26 pm
cousinshelley) wrote2023-01-21 10:26 pm
Entry tags:
Snowflake Challenge #11
In your own space, Talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I love so many tropes. There's a special place in my heart for hurt/comfort of all kinds, but specifically comfort after nightmares usually brought on by some type of trauma.
Years ago, probably forty years ago, I read a book about writing that might have been written by Dean Koontz. He pointed out that a quick shorthand to get the reader to worry about a character was to have them naked. It's about the vulnerability. When are we more vulnerable than we're were naked?
For me, nightmares run a close second.
The character's mind has taken them on a horrendous journey they were helpless to stop, and they wake in the throes of it, in that place between asleep and awake in a panic, terrified. Vulnerable. And who is there to comfort them and get them through that but the object of their affections. Someone in love with them who has never said as much because they're repressed or uncertain or scared.
So in the character's most vulnerable moment of despair, the person pining for them (and whom they are also pining for) provides comfort, making it easy for one or other to show or say more than they normally would, especially if the nightmare is about the other person or an experience they shared. So a character's in the bed holding the one who's upset, who's everything to them, and they have to try to hide that? At that point,
And how both characters are vulnerable in that situation and can barely hide (or often cannot hide) their feelings any longer.
I'm also someone who only ever has nightmares every night, I don't have good or even neutral dreams, so the idea of comfort afterward is something I find personally neat to write and read. But it's really more about the character getting to comfort the one they love, and the character comforted by the one they love, while they're both trying (and eventually failing) to hide their deeper-than-friendship feelings.
I love so many tropes. There's a special place in my heart for hurt/comfort of all kinds, but specifically comfort after nightmares usually brought on by some type of trauma.
Years ago, probably forty years ago, I read a book about writing that might have been written by Dean Koontz. He pointed out that a quick shorthand to get the reader to worry about a character was to have them naked. It's about the vulnerability. When are we more vulnerable than we're were naked?
For me, nightmares run a close second.
The character's mind has taken them on a horrendous journey they were helpless to stop, and they wake in the throes of it, in that place between asleep and awake in a panic, terrified. Vulnerable. And who is there to comfort them and get them through that but the object of their affections. Someone in love with them who has never said as much because they're repressed or uncertain or scared.
So in the character's most vulnerable moment of despair, the person pining for them (and whom they are also pining for) provides comfort, making it easy for one or other to show or say more than they normally would, especially if the nightmare is about the other person or an experience they shared. So a character's in the bed holding the one who's upset, who's everything to them, and they have to try to hide that? At that point,
And how both characters are vulnerable in that situation and can barely hide (or often cannot hide) their feelings any longer.
I'm also someone who only ever has nightmares every night, I don't have good or even neutral dreams, so the idea of comfort afterward is something I find personally neat to write and read. But it's really more about the character getting to comfort the one they love, and the character comforted by the one they love, while they're both trying (and eventually failing) to hide their deeper-than-friendship feelings.
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Oh, this. This is such a cathartic moment.
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But it's really more about the character getting to comfort the one they love, and the character comforted by the one they love, while they're both trying (and eventually failing) to hide their deeper-than-friendship feelings.
Yes to all of this!
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Thoughts
I agree, that's awesome.
>>I'm also someone who only ever has nightmares every night<<
O_O That sucks so much. You have my complete sympathy.