The Pain Fandom
How whump—one of fandom’s oldest and most divisive genres—gained a fanbase of its own
by Maria Temming
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In one curious corner of Tumblr, you’ll find a festival of fictional suffering. Gifsets of wounded heroes grimacing in pain. Fanart of characters cradled gently in each other’s arms. Rec lists stuffed with sickfic and kidnappings, and advice for realistically portraying all manner of illnesses and injuries. This is the work of the whump community—or, as one fan so aptly put it, “the pain fandom.”
The exact definition of “whump” varies from person to person, and it has evolved over time. But among whump fans, the word generally refers to portrayals of pain and recovery in media, along with fanworks and original works that put characters in those situations. Some fans of whump use the term interchangeably with “hurt/comfort.” To others, “whump” is an umbrella term that also includes “hurt no comfort.”
“Hurt/comfort” is a fandom staple: generally characterized by one character getting hurt and another, well, comforting them, there are nearly a million h/c fics on the Archive of Our Own alone. But members of the whump community are a self-identified subset of fans who are specifically interested in such distress-heavy fiction. And this pan-fandom crowd has come together on Tumblr around their mutual love of seeing characters physically or emotionally put through the wringer.
At first glance, whump might look like sadistic character-bashing. “On the contrary, whump is born of love for the characters,” says Tumblr user justwhumpythings. The appeal of whump depends on an emotional investment in the suffering character’s struggle and survival. Sometimes, fans of whump—or whumpers—tap into those feelings by watching pain-centric scenes in popular media. They also do it by producing and consuming whumpy fanworks and original content.
While the Tumblr whump community is relatively new, it is just one part of fandom’s long history of catering to whumpy interests. Fans were churning out whump and attendant meta decades before fandom even came online. “Hurt/comfort fans pop up through fandoms again and again, as predictable as mushrooms after a rain,” says Tumblr user haich-slash-cee, who has compiled a history of whump-related discourse and academic literature. “The mycelium of whump and h/c runs deep in fandom.”
Whump—particularly the hurt/comfort variety—is hardly the only fandom genre or trope with widespread popularity and staying power. But other favorites like fake dating AUs or omegaverse don’t seem to be tentpoles for self-identified fan communities the way whump is now. “The whump community basically operates a lot of the way any fandom would,” justwhumpythings says, with its own Wiki, fanzine, and other trappings of fandom usually reserved for specific media properties.
Part of the reason that whump occupies such an unusual place in the fandom landscape could be its longstanding, seemingly widespread appeal: there seem to be many people with varying levels of interest in whumpy fictional scenarios, so it makes sense that there would be some visible superfans. But another key factor in whumpers sticking together appears to be the confusion and discomfort that scores of fans have felt about the idea of reveling in fictional pain. And that includes whump enthusiasts themselves—at least some of whom express an inexplicable, innate attraction to the genre.
Whump, like so many aspects of fandom today, can be traced back to 1970s Trekkies. Early Star Trek fans created a sort of proto-whump genre of fic known as “get ’em,” which delighted in hurting—that is, “getting”—a particular character. Some fanzines were even known for this fare, with the 1980s publication Vault of Tomorrow “considered to be the ultimate in hurt/comfort fanzines,” according to Fanlore.
Over time, clusters of whumpy content have sprung up in various fandoms. The 1990s saw the rise of MulderTorture Anonymous, a trove of X-Files fic that imperiled Fox Mulder. The word “whump” itself is commonly thought to have been popularized by the fandom for Stargate SG-1 in the early 2000s, where the phrase “Danny whumping” described the practice of beating up on character Daniel Jackson in fic. More recently, users on Fanfiction.net and the Archive of Our Own have liberally applied hurt/comfort tags to fanfiction of all stripes.
Lots of fans like to theorize about why they love what they love, and whump fans are no exception. Some have highlighted the function that whump serves in the media ecosystem. Film and media studies scholar Chera Kee, for instance, argued in a 2017 paper that hurt/comfort can play the classic fanfiction role of “filling in the narrative gaps” left by mainstream media. “When men in fiction do get hurt, they largely bounce back from it, action-hero style,” one fan quoted by Kee wrote. So it’s appealing to see “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.”
That vulnerability can add new dimensions to a character, whumpers say, and unpacking other characters’ responses to that pain can reveal and strengthen the bonds between them. “It is the raw expression of the [hurt character’s] pain and the opportunity for intimacy that offers itself in the wake of this vulnerability that perhaps offers the greatest connection between the story and a whump interested person,” wrote Renée Nielsen in a 2021 research paper on whump.
Other whumpers have tried to explain why tales of such acute vulnerability and intimacy might tickle the psyche, regardless of how those stories build on canon content—if they respond to an existing canon at all. For instance, whump fiction may offer people the opportunity to explore feeling vulnerable without being made vulnerable in real life, or vicariously feel the satisfaction of taking care of someone without any real-world hurt. Like a lot of darker themes in fiction, it can let them experience fear, grief, and other negative emotions in a safe and controlled way.
“Whump offers a safe place to explore darker, taboo topics and offers a place for people to work through their own problems and traumas,” says Ace, a whump fan. Basking in the comfort part of h/c can also be cathartic. “Whump shows fictional characters going through really difficult things and not only do they have people who care for them, offer them comfort, but they recover from whatever they went through,” Ace says. “That’s something that I think a lot of people wish they had in their real life.”
Plus, some fans also just find whumpy content hot—whether because they find pain-centric fictional scenarios thrilling in and of themselves, or those scenarios cultivate the kind of tension or intimacy that can lead to smut. “Those in our community who do derive sexual enjoyment from whump are no less valid or somehow wrong to do so,” says justwhumpythings.
But whump has always been controversial. In slash fandoms decades ago, whump was branded by some as a stand-in for sex—a way for fan creators to lay characters emotionally bare when the fan’s own internalized homophobia prevented them from actually getting characters naked together. Fanworks that resort to such violence to avoid depicting queer intimacy “are very unhealthy ways of dealing” with slashy feelings, one Starsky & Hutch fan declared in a 1980s letterzine.
When whump is written about characters who are in queer relationships, it has been called homophobic for seeming to punish same-sex couples for their love, or written off as a cheap trick to force slash pairings to admit their feelings. In fact, much fan studies literature has framed hurt/comfort as a precursor to or type of slash, despite the heaps of whumpy gen content that also exist. (Currently, about half of the top 10 relationship tags for both “hurt/comfort” and “whump” works on the AO3 are platonic pairings.)
Whump has also been—and continues to be—criticized for glorifying illness, injury, and other types of distress. And those concerns aren’t just leveled at whumpers by their critics. Feeling guilt and shame about enjoying trauma-centric stories seems to be a nearly universal experience among whump fans. “It’s a difficult thing to explain to someone,” says longtime whumper Marie. “It’s hard not to sound like you’re a psychopath or a sadist.” Indeed, one of the earliest pieces of whump meta, published in 1976 by a pair of Star Trek fans, noted that even though “get ’em” was “one of the most common genres of fan-written Star Trek fiction,” fans of the genre were concerned that reading or writing it “could indicate a deeply-rooted psychological maladjustment.”
Today, whump fan essays and survey responses are threaded with the same internalized whumpaphobia. “Everyone in the community has felt something like that at some point—guilt or shame from within for their interest,” justwhumpythings says. “A fear that people will think something’s wrong with you for liking to see characters suffer, or at the very least a sense that this should be kept a secret.”
For many whump fans, that’s what makes Tumblr so special. It’s the first place they’ve ever seen someone else openly loving their guilty pleasure.
killian-whump, a U.S.-based fan in her early 40s, was an early arrival on the Tumblr whump scene. Her first brush with the genre had been in MulderTorture Anonymous, but early whumpy platforms like that were more repositories than communities, she recalls, and people weren’t waxing about torturing their fictional faves as a general practice. In such fandom-specific whump hubs, she says, “there’s always been a veneer of, ‘This is just how I like to enjoy THIS show/fandom/ship,’” rather than something fans claim to enjoy more broadly.
As X-Files popularity ebbed, so did activity on MulderTorture Anonymous. But the site’s mere existence made killian-whump suspect she wasn’t alone in her generally whumpy inclinations. “There was a feeling that there was a community lying under the surface of fandom itself,” she says, “made of individuals just hiding out and waiting for somewhere to gather.”
By 2016, killian-whump had found a new fandom home on Tumblr. “I’d also seen a rather promising-looking bunch of Captain Hook fans in the Once Upon a Time fandom who seemed to be putting out wink-wink-nudge-nudge signals that they were into [whump],” she says. So she threw caution to the wind and launched an explicitly whump-centric blog about Hook. “I honestly wasn’t expecting to be embraced so quickly or so readily,” she says. “But I was very pleasantly surprised.”
killian-whump was on the leading edge of a surge in Tumblr whump accounts. The few blogs that had set up camp in the early 2010s were joined by dozens, then hundreds of others. “When I started my blog, the whump community itself was so new and small that every time a new whump-focused blog was born, the word went out and we all followed/welcomed that person with open arms,” killian-whump says. “It wasn’t long at all before blogs started popping up so quickly and plentifully that this was no longer feasible!”
This wasn’t just the first multi-fandom gathering of whump connoisseurs that killian-whump had ever seen. It was also the first place she’d ever seen fans “out and proud” about loving the genre. “Whumpers feel comfortable saying, ‘I just like these tropes, and will gravitate to any fandom that provides them (or fertile ground for them),’” she says.
Tumblr has now become a nexus for whumpers to talk tropes, post fanworks, and organize events like Whumptober—a monthlong marathon of prompts á la Inktober, featuring whumpy buzzwords like “hostage” and “self-sacrifice.” On one Tumblr blog, fans add entries to the Whumpapedia, a crowdsourced database of whumpy moments in TV shows, books, comics, and other stories. “Your days of searching desperately for new whump content are over,” Marie wrote in an article advertising the catalog. On the Whumpapedia, fans have poached thousands of bits of pain from a vast array of fictional narratives to construct their own sort of pan-fandom canon.
Tumblr is also home to Wince, a whump magazine that has published everything from essays on fans’ love-shame relationship with the genre to reviews of novels with whumpy elements. “I wanted a central spot for whump fandom that was text- and non-fiction heavy, a place for discussion and critique,” says Wince editor Ari.
Whump community discussion extends far beyond the pages of Wince. “There’s a general pushback against ‘purity culture’ and attitudes like ‘reading/writing this makes you a bad person,’” says haich-slash-cee, “because if these were the case, as whumpers, we’d all be hunted down with harpoons.” But there are discussions about, say, fans’ responsibility for accurately portraying trauma or chronic illness, as well as representations of people of color in whump and the ethics of whumping characters who belong to vulnerable minorities.
Like much of fandom, whumpy fanworks have tended to center white male characters. The most popular character lists for both hurt/comfort- and whump-tagged works on the AO3, for instance, are full of usual suspects—from the Witcher to both Winchesters to a whole squad of white superheroes. Some whumpers have noted that this trend extends to original whump works, too.
Fans of color have noted that the overwhelming whiteness of whump means that its themes of vulnerability, intimacy, and resilience are often explored only in the context of white characters’ pain—not to mention all the comfort lavished on white characters in h/c content. True inclusion, these whumpers argue, means depicting characters of color with a full range of experiences, including the raw, character-defining, emotional scenarios at the heart of whump content.
“I [also] occasionally see discussion from people with disabilities about how they’d like to see disabled characters portrayed in whump, and the nuance of how to do so,” haich-slash-cee says. (In fact, Nielsen’s research surveyed over 800 whumpers on Tumblr, nearly two-thirds of whom identified as having some sort of disability.) “We may be plotting how to deliver suffering unto fictional characters,” haich-slash-cee says, “but we can still bring social justice, principles of equity, and intersectionality into whump.”
For the most part, whump discussions tend to be civil. “The whump community is the kindest fan community I have ever been a part of,” says Ace—a sentiment echoed by other whumpers. Folks generally take a whump-and-let-whump attitude toward tropes they don’t like, and there’s a strict culture of tagging and blocking to protect people from encountering triggers. “I’ve never been a part of a community that is so full of love and acceptance,” Ace says. “And it’s a community of people who write and love pain!”
That effort to promote a positive group culture might be due in part to the negativity that whumpers have faced from others—or felt about themselves—for their genre preference. In fact, stigma is a commonly cited reason for the community existing at all.
“I don’t think other fans of genres like enemies-to-lovers or fake dating receive the kind of hate we in the [whump] community do,” says Ace, who’s gotten messages calling her “sick” and “messed up” for her posts. She’s also received messages from whumpers who are “terrified that they’re bad people” for what they like. “I think this is why the community has gathered,” she says. “We found others who like it as much as we do and don’t judge us.”
In a 2016 article, media and communication researcher Christine Dandrow underscored this point about h/c fans “bonding through their twice Otherization”—first at the hands of mainstream culture, then by fan culture. Finding acceptance among fellow h/c lovers, she wrote, “serves the function of both bolstering self-esteem and tightening community bonds.” Other scholars have found similar prosocial cultures and psychological benefits of community involvement in stigmatized fandoms such as furries and bronies.
But stigma is not the only glue that binds the whump community together. There seems to be another key element that sets whump apart from other fan-favorite tropes and genres. Some people report having an intrinsic urge to make and consume this flavor of fiction—a fact that perhaps no one finds more baffling than whumpers themselves.
hold-him-down has been into whump for as long as she can remember. “My earliest interests in media were whumpy scenes,” she says. “Luke Skywalker freezing and crawling into the Tauntaun, Aladdin being ball-and-chained and thrown into the ocean…this is all pre-kindergarten.” During her early days in fandom, “I created fanfic that I just slapped with a ‘hurt/comfort’ label,” she says. But she didn’t know anyone else was into h/c the way she was until stumbling upon Tumblr whump in 2016. By 2021, she had started sharing her own original whump stories.
Memories of being riveted by whump long before having a word for it is a common theme in whumpers’ personal histories. “It’s just always been a part of who I am,” says justwhumpythings. And it’s a core element of their media consumption: “Whump is just one part of how I engage with the stories I am a fan of, but it’s also often the primary or most enticing part…I only tend to get into whumping a character when I already like them in the source media…though the gap in time between falling for them and wanting to whump the heck out of them is often minuscule! And then it’s most of what I think about for that character.”
Other whumpers go the further step of seeking out stories rich in suffering to become fans. “I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve started watching purely because I saw a gifset of the whump on Tumblr and loved it so much I wanted to see it and then ended up loving the show as a whole,” says Ace. For whumpers in general: “Whump is at the core of our fandom experience.”
One reason whump-attracted people are drawn to the genre is what haich-slash-cee describes as “a pleasurable rushing, fluttering, or swooping sensation in their stomach or chest” from reading or seeing whump. “In the past few years,” they say, “the Tumblr whump community has named this sensation ‘whumperflies.’”
The exact nature of this nonsexual, thrill-like response to whump varies from person to person, but people report enjoying whumperflies long before knowing anyone else did. “If you get them, you get them—even if you’ve never heard of the term ‘whump,’” haich-slash-cee says. Indeed, mentions of h/c-induced “tummy twinges” appear in fan chatter dating back decades.
“Whumperflies are mysterious,” haich-slash-cee says. “We all love the sensation of them…but seriously, what is going on. I’ve never seen any mainstream nod to them, even though they’re a well-known sensory experience within the whump community.” One enterprising fan has even laid out the blueprint for a study to investigate the neural wiring that underlies such pleasurable responses to whump.
For haich-slash-cee, discovering that anyone else shared a penchant for whump was monumental. “Some people have formative adolescent moments such as, ‘I saw another person being queer and I realized I wasn’t alone,’” they say. “My moment was more like, ‘Someone else is recognizing and leaning into…whatever this is, the hurt thing. I’m not alone.’” They add that identifying as queer would come later.
It’s unclear how widespread such deep-seated whump interest is among the many, many people who have ever employed a hurt/comfort tag. Some whumpers see themselves as superfans of a genre with lots of casual admirers. Others believe hardcore whump lovers may experience the genre in a fundamentally different way than the h/c-tagging masses.
“People who identify as whumpers or whump lovers tend to have an intensity to the interest that isn’t necessarily there for other people who use the genre, and this innate attraction to whump is what tends to draw people to join the community (not that those who just like it ‘casually’ don’t have a place and value here too),” justwhumpythings says. In their view, there’s a difference between someone using a hurt/comfort tag to simply describe one element of a plot—the way they might tag something “fantasy” or “college AU”—and someone creating whump to appeal to that particular emotional kink.
“I think the whump community is self-identified people who’ve stumbled on the term out of a broad, broad amount of people that enjoy it,” says whump writer Envy. That being said, her experience of trying to describe whump interest to others has been pretty black-and-white. “When you’re talking to someone who feels the same way, they Get It, and when they don’t feel the same way, they’re weirded out,” she says. “In that way, it’s a lot like talking about [sexual] kinks. Either you get it or you don’t; there’s no amount of explaining that’ll make up the gap.”
Why some people seem born to whump is perhaps the most popular topic of meta about the genre. “A lot of people in the whump community are interested in dissecting it,” says Envy, who believes this collective fascination is the second reason, besides stigma, that whump has its own dedicated fanbase.
An oft-discussed theory is that there’s some link between whump interest and asexuality. In Nielsen’s Tumblr whump survey, about 40% of respondents were on the asexuality spectrum. Given that high percentage, “I think it’s clear … that whatever it is that draws us to whump is somehow related to our lack of sexual desire,” says killian-whump. “It could be that the vulnerability and intimacy in the scenarios … fulfill emotional needs that our lack of sexual/romantic interests leaves vacant. It could be whatever psychological factors fuel an interest in BDSM dynamics, but experienced with the sexuality of it all filtered out.”
But those theories obviously can’t account for the 60% of survey respondents who didn’t identify as asexual. And there may be some selection bias in whump community survey results, since other data suggest there’s a very high percentage of ace-identifying people in fandom overall. Nielsen also explored other factors that might influence someone’s whumpy inclinations. For instance, the survey asked how much people felt like they used whump to process painful experiences. (Responses were a fairly even spread from a lot to not at all.)
In the end, Nielsen concluded that the psychology of whump interest varies from fan to fan. Media and cultural studies scholar Judith May Fathallah, who wrote autoethnography on hurt/comfort in 2011, similarly decided against seeking “a totalizing theory of h/c,” since all fans bring unique personal experiences, sociocultural contexts, and needs to the genre.
Whump may have been first named and claimed as a distinct genre by fandom, but it has since taken on a life of its own. Whereas early Tumblr whump blogs mostly focused on characters in existing media, lots of newer blogs are dedicated to whump about original characters. “I don’t want to say that we’ve fractured, necessarily, but we’ve definitely gone in two different directions,” says Marie. “In one direction, you’ve got the older whump blogs that are pretty much strictly fandom-based whump, and then you’ve got the OC people…and I think that portion of our community has exploded.”
A pair of whumpers recently teamed up to edit and self-publish an anthology of original whump stories, and at least one author has argued that whump should be recognized as a genre in mainstream publishing. “It has its own set of rules and conventions that readers are looking for,” sci-fi author K. Pimpinella wrote in Wince. “This is what gives whump readers satisfaction from a story they read, just like ‘two lovers meeting’ gives a romance reader satisfaction.”
To some whumpers, the profusion of original whump content shows that the genre has outgrown its origins as a component of fanworks or shipping. “We recognize instances of whump in fandom, and we create whump in fandom,” says Envy. “But whump is more of a writer/artist subculture than a fandom space.”
But others see whump as inextricably linked to its fannish origins. The Organization for Transformative Works has stated that “there are many varieties of original works that are written in fannish traditions,” justwhumpythings notes. “Even when something isn’t about an external media piece, it clearly can still have an intangible quality that relates it to the unique traditions of fandom.” That’s true of original whump, they say. “Whump was born of fandom, and that legacy still exists in non-fandom whump content.”
The exact nature of whump interest and its relationship to the rest of fandom might become clearer as more fans speak candidly about their experiences with the genre. Luckily, whumpers pride themselves on welcoming newcomers and good-faith curiosity with open arms. “We’re all soft and hug-shaped,” promises killian-whump.
In the meantime, whumpers will be about their usual business of churning out creative works that sometimes plumb the darkest depths of the human condition and sometimes, for whatever reason, just give the id a good, hard scratch—and what, honestly, is more fannish than that?
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Maria Temming is a science journalist and fan of fandom based in Washington, D.C.