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. 2002, Fee Folay, quoted in Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans, Continuum (2002), page 137
In boys' love and slash, h/c is also a way to add a homoerotic dimension to an otherwise ostensibly homosocial relationship. 2008, “Glossary”, in Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, Dru Pagliassotti, editors, Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, McFarland & Company, →ISBN, page 259:
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. 2004, Nicholas Sammond, Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Writing, Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 183: