It occurs to me that JULIA & BUDDY is basically a Hurt/Comfort story.
Hurt/Comfort has been around since the dawn of fiction, as the too-restrictively named Television Tropes endless matrix demonstrates, but it really takes the world of fan fiction to come up with snappy terms like Hurt/Comfort.
H/C is also big in the fan-fiction subcategory of "slash" fiction, which I've blogged about several times - and I wrote a one-act play called THE SLASH inspired by slash fiction. I even used the cargo cult trope before I realized there was one.
The reason H/C is so popular in slash is because it's a good excuse to get two same-sex (usually male) characters together in a state of vulnerability.
The J&B plot is a H/C switch-off. At first Julia is hurting thanks to her panic attack and Buddy keeps her company, then Julia becomes interested in Buddy's resentful-maintenance man schtick and by the end of the play discovers his hurt and then comforts him.
Rehearals begin today.
