As you say. Hee ha hoo, were the Phoenix books ever unsubtle! They may have been the first unabashed h/c I ran into, and even as a baby fan who hadn't heard the term "hurt comfort" at the time, I could see that, shall we say, the writers had an agenda. I sometimes liked it and sometimes got tired of it. And it was a completely different tie-in book, by Della Van Hise, that scandalized the publishers (or someone) as being nearly-almost slash!