Trope meme: no-romance version

[sholio]

trobadora found a no-romance/all-gen version of the other trope sorting meme (I did the "short" version; didn't try the long one), which is even more fun -- and more accurate for me than the other one, though you'll notice a handful of suspicious similarities ...

All of the top 10 are ride-or-die narrative kinks for me (mostly in no particular order, though Found Family probably DOES belong at the top):

1 Found Family
2 Antagonist Turned Weird Uncle/Antihero/Reluctant Part of the Hero Group
2 Childhood Friends Reunited
4 Casefic
4 Sleepovers/Stuck In A Tent Together/Bed Sharing
4 Bonding Through Adversity
7 The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend
7 Platonic Cuddling/Hand-Holding/Skinship
9 Mentor Fic
9 Antagonist Saves Hero ('nobody is allowed to kill you but me'/'I still need you around for my grand plan')

And this batch are "stuff I like in a fic" in no particular order (like, say, there's no reason why "accidental pet acquisition" is that far down the list except just due to the way the sorting match-ups worked out, but I also wouldn't say that I like it more than any specific other item on the list; they're just all kinda "sure, these are fun, A+ would read if the fic sounds good"):

11 Time Travel
11 Magical Realism (e.g. animal transformation, woke up a different sex, bodyswap, age regression...)
11 Training Montage Fic
14 Spies/Double Agents/Secret Identity
15 Possession/Mental Connection
15 Modern AU
17 Mythological Creatures
17 Historical AU
19 Political Intrigue
19 Accidental Pet Acquisition
21 Reincarnation

And then we have the NOPES (except that I will very occasionally read/write "always a different sex", but anything that involves good guys going bad is a huge noooooooo unless it's due to brainwashing/magic/blackmail and is followed up by large amounts of fixing):

22 Always a Different Sex
22 Friends/Siblings to Enemies
24 Slowly Turning Evil/Heel Turn
24 Self-Insert

So yeah, this one's more accurate than the other one, I'd say! And breaks down quite well into sections that consist of "things that you could use for bait in a sholio trap / things that will entice me in a summary if everything else looks good / things that are NOPE".

Comments

[maplemood]

Found family will forever probably be at the top of my list, too! (Though I've got to admit that, depending on the fandom, friends-to-enemies can really work for me in an especially angsty way, but I need to be in a pretty specific mood for it, and it's not my first choice.) And I didn't know an all-gen version of this meme existed--now I need to try it out!

[sholio]

I think found family will always and forever be my #1 trope. Well, along with h/c (surprisingly absent from this list).

I absolutely love all variations on temporary friends-to-enemies (brainwashing, misunderstandings, stuck on opposite sides of a bigger conflict with loyalties pulling them in various directions) but the permanent version is a reaaaally hard sell for me. Though it can make for delicious angst in some cases, it's true! I just kinda need some sort of of offsetting comfort to come from some other direction if that's going to be the case, I guess.

[gwyn]

Oh interesting! I never even bothered with the other one, it was so wildly off after the top five, and I remember doing it years ago and it was wildly off then. Maybe this one would be better.

[sholio]

I think it helps that I will read and enjoy most things aside from a handful of squicks or things I'm just not interested in - like, I enjoy all types of AUs and fusions (though not crossovers so much), and I love ridiculous tropes like bodyswap and that kind of thing. So my reading tastes are fairly broad; it's just the ranking that's a bit tricky. These kinds of lists tend to end up being a list of story ideas I'd love to write, as well. ;D

[corvidology]

I haven't tried this one but I think we'd have a lot of overlaps in our top 10.

[sholio]

Excellent taste. :D

[magistrate]

•sneakily takes notes•

I foolishly tried to do the long version of this, and I'm 90% certain that I gave multiple Rock-Paper-Scissors style circular answers, and that my rankings would change based on the day / time of day / possibly the side of the choice the option was presented on, but it was an interesting exercise! ...especially interesting in that it really is indicative of the field of tropes that the person putting together thinks of as a representative spread of tropes in fic.

Frex, when I consider AUs, I rarely-if-ever consider things like setting / time period AUs; in my head, I divide AUs into things like "A canon plot event went differently", "I've introduced noncanon but canon-compatible elements which spin the plot off in a canon-incompatible way", "I've changed aspects of the underlying worldbuilding which maintain the basic arc styles and thematic flavoring of the canon but result in much different particulars", etc. "Modern AU" is a thing I have to be reminded exists. And yeah, there's the surprising lack of H/C in there even in the long version, unless one counts the oddly-specific "Taking Care of the Person Usually Taking Care of Everyone" and "Male Characters Doing Emotional Labour". The long version has "Friendly Exes" but no "Platonic Romance" or "De Facto Siblings" or anything similar, and both versions share having "Friends/Siblings to Enemies" but no "Enemies to Friends/Siblings", unless you count the oddly-specific "Antagonist Turned Weird Uncle/Antihero/Reluctant Part of the Hero Group".

I feel like in order to have a version of this that worked for me, I'd need to do some kind of mental inventory of all the tropes I actually engage with. Which is kinda what I suspect this kind of sorter is supposed to help with, because a lot of the tropes I engage with exist in my blind spots; I write what I write, and what happens in it happens, and it occasionally takes me years to recognize that, oh, I really fall hard for X trope, don't I?

In conclusion, the taxonomy of fiction is a strange and many-splendored thing, and some of those splendors are tentacles.

[sholio]

Yeah, the absence of "Enemies to Friends/Siblings" is an especially odd omission, since they have the reverse version in the list! The "former antagonist reluctantly hanging out with the heroes" dynamic is one I adore ("Weird Uncle" made me laugh although in general I wouldn't really describe it that way) but it IS a different dynamic than "you used to be my enemy and now you're my BFF" and BOTH ARE VALID DAMMIT. XD

And yeah, neither this nor the other tropes list has Canon-Divergent AU, which is a huge subset of AUs; that's really odd now that I think about it.

I expect it's very easy to omit tropes, though - I mean, heck, I can't even imagine trying to make a comprehensive list of gen tropes, and it'd be heavily weighted towards things I read just because those are the ones I know about and think of.

I feel like in order to have a version of this that worked for me, I'd need to do some kind of mental inventory of all the tropes I actually engage with. Which is kinda what I suspect this kind of sorter is supposed to help with, because a lot of the tropes I engage with exist in my blind spots; I write what I write, and what happens in it happens, and it occasionally takes me years to recognize that, oh, I really fall hard for X trope, don't I?

OH MAN I FEEL THIS SO HARD. I also can be really wrong about things, because of happening to run into a string of similar canons that happen to hit my narrative kinks in a particular way, and therefore concluding that I like one kind of thing only to get a slightly different version of it and realize, no, it's actually THIS that I like, it's just that I've only been seeing one particular variation on it.

(I think the most blindingly obvious one of those is that for many, many years I thought I liked a couple of particular, specific sorts of BFF-type friendships, but could never put my finger on why some worked for me and some didn't, only to eventually realize that no, what I love is actually found-family ensembles with a few close individual friendships of this particular type embedded in the ensemble, and I actually don't get nearly as emotionally involved with isolated examples of that relationship without a support system around them. And looking back, I can totally see it in most of the things I loved; it also explains some things I really loved that didn't have the BFF element and seemed like outliers, but actually I now realize that they just gave me everything I wanted in the ensemble without needing individual close relationships within it.)

... and some of those splendors are tentacles.

Hahaha. So true. :D

[sheron]

Intersting! I really need the close intimate relationship (not necessarily romantic) to be at the core of whatever I am into, and then an ensemble built around that. In a way SG-1 exemplifies this.

[sholio]

Yeah, usually for me there's a "core" relationship (not necessarily the core relationship on the show; in fact it could be something totally different - but the one I'm most emotionally involved with) surrounded by an ensemble, including other close relationships between my faves and other people on the show. I think an example of a show where I noped out because of the lack of ensemble-ness, and not due a lack of closeness between the core pair, was SPN - I gather that it got ensembley again later on, and I'll probably catch up sometime (though I guess the chances of that keep dropping with every new season XD) but I quit sometime around season 4-5. In fact I think SPN might've been the show that made me realize how important it is to me to have the characters have emotional intimacy with people other than each other. (And yeah, I know this DID change, but the point where I left was the point where I kinda hit a wall on losing supporting characters.)

But yeah, the Stargates are basically ideal for that kind of thing. Or things like the MCU or other superhero teams. I don't usually get involved in that hardcore fandom way if I don't have a fave relationship (or sometimes it's 2 different sets of individuals, or a trio), but the ensemble/team is really important to me.

Moi

[sheron]

I actually don't have any 'nopes' on this list, but the ones on the bottom are rare for me to enjoy (even though I can think of exceptions of top my head).


Rank Trope
--------------------------------------
1 Found Family
2 Bonding Through Adversity
3 Casefic
4 Time Travel
5 Mythological Creatures
6 Platonic Cuddling/Hand-Holding/Skinship
7 Antagonist Turned Weird Uncle/Antihero/Reluctant Part of the Hero Group
8 Political Intrigue
9 Possession/Mental Connection
10 Sleepovers/Stuck In A Tent Together/Bed Sharing
11 Spies/Double Agents/Secret Identity
12 Magical Realism (e.g. animal transformation, woke up a different sex, bodyswap, age regression...)
13 The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend
13 Antagonist Saves Hero ('nobody is allowed to kill you but me'/'I still need you around for my grand plan')
15 Historical AU
16 Reincarnation
17 Accidental Pet Acquisition
-----things I didn't choose after this line-----
18 Childhood Friends Reunited
19 Mentor Fic
20 Always a Different Sex
20 Slowly Turning Evil/Heel Turn
20 Self-Insert
20 Modern AU
20 Friends/Siblings to Enemies
20 Training Montage Fic

Re: Moi

[sholio]

It doesn't surprise me that our top list is so similar. :D I think the differences are mostly a matter of liking the same things and just ranking them relatively high-low compared to each other (in general).

Re: Moi

[sheron]

Yeah, for sure, they're all excellent tropes. Found family encompasses a lot, and it's definitely one of my most favourite things to read about :)

[ranalore]

This is an interesting list, and I think has more things on it that are representative of what I like, though I wouldn't classify them as specifically gen or non-romantic. I'm really having a hard time getting past the examples given for "Magical Realism," though, because that is not what that means! *ahem* But also, I would not group those things together, and I would say, based on my fannish experience, many fans wouldn't group those things together. Rather, age regression would be grouped with kidfic, woke up a different sex with always a different sex (and there's current discussion about the conflation of gender and sex in these tropes/types of stories), bodyswap with possession/altered mental states or a curse/alien technology gone haywire, and animal transformation with supernatural creatures AU. I mean, not only is a very specific literary category label misapplied, but even if the trope in question were called something else, I wouldn't see those things as the same trope, and I'd rank them differently from each other if they were separated out.

[sholio]

Hmmm, see, for me it does actually make more sense to group all of those together. I'm not into all of them, but I do like fic that messes with the underlying trappings of the world in that particular way, and grouping together bodyswap and animal transformation and the like does actually make more sense to me than, say, putting bodyswap with altered mental states because those are radically different things to me!

It is a good question, though; I think the thing about any quiz like this is that the creator is going to have to make a lot of arbitrary choices about what counts as an important enough trope to be on the list, what the umbrella categories would be, etc. (It makes me think of that quiz that was going around awhile back in which most people's least favorite trope was listed as "centaurification" - which, well, obviously, because I have literally never seen that in fic in 20 years of reading fic, and can't even figure out why someone put that on a list of common tropes in the first place).

[tippergreen]

I'm thoroughly amused by the "Weird uncle." I totally get that vibe, but it still made me laugh out loud.

[sholio]

Hahaha, I know. XD I totally get what they mean, but it's such an adorable way to put it.

[yalumesse]

Hmmmm.... a sholio trap....... would a trapped Sholio still write?

[sholio]

I'm not sure if answering this question is in my best interests. XD

[yalumesse]

Oh honey, trust me, it is. You'll never want for anything (except sunlight) and Agent Carter will be on non-stop rerun just outside your cageroom to insipre you!