December unscheduled posting meme: Tropes!

[sholio]

theladyscribe asked: What are your favorite tropes to read and/or write?

TROOOOOPES! :D (This is a fun one! Thank you for asking!)

I have some trouble here figuring out where to draw the line between trope and narrative kink and just plain "what I like in fiction", so I'll lean more towards the idficcy stuff here. Not that this is limited to fanfic specifically; it applies across the board, though some things work better in fic and some work better in original stuff.

Hurt/comfort is pretty much a gimme here. I love it. Always have, always will.

I don't really get my particular h/c buzz off the light fluffy stuff, though -- taking care of someone with a cold, that sort of thing. (Though it totally appeals to me on a friendship-fluff level, which is another thing I like.) My particular set of favorite h/c tropes are mainly centered around worry and angst -- I am absolutely gone for "don't die on me!" type scenarios (bleeding out! heart attacks! desperate clinging! rescue breathing!) and characters sacrificing themselves for each other or thinking each other are dead (presumed dead is one of my biggies, especially if it goes on for YEARS), or being terribly angry at each other but still loving each other deep down and then having something ~terrible~ happen. I am SUCH an angstbunny.

... though, just to make things terribly difficult for myself, I don't really go for super heavy-duty emotionality, either. I love it when characters talk around their feelings and have entire conversations in which they never manage to say "I love you" but imply it, or express their feelings over someone not actually being dead by punching them in the arm and making them dinner while glaring at them the whole time for MAKING THEM FEEL THINGS.

(Obviously making allowances for individual character behavior here. Not everybody is an emotionally damaged bundle of glower. Huggy, emotionally open characters are gonna be huggy! Actually, letting the huggy, happy people play off the scowly damaged ones is its own kind of delightful.)

... so there's that. Another whole big trope-set for me is a bunch of stuff surrounding family and found family and groups of characters coming together and accidentally-on-purpose loving each other despite their quirks and flaws. Among other things, I adore platonic or semi-platonic house-sharing and bed-sharing, domestic fluff with characters who are not normally domestic types (especially as down-time between action sequences; as a kid I always had a huge fondness for seeing superhero characters out of their uniforms doing normal-person things, which was one reason why I liked the X-Men comics so much, because there was a fair amount of that sort of thing), stupid roommate shenanigans, having to deal with someone in the group who's drunk or sick, basically just all the dumb-funny-sweet hanging-out-together stuff, especially with a side of sarcastic humor and/or bafflement at how the hell they ended up with These Weirdos. I love characters having each other's backs, and characters who don't normally get along being forced into situations where they HAVE to get along and finding out they actually do get along pretty well when no one is watching.

I like complicated and hard-to-define relationships, and characters who are together but don't do most of the things that people in a relationship are "supposed" to do. I like explicit relationship and consent negotiation. I like characters being thrown into situations that should, tropishly, lead to sex (fake marriage, bed-sharing, huddling for warmth, AMTDI, etc), but NOT actually having sex and staying friends; and I like watching characters dealing with their close friends'/family members' significant others and kids. I like a particular kind of relationship I call "amiable enemies" (since I still haven't found an exact analog in TV Tropes) -- basically, two characters who are on opposite sides, who are dedicated to staying on opposite sides and respect the other one's dedication to their own side (as opposed to this kind of relationship being a prelude to someone crossing over to the other's side) but enjoy each other's company and do things together even if they're not supposed to. (Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens are a PERFECT example of this.)

I like a lot of dumb spec-fic tropes, like clones and time loops and generation ships and sudden!surprise!powers. I have a ridiculous weakness for long-lost siblings, especially if they already knew each other and couldn't stand each other, and then SURPRISE, YOU'RE RELATED! (Although I tend not to enjoy this one in fanfic at all; I don't usually like fics of the "X and Y are seekritly related!" variety because it tends to blow apart my established idea of the character relationship and I don't generally enjoy that. I eat it up with a spoon in origfic, though.)

I love teamwork fights and characters saving the day together. I love it when the main heavy-hitter characters need to be rescued in a fight and the "weak" ones use cleverness and resourcefulness to get the job done.

I love surprise!twists that make you re-evaluate everything that's happened up to that point. (Er, assuming the twists are clever and sensible and have been adequately set up by Our Story So Far, as opposed to the ones that make you wonder what the writer is smoking.)

Apparently I like a lot of tropes. :D

Usually for me there isn't a big distinction between reading tropes and writing tropes -- if I like it, I'm about equally likely to write it as to read it. In many cases it'll be influenced by whatever I'm into -- I mean, some tropes don't work for some characters at all, and some I don't want to see with certain characters even if it's technically possible. There are a few that I'd rather write than read because they can so easily go to places I don't want and therefore I'm more comfortable staying in control of the whole process -- fic involving non-canonical children is a good example of that, because I really love to write kid!voice and I have adored a handful of kidfics, but the vast majority of them either leave me cold or actively squick me; I think whatever I want from kidfic is not what most people want from kidfic.

So yeah, I guess that's Me And Tropes: The Novel.

Comments

[theladyscribe]

Aaaah tropes! They are so great! We have a lot of them in common, too (which is maybe unsurprising, as I feel like a lot of fandom shares the found family and friends-who-are-enemies tropes).

[sholio]

Ha, yeah, I think fandom tends to congregate in droves around certain tropes, especially the teamwork/family ones. :D

.... Which is actually an interesting thing to think about, because it does seem like certain tropes get SCADS of play in fanfic, including many of the above, while others are much less common. I wonder how much of that is just fannish cultural norms at play, and how much is, I dunno, something fundamental that we aren't getting in media? Or something that we are getting in media and want more of? (Because it's not like "team/found-family" is terribly uncommon in profic, TV shows, etc.) I DON''T KNOW.