Trope Meme redux
20 Feb 2020 21:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extrapenguinExtra tropes via china_shop! (Original edition.)
High school romance or middle aged romance: Middle-aged, since it's less likely to contain teenage melodrama or be a codified trope narrative where the calls and responses are reading off a script rather than organically arising from the characters and setting. Also, less US High School stuff.
BDSM or vanilla: I like D/s a whole lot, and bondage in service of that, but I'm not into discipline. As from sadism and masochism, idk, I ... can like them as seasoning, but I'm reading fic for the head-stuff of D/s. But I also have dom preferences! D/s with the right dom is better than vanilla is better than D/s with the wrong dom.
Redemption or corruption: I actually like both, but corruption is more of an id/kink thing, I think? Corruption only from the POV of the corrupter, though. Redemption also tickles places a lot! (Those places are less dark and destructive.) In general, I guess redemption, though here both is good and it depends on how they're handled and what I'm in the mood for.
Vampires or werewolves: Neither. I'm not into the tropes either of them bring. Though vampires don't seem to have as strong a tendency towards "call-and-response narratives" so vampires, if I had to choose.
Soulmates or second chances: Neither? Soulmates would in theory be a good romance trope for me, in that it cuts out all of the "does the other person liiiiike meeee" BS from the romance narrative and we can get to the good, post-get-together part, but in practice it just means that the whole "does the other person liiiiike meee" BS is even dumber than usual. Second chances I can like in cases like Guardian, where one of the people was ripped away through the fabric of space-time, but if it's just regular mundane circumstances of breaking up, I don't see the point. They didn't work out the first time around, and authors often have too fast a turnaround for me to believe the relationship to be anything more stable than a revolving door. In conclusion: I pick the second love trope, because it is possible for people to fall in love more than once, and with more than one person, and soulmate tropes are my anti-id, apparently.
Hurt/comfort or romance: H/c is sort of adjacent to a lot of things I like, but not it. I have also never found hurt/comfort fic in my fandoms that wasn't shipfic, so this is very "romance or subcategory of romance?" – I guess I'm picking hurt/comfort, because that usually has a plot not exclusively composed of dumb misunderstandings, and there's some sort of external conflict going on. (...sometimes I wonder why I even read fanfic. *g*)
Rescue fic or working together to defeat X: The latter! I'm into competence and back-to-back badasses, so characters working together to defeat a villain is excellent. I approve. Though if there's a power differential, the occasional rescue fic where the more powerful character gets rescued can be nice, too. (I really enjoyed Zhao Yunlan coming to rescue Shen Wei from the pillar!) But working together, with both of them having crowning moments of awesome is the best. (I mostly find this a ship trope. It gets a bit more unwieldy at 3+ people, and then you end up having a team leader who's more awesome anyway, in which case I want it to be a competent badass leader with loyal and competent subordinates. Just a maximum of two lynchpins?)
china_shop! (Original edition.)High school romance or middle aged romance: Middle-aged, since it's less likely to contain teenage melodrama or be a codified trope narrative where the calls and responses are reading off a script rather than organically arising from the characters and setting. Also, less US High School stuff.
BDSM or vanilla: I like D/s a whole lot, and bondage in service of that, but I'm not into discipline. As from sadism and masochism, idk, I ... can like them as seasoning, but I'm reading fic for the head-stuff of D/s. But I also have dom preferences! D/s with the right dom is better than vanilla is better than D/s with the wrong dom.
Redemption or corruption: I actually like both, but corruption is more of an id/kink thing, I think? Corruption only from the POV of the corrupter, though. Redemption also tickles places a lot! (Those places are less dark and destructive.) In general, I guess redemption, though here both is good and it depends on how they're handled and what I'm in the mood for.
Vampires or werewolves: Neither. I'm not into the tropes either of them bring. Though vampires don't seem to have as strong a tendency towards "call-and-response narratives" so vampires, if I had to choose.
Soulmates or second chances: Neither? Soulmates would in theory be a good romance trope for me, in that it cuts out all of the "does the other person liiiiike meeee" BS from the romance narrative and we can get to the good, post-get-together part, but in practice it just means that the whole "does the other person liiiiike meee" BS is even dumber than usual. Second chances I can like in cases like Guardian, where one of the people was ripped away through the fabric of space-time, but if it's just regular mundane circumstances of breaking up, I don't see the point. They didn't work out the first time around, and authors often have too fast a turnaround for me to believe the relationship to be anything more stable than a revolving door. In conclusion: I pick the second love trope, because it is possible for people to fall in love more than once, and with more than one person, and soulmate tropes are my anti-id, apparently.
Hurt/comfort or romance: H/c is sort of adjacent to a lot of things I like, but not it. I have also never found hurt/comfort fic in my fandoms that wasn't shipfic, so this is very "romance or subcategory of romance?" – I guess I'm picking hurt/comfort, because that usually has a plot not exclusively composed of dumb misunderstandings, and there's some sort of external conflict going on. (...sometimes I wonder why I even read fanfic. *g*)
Rescue fic or working together to defeat X: The latter! I'm into competence and back-to-back badasses, so characters working together to defeat a villain is excellent. I approve. Though if there's a power differential, the occasional rescue fic where the more powerful character gets rescued can be nice, too. (I really enjoyed Zhao Yunlan coming to rescue Shen Wei from the pillar!) But working together, with both of them having crowning moments of awesome is the best. (I mostly find this a ship trope. It gets a bit more unwieldy at 3+ people, and then you end up having a team leader who's more awesome anyway, in which case I want it to be a competent badass leader with loyal and competent subordinates. Just a maximum of two lynchpins?)
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 02:11 (UTC)That makes a lot of sense.
I've tried to write team h/c a few times, but I understand the trope so poorly that I don't know that they registered to anyone else as h/c. ;-p
:-D
no subject
Date: 2020-02-23 11:14 (UTC)Hm, I think h/c is a two-character (or maybe three max) relationship trope, so trying to include more characters is either "one character is hurt, everyone comforts them, hurt character approaches woobie Mary Sue status" fic, or "everyone is hurt, only one person can comfort them, the comforter approaches woobie Mary Sue status" fic. Or I guess fic where there's a bunch of binary h/c going on with multiple pairs? But I don't think it's really a team trope.