Talking Meme 4: Thoughts on tropes

rogueslayer452 : Do you have any favorite tropes? Any least favorite and/or any tropes you feel are overused?

Okay, so as all of you probably know, by favourite kind of fic is friendship fic. IT IS THE BEST. I'm always a little hazy on what counts as trope and what doesn't, but I think that's not one.

I'm reasonably sure that "people on opposite side who care about each other" is a trope and it's probably my favourite kind of friendship fic. It's a subset of "friendships in unlikely places" which are my favourite broad subsets of friendship tropes, I guess. There's no kind of "people on opposite side who care about each other" that I don't like, be that friends-turned-enemies or enemies-turned-friends or any other variations upon this theme, including shippy ones.

But, really, there's no kind of friendship fic I don't like. I do also have a spectacular fondness for the "found familes" and "you and me against the world" tropes.

Relatedly, I also love the "people forced to work together" trope.

Identity porn is a trope I really like. Not sure why.

It does tie in nicely with my love of fandom AUs, though. Like most AUs, I tend to prefer it to be canon-plus rather than instead-of-canon (unless that's not possible, like, say, IN SPACE AUs). Instead-of-canon would be, for example, in the Rise of the Guardians fandom, a fic where the Guardians are not supernatural beings but regular humans with fandom identities (and then Pitch tries to C&D fandom into oblivion and lands them on CNN, oops). Canon-plus would be, as another example, in Young Avengers fandom, if the Young Avengers are all in fandom, fighting over who get to take over mod ownership of a fan exchange while still being superheroes on the side. (To pick two examples I've been toying with for years.)

Does that distinction between instead-of-canon AUs and canon-plus AUs make sense? I suppose another way to separate AU types would be setting-replacement (instead-of-canon), canon-compliant (canon-plus) and canon-divergent (what-if). Although, since there can be trope overlap between setting-replacement and canon-compliant AUs (like the fandom AU example above), that's not always the best way to differentiate, either. Especially since I would tend to classify canon-divergent AUs as canon-plus.

I think what I'm getting at is that in my fandoms, I like the settings and changing them are only interesting to me if you add stuff to them or make them more interesting in some way. (This isn't to say I don't like some setting-displacement AUs, but then my taste run more to the IN SPACE end of the scale than to the coffeeshop end of the scale.)

The reason I put IN SPACE in all caps all the time is that I'm secretly twelve it's one of my favourite kind of AUs. Probably my favourite outside of canon-plus AUs, actually.

I haven't seen this a lot, but one thing I absolutely love is in-canon myths or canon-retold-as-myth (with a broad definition of myth).

Time-travel and time-loops and assorted tropes are often awesome.


As far as tropes I don't like go, I think the tropes I tend to dislike most are tropes that take away something I see as fundamental to canon, which is a very subjective thing, I know. I tend not to like setting displacement AUs for this reason. (Let me put it this way: Without Auschwitz, Erik Lehnsherr is not Erik Lehnsherr, he's Max Eisenhardt. Granted, this is a rather extreme example, but it does explain why I lasted about three modern AUs into X-Men: First Class as a fandom.)

(While I'm on the subject of modern AUs, why is that so often used as a synonym for modern US AUs, even when the canon isn't set there? I hear that's common in Les Mis fandom (I stay away from that canon for reasons*, so I also stay away from the fandom, but I trust my source) which strikes me as strange, because I'm hard-pressed to think to think of a more French author than Hugo**.)

(No, wait, I know that one. Starts with "US" and ends with "centrism".)

Okay, so that ended up a lot closer to "thoughts on AUs" than to "thoughts on tropes", but as I've said above, I find tropes somewhat hazy to define. If anyone would like to name some in the comments, I'll give more specific thoughts.

I do enjoy, in general, trope subversion rather than tropes played straight, because those tend to have more worldbuilding. And worlduilding is AWESOME.


* Mainly that it's fucking weird for me.
** Molière's it, honestly.

Snowflake Challenge Day 1

Day 1

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

In reverse chronological order of writing.

Seas Would Rise (1253 words) by sevenofspade
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Viva La Vida - Coldplay
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat
Summary: Dead, mortal and gone, the gods went and left behind the world.

It's the only fic I wrote this yuletide that only the recip commented on. Also, I'm proud of the fact I managed to rewrite 2/3 of it after losing the first draft entirely, because the last time something like that happened (years and years ago) I didn't pick up the story again and stopped writing entirely for months. Progress.

Two for Joy (3389 words) by sevenofspade
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Journey into Mystery
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Loki (Marvel), Verity Willis
Summary: This is a story about Loki. It doesn't feature quite as much lying as you might expect based on that. Verity won't let it.

Because I'm proud of this fic, dammit. (Also, I wrote it for the exchange I accidentally ended up modding. nightonficmountain will run in 2015 too, btw, with noms beginning in April and stories revealed around the June solstice.)

Punica Fides (3681 words) by sevenofspade
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Ancient History RPF
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Hannibal Barca/Scipio Africanus
Characters: Hannibal Barca, Scipio Africanus
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate History, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Ten conversations Hannibal Barca and Scipio Africanus never had.

Hannibal/Scipio is pretty much the pairing of my heart, for various reasons. (It edges out Yoko/Khäny because it has enemies-to-friends, which is one of my favourite tropes. And because both "write fic in ENglish for canon in French" and "write fic in French" do my head in to think about.) This fic was the first one I wrote for it and as far as I know, it was the first fic written for that pairing ever. I did that. Me. *waves tiny flag*