Beyond Selidor

In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.



Why limit myself to just one? Here is a non-exhaustive list of stuff I like — sometimes just in fanfic, sometimes just in professional writing, sometimes in both. I think the boundaries between tropes, clichés, kinks and so on can sometimes be a bit blurred, so I'm not going to define any of these narrative/character/relationship preferences as one thing or the other.

Enemies/antagonists to friends/allies/lovers is something I will eat up with a spoon. I like it in both its variants — where the characters differ in their approaches, methods or aims but are essentially both fundamentally correct, and where one character is clearly in the right and the other one is at best wrong and at worst straight up evil. I guess in essence I like characters being thrown into situations that force them to reevaluate their core understanding of themselves, and these kinds of relationships often do this.

Hurt/comfort is one of my favourite things to read, although I don't like it so much in visual media. Like many people in my Dreamwidth circle, I tend to have firm preferences for which character is hurt, and which one is doing the comforting. I sometimes like this trope in combination with the enemies-to-lovers one, in which one character comforts the other for hurt that they themselves inflicted, but it depends on the fandom.

I don't really know how to describe this one succinctly, but basically stories about women enduring awful stuff at the hands of men in patriarchal societies, and finding a sense of community and common purpose within these terrible situations. Survival is the important thing here — I don't need the women to escape or overthrow their oppressors within the narrative, but they need to be able to find ways to survive and find meaning and connection with each other in the margins. Examples of what I'm talking about include Mad Max: Fury Road, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, and stuff like that.

Human/non-human pairings where the human character stays mortal, the non-human character remains a vampire/demon/otherworldly fairy/etc etc, but they both transform each other in other ways. The irreconcilable differences are the thing, here — I don't want them reconciled by the vampire's human girlfriend becoming a vampire herself, or the god who falls in love with a human giving up immortality for love.

Stories in which the ordinary work of everyday life is made magical and heroic, especially tasks typically perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) as having been 'women's work' in a historical setting. I particularly like this if the story hinges on mentor relationships between girls and women, relationships between sisters (or girls who are raised in a situation that is essentially like being sisters), mothers and daughters, and so on.

Stories about characters who were made to feel frightened once, reacted (to put it mildly) extremely poorly to this, and decided the only reasonable course of action is to warp the world around them such that they will never, never be made to feel fear again — even if they burn down the world and all their relationships with it. An example of this type of story is the Peaky Blinders tv series.

Stories that are fundamentally dystopian (or ushering in something that will result in utter destruction of everything the characters valued — they just can't see it yet or can't do anything to stop it), in which the characters do their best to carve out meaning and joy, build community and remain essentially true to their own ethics, even if their efforts are marginal at best and are like twigs attempting to shore up a torrential flood. Examples of this type of story are — in different ways — The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay), Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, and the Babylon BerlinTV series.

Do you have any specific narrative/character preferences?