Feb. 10th, 2019

on tropes

Feb. 10th, 2019 08:52 am
dragonlady7: black and white photograph of a woman holding a goose looking at it (mabel)
Sometimes I think I'm not really very good at blending into the fannish community. I like it, it's nice, but I don't... work like that.
I've seen a lot of people doing this thing where they're... is it a generator? One of those Buzzfeed-style personality quizzes? (Or... those were the first memes I remember on LJ, and you'd do one and it would give you a chunk of HTML to post your result with a picture in your blog. What Kind Of Doc Martens Are You etc. Why doesn't anyone get HTML results like that anymore, hm?)
Anyway I'm not sure, but you do something that helps you rank the tropes you like best in fiction from most to least.
I've been looking at the lists they come up with and I'm like... I have read both good and bad things in those examples? There are a couple things that are mild squicks, for me, so I'll avoid them if I see them called out because they almost always gross me out or make me uncomfortable, or ruin the story for me because I feel the author didn't really consider the fundamental ways in which such a dynamic would genuinely function, but that's usually more a mechanism of the story than of the trope itself.
(Like, for example, 7 or 8 times out of ten, if there's a wedding scene, it grosses me the fuck out, and most of those times it's because the wedding is a substitute for an actual character resolution and super often weird rituals that are highly specific to our culture just get transplanted wholesale into the fic's culture without any questioning and it's bad worldbuilding guys*, and some of the times it's because I'm a bitter old harpy who has never managed to get anyone to wife me and so is twisted by jealousy, and yet! People don't call out weddings as a trope and generally don't tag for them, so I just deal! Also, i have written wedding scenes, so clearly this isn't bulletproof for me!)
*(This is based on 0 specific examples for the moment so please do not think I'm vagueing about anyone in particular, please, because I'm not, this is like 35 years of reading distilled, here, and not anyone I actually would be able to remember the name of.)

I've read amnesia fic that was awful and unredeemable, but the very best SGA fic I've ever read, long before I ever watched the series, was about amnesia. (It was on LJ and I don't remember the title or author and it was probably 2004 so.) I fucking love meet-cutes except about half the time they make me want to barf. I cannot fucking stand soulmates/soulmarks any of that stupid bullshit, except sometimes people write them and it's weirdly compelling. (That's not how love works! And yet sometimes fiction's not about how love works and is good anyway!) A/B/O is gender essentialist and super gross, and yet sometimes people write it and it's super hot so just don't think that hard. And so on, and so forth.

I think this is similar to sexual tropes, too. Like, some people are just super into reading about specific sex acts, and that's never really how it's been for me. Like-- cunnilingus in a sex scene is probably a good sign that there are specific dynamics going on between characters and so I'm going to overall enjoy the rest of the scene, but that doesn't mean that I'm super into reading about cunnilingus (and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether I enjoy giving or receiving that sex act in real life with my actual real life body!) just for itself. (And like, it means there's a woman in the story, which I generally like, so. But it doesn't necessarily, y'know?! And sometimes it's written super gross so there's that too.)

So like. I might love bedsharing in a fic, but I might not. I might really enjoy a snowed-in kind of story, or I might not. The tropes are often a good shorthand for the shit that's going to happen, but sometimes they're not! (So many of them are just ways to put specific pressures on characters to overcome those characters' boundaries that make them the character they are, so that they can do things they'd never normally be permitted to do without going OOC, but because of this external force, they're squeezed into a place where they can do super vulnerable things. So those are kind of redundant tropes, but the different shapes the squeezing takes can give the vulnerability different forms and so that's interesting, and yet. well. i never was good at reducing fractions, so someone with a more analytical mind might have a better go at figuring out how distinct all of those really are.)

It might be an interesting writing exercise sometime to go through various of the tropes in that list and distill out the thing about each trope that is actually what people are looking for to get their specific dopamine releases, and then write a series of ficlets where those tropes happen without the specific element anywhere in them. Or, alternately, write a series where those specific elements happen totally independently of the tropes. But I don't have the patience for that sort of thing anymore, really.

I get why the tropes are a useful shorthand but my brain wiring doesn't really seem to work that way. Or, at least, isn't currently.
dragonlady7: Two black-eyed susan flowers against a backdrop of yarrow flowers (flowers)


I worked on learning this song a little, today. I can find the melody notes on the banjo but have no idea how it ought to be arranged. The notion of instruments that play more than one note at once is still pretty new to me. I actually started singing to myself while Dude was out grocery shopping because the cat wouldn't stop yelling (she wanted me to sit down so she could sleep on me and I was too busy) and I figured I should yell back. Chita did not care for any of my selections. (I also sang The Green Linnet and The Bonnie Bunch Of Roses O, or as much of each as I could remember the words to. I don't sing as much lately as I used to; I don't get any singing done in the car and it's a shame, but I don't sound too rusty, now that I don't seem to have a cold anymore. But I'd like to learn Bread And Roses because it's pretty and topical, as laments for Buonaparte are not so much-- I mean, they're pretty, they're just not topical. If there was ever anyone so thoroughly undeserving of the beautiful songs written for him... might be a tie with Bonnie Charlie, now I think on it.)

I thought of it because I baked bread today-- I defaulted to Joy Demorra's recipe (bibliosphere on Tumblr, but her Patreon is a better archive since Tumblr keeps flagging the bread photos as sinful, and it's unlocked there), and she used to just call it Peasant bread but I see the title's gotten upgraded to Communist, now. I've no insight into which label suits it better but there's some novelty in using a mug to measure. I'm not the target audience for that, but my favorite recipe is the no-knead one (I hate getting my hands so sticky) but I wanted to make little boules and I don't have suitably-sized baking pans for that, so something kneaded and hand-shaped it was. For some reason it was horribly sticky, and I had to chip it off the cookie sheet at the end because it had adhered so much, and I think I used too little yeast so it didn't rise all that well, but it will suit to put the stew into, I'm sure. Probably wound up super dense but whatever.

I also have boeuf bourgignon in the Instant Pot, and I made biscuits to use up the last of the milk that was going sour, so I also defrosted some frozen strawberries and made Dude buy vanilla ice cream, so we'll have strawberry shortcake for dessert. I thought a proper Sunday dinner was called for, as we won't be celebrating Valentine's Day really.
(Well, we will probably, as we usually do, sitting at home together, but less festive than normal because Dude's going in for some very minor surgery the day after, but surgery nonetheless, so.)

I've had a headache since about noon, so that's annoying. It's the most minor headache anyone's ever had, but I'm a big wuss about headaches, so I'm grumpy. It's fine, I've been cooking and cleaning in the kitchen all day so it's not like I have to look at screens or things.

I wanted to do some sewing today and have done none, and won't do any if the headache doesn't ease.

I had a thought, that it might be fun to do big painted banners a la suffragette-era protests. Nicely quilted ones. Bread & Roses for sure, but also "DEEDS NOT WORDS". Taking suggestions for more. I think they'd make beautiful wall-hangings, especially if I did them up super retro with like, fabric cutout letters, and beautiful finishing, and fringe on the bottom, and such. (I suppose I could do a BLACK LIVES MATTER one in the same style because an unfortunate relic of the suffragette era is how fucking racist they all were, in that early movement, and it would be wise to just... head that off. Maybe I could do "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit".) I don't know where these wall-hangings would even go, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, it'll take me decades to make them, so what the fuck ever.

I've also been dying for literally years to make one of those triangle-hangy-letter-banners? I made one that says "Welcome" that I gave my sister for a party at the farm, and I fucked it up so it's not reversible even though I went to great lengths to make it reversible-- the secret is, paint the letters the other way on the other side, but somehow I totally fucked that up. I want to make another one but I don't know what it should say. I might do another one for the farm that says something like Farmland Forever. But I'd quite like one for the yurt and I just don't know what it should say.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
i’m such a dumbass i’ve had a headache for seven hours and i tried changing my hairstyle, eating something, drinking something, eating something else, drinking a bunch more water... i finally just took an ibuprofen and bam 10 minutes and the headache’s gone.

sigh

I did get to a tiny bit of sewing! I'm going to just. Make squares of quilt out of these old pajamas. That's all I got for a plan. Might as well practice hand-quilting on this basically-no-batting project, so that I'm good at it by the time I make something pretty.

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dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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