on tropes

[dragonlady7]

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.

Comments

[sabotabby]

It's an HTML thing (A HREF="http://ellimists.tumblr.com/">here, if you're interested; warning that it's a time sink).

I had much the same reaction. I think I have a set of tropes that I like and I write a lot and read a lot, but some of the specific tropes are highly contextual on a) the canon, b) the characters, and c) the writer's talent. Whether kidfic works for me, to pick an example, depends on whether the kid actually acts like a kid, or whether they could get a puppy and it wouldn't make any plot difference, and whether it changes their personalities in ways that are unrecognizable.

I struggled to rank, for example, Friends to Lovers versus Enemies to Friends to Lovers, to pick two tropes that I generally like. To take the new Star Wars, I would be into, say, Rey/Finn, or Finn/Poe, and detest Kylo/Rey. But in the X-Files, Baby's First Fandom, I preferred Mulder/Krycek to Mulder/Scully or Mulder/Skinner. And a good writer could probably sell me on all of the above (okay, maybe not Kylo/Rey; I just can't.).

But whatever it was fun to do.

[dragonlady7]

Ah but even your specific example though-- I hate the entire Reylo fandom, and yet! AND YET! Before i even really knew that was going to be a thing that I completely fucking hated, a wonderful author wrote this incredible modern A/U Kylo/Rey thing where he was the disgraced traumatized drug-addiction-recovering scion of a celebrity family (and Snoke was his drug dealer), and she was the aged-out-of-social-services orphan who moved in next door, and it was the most incredible thing, it was devastating and brutal and gentle and realistic, and it worked beautifully. and another writer I respect wrote a fantastic one that was gen Kylo & Rey where he was an escapee from a cult and got Rey out with him and raised her like a parent-- also brutal, and gentle, and a beautiful piece of work.

If I'd filtered by tags, I would never have read either of those, but they were both among the most stunning works to come out of that entire fandom beginning to end.

So I don't filter by tags, I don't filter by tropes, I just don't. How the fuck am I supposed to choose what to read? I don't know. I just don't read that widely, I guess.

[sabotabby]

Okay, that legit sounds good. And I'm not into modern AUs either, so go figure.

I tend to avoid RPF and rapefic but I encountered one once that was so incredible that it still haunts me. Of course the author never finished it (it was one of the most painfully intense pieces of writing I've ever come across), but at least a few years ago, they announced that they were filing the serial numbers off and rewriting it as original fiction. So I can dream of reading the ending.

[paean]

Yes, this. I’m often baffled about how a trope could make something attractive to a potential reader when it’s always the writing and what someone does with the trope that matters.

I just end up reading the same writers, even when that means trying a whole new fandom and having to familiarize myself with the source media, when they go there. Sometimes though, I end up back buttoning from the source media and then that kind of messes up my ability to read anything in that fandom. Very inconvenient that.

[mific]

That SGA fic might have been Unidentified by fiercelydreamed - ??

[dragonlady7]

it IS OMG!!

... do i dare reread it or will that upset how perfect it is in my memory????

[mific]

I reckon you're safe - it's very good! There are, in my view, three great and really well-written SGA amnesia fics (this may help you pin it down).

Unidentified by Fiercelydreamed where Rodney and John break up then Rodney turns up a while after with psychogenic amnesia - complete loss of his prior autobiographical memory, so he has to learn who he is/was from scratch. There are 3 fics - the main one, a future scene about Rodney's new life, and a sex scene coda. 

Non-Linear System by Berty where Rodney's short-term memory is damaged in an Ancient tech-related disaster and John helps him find a way to live and cope even though sleeping each night resets his memory so he has to start every day afresh.  

Forget Me Not by Maisierita - J & R get captured off-world and kept as slave-workers with their past memories wiped by drugs. Rodney has higher status and John's assigned as his domestic servant. 

[dragonlady7]

I did reread it, and it's very good. It absolutely holds up. It's funny, though, as the sex scene is broken out into a separate fic, and I think on LJ it was just linked in sequence, so I remembered it as being all in one bit.
I get that it was written so long ago but it's just unjust that it never gets recced and that awful one where John is dead is like, The One That Makes Every Rec List. I didn't like it that much and I don't know why it's The Classic, now.

What about the one where an Ancient device strips Rodney of memories he finds stressful, and it turns out that what it does is remove John from his memory? I don't remember what that one was called but it was also lovely and an excellent use of the amnesia trope.

[mific]

Oh yeah, another good one. That's Happy by Crysothemis.

[chamerion]

Ohhh man. This is honestly among the most relatable fandom posts I’ve ever read. Maybe I’m just a natural pedant who’s fretful about nuances and bad at binary decision-making, but whether I find a trope compelling (or squicky for that matter) depends wildly on context. I forget who said it, but there’s that line about how it’s not what story is about, it’s how it’s about it.

Like for example...to me, the appeal of shipping is much more often about puzzle-solving - how do these characters fit together, do interesting narrative sparks fly if you bounce their personalities off each other - than it is about that visceral D’AWWW reaction where you just want to sink into the warm fuzzy feelings that a certain relationship inspires. Not that I’m devaluing the warm fuzzies, not at all! I just get them rarely enough that it’s kind of notable when I do.

AND YET, bizarrely enough, the latest ship to actually evoke those rare warm fuzzies for me happens to be a grab bag of a bunch of tropes that I often find slightly off-putting under other circumstances. Somehow they made them all work, and melted my heart in the process.

Often I think probably other folks are the same way??? And when they say they like bedsharing, they’re going straight to thinking of a particular KIND of bedsharing fic that’s like…their personal platonic ideal of the trope, and bedsharing fic that doesn’t stroke their id in quite the same way gets dismissed as a lesser example of bedsharing when actually it’s just different. Like you say, it’d be interesting to isolate exactly what it is about a given trope that gets people where they live.