Snowflake Challenge #14: Favorite tropes
Jan. 29th, 2020 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfectOh, this is a fun one!
Noncon -- let's just get the major content warning out of the way first! But I do love noncon and rape recovery fics, of certain flavors: I'm not picky about whether or not the nonconned character experiences arousal or orgasm, or even about whether or not they identify what was done to them as a consent violation, but I do strongly prefer for the story to know that it was absolutely wrong, and for sympathetic characters (if there are any!) to respect the survivor's boundaries in the aftermath.
Hurt/comfort is a related genre I also love, especially when it involves a character who's been so mistreated or alone that they have to (re)learn concepts like trust and self-worth. Are they always expecting to be hurt or rejected, not even because they think anything bad about the people around them, but just because that's how they expect life to always be? Do they ignore their own needs because they assume they don't matter anyway? Yes, delicious, I will happily read 900k words.
Sad robots/werewolves/otherwise not-quite-humans. I guess I could call this trope "fictional oppression", but I feel like I most often see it... sort of used as an externalized, dramatized justification for self-loathing of the kind that might come from depression or interpersonal abuse, rather than as an exploration of how more systemic oppressions tend to work? At least I feel like the solutions offered tend to be intensely personal rather than system-wide: the sad robot is more likely to find a kind human to heal their emotional hurts than a group of other robots figuring out how to heal at the same time as they're fighting for their rights. And damn, now that I've written that sentence, I really want more of the second thing too! But I do also love some externalized self-loathing.
Mutual pining. All the hopeless longing and careful self-restraint of believing your feelings aren't reciprocated, but with a happy ending! And sometimes, when the characters involved are trying to rein themselves in because they believe their feelings to be unwelcome, this ties into...
Good consent. Yes, I like both this and noncon! (I am large, I contain multitudes.) This can take a lot of forms, from characters being careful with someone whose ability to say no is compromised, to immediately backing off and accepting a boundary without making it a big unhappy thing, to detailed on page kink negotiation. And it definitely applies to things outside of kink and sex, too! I love it when characters are good about not pressuring each other into anything, no matter how seemingly benign. It makes me feel warm and cozy.
Found family, but like, literally. I first realized I had a weakness for this when I readjmtorres's fic You Ruined Everything (In the Nicest Way), in which White Collar's most popular pairing is reinterpreted as literal father and son and it works astonishingly well. But yeah, it turns out I really love stories about kids and/or teens and/or actual grown adults finding parents or parental figures and having a million feelings about it? I guess in some ways I feel like it's an even better medium for exploring themes of loneliness and longing for connection than shippy h/c is, because there's less to distract from the process of learning to trust.
Online relationships in fiction! So many of the most important people in my life are people I've met online, and in all but a couple of cases, those relationships have stayed wholly online, too. And I love seeing that represented in stories! The rhythm of the times of day when a particular friend tends to be around, of emails and IM, of sharing links to talk about together... It just makes me so happy.
Noncon -- let's just get the major content warning out of the way first! But I do love noncon and rape recovery fics, of certain flavors: I'm not picky about whether or not the nonconned character experiences arousal or orgasm, or even about whether or not they identify what was done to them as a consent violation, but I do strongly prefer for the story to know that it was absolutely wrong, and for sympathetic characters (if there are any!) to respect the survivor's boundaries in the aftermath.
Hurt/comfort is a related genre I also love, especially when it involves a character who's been so mistreated or alone that they have to (re)learn concepts like trust and self-worth. Are they always expecting to be hurt or rejected, not even because they think anything bad about the people around them, but just because that's how they expect life to always be? Do they ignore their own needs because they assume they don't matter anyway? Yes, delicious, I will happily read 900k words.
Sad robots/werewolves/otherwise not-quite-humans. I guess I could call this trope "fictional oppression", but I feel like I most often see it... sort of used as an externalized, dramatized justification for self-loathing of the kind that might come from depression or interpersonal abuse, rather than as an exploration of how more systemic oppressions tend to work? At least I feel like the solutions offered tend to be intensely personal rather than system-wide: the sad robot is more likely to find a kind human to heal their emotional hurts than a group of other robots figuring out how to heal at the same time as they're fighting for their rights. And damn, now that I've written that sentence, I really want more of the second thing too! But I do also love some externalized self-loathing.
Mutual pining. All the hopeless longing and careful self-restraint of believing your feelings aren't reciprocated, but with a happy ending! And sometimes, when the characters involved are trying to rein themselves in because they believe their feelings to be unwelcome, this ties into...
Good consent. Yes, I like both this and noncon! (I am large, I contain multitudes.) This can take a lot of forms, from characters being careful with someone whose ability to say no is compromised, to immediately backing off and accepting a boundary without making it a big unhappy thing, to detailed on page kink negotiation. And it definitely applies to things outside of kink and sex, too! I love it when characters are good about not pressuring each other into anything, no matter how seemingly benign. It makes me feel warm and cozy.
Found family, but like, literally. I first realized I had a weakness for this when I read
jmtorres's fic You Ruined Everything (In the Nicest Way), in which White Collar's most popular pairing is reinterpreted as literal father and son and it works astonishingly well. But yeah, it turns out I really love stories about kids and/or teens and/or actual grown adults finding parents or parental figures and having a million feelings about it? I guess in some ways I feel like it's an even better medium for exploring themes of loneliness and longing for connection than shippy h/c is, because there's less to distract from the process of learning to trust.Online relationships in fiction! So many of the most important people in my life are people I've met online, and in all but a couple of cases, those relationships have stayed wholly online, too. And I love seeing that represented in stories! The rhythm of the times of day when a particular friend tends to be around, of emails and IM, of sharing links to talk about together... It just makes me so happy.
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Date: 2020-01-30 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 01:29 pm (UTC)Also I think you might like Guardian (c-drama), if you don't mind subtitles, because there is So Much Pining and h/c and also Competence and identity porn and just *chef's kiss*
Here are some h/c gifs of the show:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/22400587
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Date: 2020-01-30 11:40 pm (UTC)I think you're absolutely right about that!
And thank you for the show rec! That really is some pretty suffering in those gifs you linked...
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Date: 2020-01-31 04:16 am (UTC)Here are some links to get you started:
A Guardian Starter Pack by
Non-Spoilery Guardian Starter Kit by
So You Started Watching Guardian: A Non-Spoilery Language Primer by
It's worth watching with the good subtitles, made by
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Date: 2020-01-31 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 02:57 pm (UTC)One thing I actually can talk about: I think Remus Lupin often gets caught in the middle of this trope, because he is experiencing systemic oppression, but the solutions that are commonly offered (both in canon and in fic) are on the personal and not the systemic scale. Especially because Remus is the only werewolf we really know, and not part of a community of other werewolves, his self-loathing does read as very personal.
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Date: 2020-01-30 11:43 pm (UTC)That's a great point about Remus being an excellent example of the trope. It really isn't a coincidence that he was my first Harry Potter fave -- he's just so sad and alone and kind, I couldn't not love him!
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Date: 2020-01-30 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-01 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-09 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-31 06:44 am (UTC)How could you expose me like this (^_^;)
I guess I could call this trope "fictional oppression", but I feel like I most often see it... sort of used as an externalized, dramatized justification for self-loathing of the kind that might come from depression or interpersonal abuse, rather than as an exploration of how more systemic oppressions tend to work?
This reminds me of things Silvia used to tweet about othering in fantasy or sci-fi from their literature cons and things, if I find them again I will let you know!
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Date: 2020-02-02 04:20 am (UTC)Well, I'm talking about myself too, if that's any consolation. ♥
Oh, I'll be delighted if you do, that sounds fascinating!
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Date: 2020-02-02 06:49 pm (UTC)Part of the protagonist's issues is that it doesn't believe it can band together with other robots, either to heal or to fight for their rights, because robots can always be reprogrammed to betray each other. And in general it just has a great sad robot playing around with all kinds of these tropes.
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Date: 2020-02-03 02:11 am (UTC)Unrelatedly (unless awesome works of fiction can always be said to relate to each other), I was skimming your books tag the other day to see if you'd mentioned anything of Cherryh's before, and for some reason your rec of Winter in London caught my eye, and now that I've read it all I really want to thank you for that! The devotion and mutual care is just so good. I can easily imagine it becoming a comfort read for me too.
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Date: 2020-02-03 11:42 pm (UTC)