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In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!
There is one consistent thing that I have learned through all of my wanderings through media, and that is: if you want me to enjoy your work, put as much time and care into the characters in the background as you do the foreground.
I can give or take a protagonist (or protagonist ensemble), but if your surrounding world is flat, you will not catch my interest. For example, I stuck with NCIS (and the LA spinoff) far longer than I would have, because I wanted to see more into the life of Abigail Schiuto and Henrietta Lang, respectively. I had no use for the actual investigation teams in either case, as their Bunny-Ears Lawyer selves and aspects of masculinity that I had no real interest in actively turned me off to them. (Anthony gets better when he stops being a playboy goof and actually proves out why he's on the team, but that change never lasts long.) But the caffeine-addicted Perky Goth in the forensics lab? She was interesting.
One of my oldest anime fandoms is Fushigi Yugi, which spins a tale of a plucky school student caught up in a magic book that's trying to cast a spell with its story. The protagonist and her team are on stage the most, and I can't really say there's much to recommend that. Her best friend, on the other hand, also gets pulled in to perform the same rite, but for a different country. Aside from the part where the leader of her band lets her believe she's been sexually assaulted as a way of getting her to be sympathetic to his own ends, the second crew are far more interesting, because they're not all that shiny of people and they're not trying to be. They're still very much devoted to the cause, but it's different, and they have better characterization moments because of it.
Make I've just got an instinct for fanworks of the sort of "what was that character doing while the camera was focused over here?" and I want to see media works that leave those hooks and spaces available for connections later on, where someone can nestle a story in that fits there, another piece of the puzzle. More often than not, those connecting points are in the characters not perpetually on screen. So I'm paying attention to them and filling in the details and the spaces. If you don't give me that space, I'm not going to like your work that much.
(Which means I also like fanworks that provide those stories of the gap. Weird, yeah?)
There is one consistent thing that I have learned through all of my wanderings through media, and that is: if you want me to enjoy your work, put as much time and care into the characters in the background as you do the foreground.
I can give or take a protagonist (or protagonist ensemble), but if your surrounding world is flat, you will not catch my interest. For example, I stuck with NCIS (and the LA spinoff) far longer than I would have, because I wanted to see more into the life of Abigail Schiuto and Henrietta Lang, respectively. I had no use for the actual investigation teams in either case, as their Bunny-Ears Lawyer selves and aspects of masculinity that I had no real interest in actively turned me off to them. (Anthony gets better when he stops being a playboy goof and actually proves out why he's on the team, but that change never lasts long.) But the caffeine-addicted Perky Goth in the forensics lab? She was interesting.
One of my oldest anime fandoms is Fushigi Yugi, which spins a tale of a plucky school student caught up in a magic book that's trying to cast a spell with its story. The protagonist and her team are on stage the most, and I can't really say there's much to recommend that. Her best friend, on the other hand, also gets pulled in to perform the same rite, but for a different country. Aside from the part where the leader of her band lets her believe she's been sexually assaulted as a way of getting her to be sympathetic to his own ends, the second crew are far more interesting, because they're not all that shiny of people and they're not trying to be. They're still very much devoted to the cause, but it's different, and they have better characterization moments because of it.
Make I've just got an instinct for fanworks of the sort of "what was that character doing while the camera was focused over here?" and I want to see media works that leave those hooks and spaces available for connections later on, where someone can nestle a story in that fits there, another piece of the puzzle. More often than not, those connecting points are in the characters not perpetually on screen. So I'm paying attention to them and filling in the details and the spaces. If you don't give me that space, I'm not going to like your work that much.
(Which means I also like fanworks that provide those stories of the gap. Weird, yeah?)
