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silveradeptChallenge #11 asks us to examine the building blocks and units of storytelling.
I don't have a bulletproof trope or other such unit of storytelling that draws me to a story or guarantees that it will be enjoyable. (Sometimes I think these challenges, and a fair amount of my fannish life, would be easier if I did have an OTP or something that was guaranteed to make it good for me.) The skill of someone using tropes and their storytelling elements can make a story better or worse for me, but it's not going to make or break the story itself.
As I get older and the amount of material available to me has opened up significantly, I find myself less willing to tolerate characters who are collections of tropes on either extreme of "femininity." Those who are entirely passive, demure, and otherwise would fall the sexy lamp test are grating. Those who are at best caricatures of women engaging in actions or behaviors usually reserved to men, or someone's belief of what the opposite of the sexy lamp would be like, a bro in everything but their tertiary sexual characteristics, are usually done so shoddily that they also grate. (When sporked or subverted, though, they can be great. Finding out the reason the character everyone thinks is ultra feminine and fainting is because she has extremely poor eyesight and therefore trips on everything is great, finding out that she's played up her helplessness and need for protection as an act for specific purposes is even better.) For situations where the trope played straight plays into one of the various -isms about, trope subversions work very well.
I like characters that are competent at their jobs. I don't need them to be extremely knowledgeable. Often, it's better when they aren't written that way, so that when the writers have the supposed expert make a mistake an expert would not make unless they were in a situation where their brain and abilities were severely altered, we don't spend lots of time yelling about how a supposed expert would not make that mistake ever. This is the danger of expertise – people think you'd love a show or a fic that's about the thing that you do or the hobby that you have, and unless you can really believe in the MST3K Mantra or fully embrace Bellisario's Maxim, you're going to get very sharp and spiny about all of the spaces where the writer Did Not Do The Research, or where they've taken Artistic License to make the story better, even though that's not anything like the real thing.
I like characters who, when given the opportunity to solve their issues by communicating, actually solve their issues by communicating, instead of going on an extended chase sequence of some other thing that could have been resolved if they'd stopped to talk to each other for a hot second. (Catra and Adora in SPOP, looking at you, even though I know there's more than just a lack of communication getting in the way of the two of you kissing and making up.) Stories that are primarily or assisted along about things that are simple communication screw-ups need a lot more things going on to keep my attention or be enjoyable.
I'm a big fan of good choreography and good dialogue. Not because I know the first thing about either of those, but there's a smoothness that comes from it in source materials, or in the way that words flow when there's good choreography going on. Those who can hide or disguise the seams of their transitions and make things flow are very good, and there's something impressive about making the textual equivalent of the walk-and-talk that gets information delivered and characters to their next set piece without having to do a lot of time skipping or filler. Snappy banter is definitely a liked thing, but only between characters who are established as sufficiently friendly or antagonistic to each other than they can pull it off.
Two sides of a similar coin: I am less fond of works that try to ground their setting in a particular time period by making pop culture references, dropping names of branded objects, or other such things that are mostly, essentially, product placement, rather than being plot items or at least things that are important to the setting. On the other side, however, I like subtle indicators of either time period, or the extra-terrestrial nature of things, or ways to let someone know that this thing they are looking at is not actually going to go according to their knowledge of the world or their genre-savviness. The character being genre savvy that then becomes Wrong Genre Savvy is a nice twist, especially when it turns out that their foreknowledge ends up rewriting the material itself or otherwise changing things in ways that mean they're no longer on the path they know, but into some other department entirely. It usually only applies to heroes, because the way that we tell stories tends to have arcs where the heroes are defeated or otherwise unable to succeed, and then have to gain more knowledge or power to defeat the villain in the rematch, but stories where the villain thinks they're following a specific pathway, and then they get outfoxed by the heroes because they have been believing they're in one kind of story, and that's never been true at all.
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. […]
What is that one (or several!) trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme that grips your attention whenever it pops up in fandom or fanworks? What is it about it that works for you or appeals to you? If you have any recs or examples, feel free to include them!
I don't have a bulletproof trope or other such unit of storytelling that draws me to a story or guarantees that it will be enjoyable. (Sometimes I think these challenges, and a fair amount of my fannish life, would be easier if I did have an OTP or something that was guaranteed to make it good for me.) The skill of someone using tropes and their storytelling elements can make a story better or worse for me, but it's not going to make or break the story itself.
As I get older and the amount of material available to me has opened up significantly, I find myself less willing to tolerate characters who are collections of tropes on either extreme of "femininity." Those who are entirely passive, demure, and otherwise would fall the sexy lamp test are grating. Those who are at best caricatures of women engaging in actions or behaviors usually reserved to men, or someone's belief of what the opposite of the sexy lamp would be like, a bro in everything but their tertiary sexual characteristics, are usually done so shoddily that they also grate. (When sporked or subverted, though, they can be great. Finding out the reason the character everyone thinks is ultra feminine and fainting is because she has extremely poor eyesight and therefore trips on everything is great, finding out that she's played up her helplessness and need for protection as an act for specific purposes is even better.) For situations where the trope played straight plays into one of the various -isms about, trope subversions work very well.
I like characters that are competent at their jobs. I don't need them to be extremely knowledgeable. Often, it's better when they aren't written that way, so that when the writers have the supposed expert make a mistake an expert would not make unless they were in a situation where their brain and abilities were severely altered, we don't spend lots of time yelling about how a supposed expert would not make that mistake ever. This is the danger of expertise – people think you'd love a show or a fic that's about the thing that you do or the hobby that you have, and unless you can really believe in the MST3K Mantra or fully embrace Bellisario's Maxim, you're going to get very sharp and spiny about all of the spaces where the writer Did Not Do The Research, or where they've taken Artistic License to make the story better, even though that's not anything like the real thing.
I like characters who, when given the opportunity to solve their issues by communicating, actually solve their issues by communicating, instead of going on an extended chase sequence of some other thing that could have been resolved if they'd stopped to talk to each other for a hot second. (Catra and Adora in SPOP, looking at you, even though I know there's more than just a lack of communication getting in the way of the two of you kissing and making up.) Stories that are primarily or assisted along about things that are simple communication screw-ups need a lot more things going on to keep my attention or be enjoyable.
I'm a big fan of good choreography and good dialogue. Not because I know the first thing about either of those, but there's a smoothness that comes from it in source materials, or in the way that words flow when there's good choreography going on. Those who can hide or disguise the seams of their transitions and make things flow are very good, and there's something impressive about making the textual equivalent of the walk-and-talk that gets information delivered and characters to their next set piece without having to do a lot of time skipping or filler. Snappy banter is definitely a liked thing, but only between characters who are established as sufficiently friendly or antagonistic to each other than they can pull it off.
Two sides of a similar coin: I am less fond of works that try to ground their setting in a particular time period by making pop culture references, dropping names of branded objects, or other such things that are mostly, essentially, product placement, rather than being plot items or at least things that are important to the setting. On the other side, however, I like subtle indicators of either time period, or the extra-terrestrial nature of things, or ways to let someone know that this thing they are looking at is not actually going to go according to their knowledge of the world or their genre-savviness. The character being genre savvy that then becomes Wrong Genre Savvy is a nice twist, especially when it turns out that their foreknowledge ends up rewriting the material itself or otherwise changing things in ways that mean they're no longer on the path they know, but into some other department entirely. It usually only applies to heroes, because the way that we tell stories tends to have arcs where the heroes are defeated or otherwise unable to succeed, and then have to gain more knowledge or power to defeat the villain in the rematch, but stories where the villain thinks they're following a specific pathway, and then they get outfoxed by the heroes because they have been believing they're in one kind of story, and that's never been true at all.
