#aaaaaand now you all get to see how deeply pretentious i am about fanfic

[byooregard]

for the trope rating thing this is a free card to ramble about any trope you have strong feelings on because i love you

I love you too let me think of a trope I have strong feelings about that I haven't already talked about... I've already gone off about hanahaki aus so let's go with. .. soulmates. Yeah

So basically I'll give them a solid B-? They tend to be somewhat hit or miss, how good they are depends on the source material and also what sorta mood I'm in

Things I don't like about soulmate aus are 1) I'm aro and 2) on top of my general dislike of the idea of relationships being chosen for you, when it comes to fandoms that have source material with some level of themes about choosing your own family or choosing your own destiny, the idea of characters' relationships being decided from the start falls a bit flat

That said, I can absolutely appriciate the drama of a good soulmate au, especially when they way the soulmating manifests is tailored to what would be the most fun or interesting for the characters involved (there was this one shadowgast one where soulmates couldn't lie to eachother-- a lot of esseks early relationship with all of the m9 is built on lies), or even just an interesting concept.

What I'd really love to see is soulmate aus that look at the trope and subvert it in a way that vibes with the characters and their relationship? For example, a ship that's a lot about choosing your own destiny could have the characters having other soulmates outside of eachother and choosing eachother anyways. Or something like... I'm thinking of jester and fjord in Cr, how jester starts off with a big and dramatic and a little bit silly crush on fjord which she gets over a long time before they eventually do get together and jester's idea of romance has matured. You could have them be soulmates, but it isn't until jester realizes that soulmates don't automatically equal true love that they can actually have that relationship.

I know there's a lot of soulmate aus that try to fix the amatonormativeness of the concept by letting people have multiple soulmates or platonic soulmates, and I think that's a nice idea in theory? But my root problem with the trope is much less how frequently romance focused it is and much more again how much it takes away the agency of certain relationships? A whole lot of ships I like, I like in part because they got together against the odds, or because they weren't written in the stars

Uhh tdlr soulmate aus are very fun to read because the shenanigans they can cause but I do wish people looked more deeply at the concept itself more often and utilized it in ways that would strengthen the stories they're writing fanfic of