#and tend to combine it with a quote from steinbeck's east of eden which is | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aparticularbandit · 2 months ago

Note

For STS! Do you believe there are any particular tropes or themes you repeat in your work?

Yes.

I frequently explore themes related to identity (and the lack or construction thereof - often this is where second person comes in), so much about stories (metafiction is my bread and butter even in fanfic), immortality (and what that means/the consequences of it), loss/trauma/grief and how that can change/define a person, redemption arcs so many redemption arcs, and found family so much found family.

I'm also finding that I reuse - how do I word this - ugh, I want to call it the what is meat question, particularly within the context of seeing revolution as the answer to the world's problems - sometimes not revolution, but the radical options people take sometimes to try and fix things - whether they know (or care) that those radical options might also cause harm to other people around them.

That last one I think I do...more often than I like to think. I did it with Jessica Rabbit and the Toons Rights Fanatics (who decided to start turning Toons into reality (which led to Roger dying because he got turned into an actual rabbit) and then eventually started turning senators and whatnot into Toons to get their point across); I'm currently doing it with The Thin Line Trilogy in terms of (spoilers) Ryoko realizing that the world is just heading towards destruction and the only way to fix things is to Junko and Tragedy and rebuild, except that's still radical revolution and it's going to kill a lot of people; I have it in one of profic projects that was a little more ambitious than I could handle at the time.

But I think over and over again I go back to what does it mean to be human - whether that's in the form of personal identity or how other people react to it or what the stories we tell ourselves and each other say about what humanity is.

...that's a long answer. There's probably more.

Oh, also, and back scars. I frequently give people back scars. Just they have scars on their backs. It's just a thing.

#musings #lizhly #bandit answers questions #idk if the last one counts as a trope or a theme #but wow so many of my characters have back scars who definitely don't need them #and /what is meat/ is a paraphrased reference to cathrynne m valente's space opera and #i looked up the quote so i could put it here fully #minus commas because you know -gestures-#'but in the end all wars are more or less the same. if you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking burning #death you'll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this:#which of us are people and which of us are meat?'#there's more to it than that #but the idea of 'which of us are people and which of us are meat' comes down to 'who is it okay to slaughter'#which you know the answer to #idk i play a lot with that #and tend to combine it with a quote from steinbeck's east of eden which is #'it is easy to say she is bad but it means nothing if we don't know why'#and 'maybe her whole life was her language...indecipherable. maybe she was running to something instead of away from it'#and the incomprehensibility of people but the ability to reach out and love people anyway #IDK A LOT OF COMPLICATED THINGS

7 notes · View notes