#i'm a really selective and fussy reader

[not-poignant]

What are your favorite tropes? Anything particular that you like extra much? And are there any tropes that you're also not particular fond of, and/or rubs you the wrong way? Just curious. I hope you'll have a good weekend. Sends hugs!

Hi anon!

I actually did a ‘tropes I like and nope tropes’ post a while back and dug that up.

And I wrote more recently about tropes I really love here.

Recently I realised I really don’t like soul mate tropes. Anything to do with like the ‘red string of fate’ or people with ‘matching numbers’ or glyphs or marks or whatever, can’t really stand it. I don’t mind people in a relationship calling each other soul mates once they’ve realised a profound love for each other, but I don’t like AUs / universes where soul mates are a thing. Tbh I find it squicky.

On the other hand I really like forced soulbonds, mostly to explore consent issues, lol.

I really like: ‘character is in jeopardy/pain/anguish but no one else really sees it or takes it seriously until they’re forced to and then suddenly feel guilty/regret/remorse and pile on the comfort’ trope. I’m sort of hoping to explore that a bit in The Golden Age. We’ve already seen a little bit of it, but I’d like to just...do that more. Lol. It was heaps of fun to do that in The Court of Five Thrones re: Gwyn finding out what happened with the Raven Prince. Like, he went from kind of supporting Augus but always sort of holding back his trust too, to just full out being like ‘if anyone criticises Augus in my Court again based on what happened in the past let me know so I can murder them yes Gulvi I mean you.’

But yeah I don’t...really know? I don’t sort of...I don’t search by theme very often. I don’t search for fics by trope. I actually just sort of filter by ‘Explicit’ (it’s mostly likely to have the content I want, though Mature can too) and if I really like a pairing, I’ll read just about everything except mpreg (even then there’s exceptions like I do have some mpreg Loki fics bookmarked - they usually revolve around hurt/comfort though) and um...marriage fics. Anything that starts with ‘X and X are getting married and’ - makes me want to throw up a little bit, unless it’s like ‘X and X are getting married and then X is abducted and tortured and they forget about an archaic misogynistic ritual in favour of massive amounts of recovery and hurt/comfort.’

But you know I’ve never seen that summary before. ;)

Also as time goes by, I’m finding het fics increasingly squicky. I think what it is, is being queer and knowing how damaged I’ve been by the pervasiveness of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, it is currently really hard to divorce myself from my cynicism and bitterness over that when I see how much it just oversaturates the media. So I no longer read het fanfiction, and I have noticed a tendency to avoid it in fiction in general (though it can’t be helped sometimes). That’s less of a trope? But I suspect it’s also a temporary response to the state of society and the state of fictional media. Once I feel like it’s less of a fight or struggle just to get queer romance recognised, or queer SFF recognised not as a niche ‘LGBTQIA genre’ so much as its own valid series of contributions to large genres, I’ll probably be able to handle that again.

Likewise, regardless of theme, I’m more likely to give something a try if it features ace characters, or similar. These days, I’ve been exploring what it is to be a gray asexual writer, who essentially kind of ‘specialises’ in specific kinds of explicit material, especially BDSM material. I’ve been thinking more and more about making it more evident that a lot of the characters I write are generally aspecs in some fashion or another (Cullen in Stuck on the Puzzle is absolutely demisexual, and I feel you could make a good case for Gwyn ap Nudd being the same, and also demiromantic -> Mosk will be demisexual, and of course the Raven Prince is on the ace spectrum). Asexuality is highly underrepresented, and it’s a - in some circles on Tumblr - hated upon frontier in the world right now, and as someone who identified as bisexual for a very long time before I knew that ‘gray asexuality’ existed, I feel that inter-LGBTQIA persecution in my soul.

Eh that’s probably more theme? I admit, anon, my fannish vernacular when it comes to tropes is not that great. On the one hand I have a huge familiarity with AO3 tags and fanfiction tags, and can generally tell you what I think of every single one if you put it towards me. But it’s hard for me to remember those, and they don’t always equate with the same kind of tropes you’d find on say...TV Tropes. I’m not involved in the meta of those semantics, so it’s hard for me to think from scratch what I enjoy, vs. say...scrolling through a page of fics and being like ‘no I don’t like that’ or ‘yes I’m likely to like that’ or etc. If you had any tropes in mind that I didn’t address here, feel free to ask specifically! :D

Oh, I forgot, I really love a/b/o, to the point where I’m currently writing an original fiction series that centres on both celebrating and subverting these tropes. :D My ‘Perth shifters’ series. I’m hoping to get book one finished (and maybe even published) this year.