#tropes within interests

[jichan05]

Posting things that Eka's Portal won't understand the significance of

right?

[rawliverandgoronspice]

sssstop!!!!!! assuming ganondorf is a rapist random youtube videos I'm literally eating my own fingers and swallowing the bones whole like one of those weird birds aaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

assorted quotes from the introduction of Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors

[quantumcartography]

I finished The Magnus Archives 48 and here are my thoughts.

First off, the "monster" of this episode is honestly one of my favorites and most terrifying. Like a being that is just a throng of people gibbering in an almost language whose faces are all this muddle of anguish sweeping you up and utterly forget yourself until you're just another nameless faceless selfless member of the crowd. Good shit.

In 47, when "Micheal" shows up, I was disappointed by Jon's lack of academic rigor by not elaborating afterwards about his encounter. Like that should be an attached statement to the original where he recounts the interaction and explains what happened. It's spookier to not, but to not describe him, to not explain how he got injured, to not extrapolate on his statements is just shoddy archival work. Maybe there's a companion recording somewhere.

Not to be a broken record, but I would kill to see their tagging system. Like, so many mysteries they don't seem to mention would make so much more sense if they had a tagging system that would let them view them all together. Statements involving insects, involving impossible geography, involving Gerard Keay, involving electrical disturbances, involving Jurgen Leitner, like that's super valuable stuff!!

Also, "Michaels" statements clearly imply that there are multiple entities in conflict. The attack of Jane Prentiss, the replacement of Shasha, and the building being built on an attempt to build the Panopticon implies that the Archives are already devoted to one of these entities and multiple others are attempting to make plays against it. Likely the Eye considering the nature of the Panopticon. But that's based on spoiler information.

This is only reinforced by the fact that one of the earlier episodes noted a clear tie between sacrifices to one of these entities and one of the Archives major donors.

[strelliata]

Thinking of making an AU of The Art of Murder but instead of favorite characters, it's characters from a media that doesn't exist a.k.a. a show within a show. Like from Tokyo Blade (Oshi no Ko) and Verum Rex (Kingdom Hearts). And the premise would be that these characters are only "alive" because we are drawing fanart of them despite their show not really existing in the first place.

[shouts-into-the-void]

Don't usually read Manga, but I picked up The One Within the Villainess and it's really cute so far, even if I know I'm in for heartbreak based on that intro.

[drconnors]

curt connors vc: i care for all my mentees equally! there’s peter, gwendolyn and *looks at smudged writing on clipboard* harkins

[fiapple]

literally, i love nami so much, you do not even understand. you cannot begin to fathom.

[jonathanrook]

please do keep developing ur alien biology a/b/o stuff i live for that kind of thing. genuinely so much fun to read about the specific details of omegaverse universes and that kind of thing, id read the fic ur writing for that factor alone lmao

ASDFGHJKL THANKS but i think the funniest part of all this is i genuinely don't know how much of what i'm figuring out here is gonna end up in my final fic. i think i just need to know the mechanics of things for my own sanity.

anyway. my current idea (tho this may change) is that the galra have two sexes: alpha and omega, with beta essentially being a colloquial term for sterile alphas. as previously mentioned, omegas are a transgressive phenotype only possible through hybridogenesis. when breeding with non-galra, both alpha and omega offspring are possible, but similarly to how only female ligers/tigons are fertile, only omegas are capable of reproducing. here's a handy diagram, with 'x' representing non-galra species:

[onewomancitadel]

I'm trying to be completely normal about Cinder's redemption and not get too attached (nek minute) which I've resisted for years, but it's hard not to. It doesn't help that I was dealt the full blow of Paul Atreides recently and I'm still not over it. I know he's a world-destroying conqueror, that's the tragedy.

[voluptuarian]

Its interesting that there's this growing push to judge the quality and success of media by how much fanfic presence they have, especially since fanfic thrives on a lack of something in the source material. Most fanfics seem to be in response to something a writer disliked about the source-- fix it fic, canon divergence-- or felt like adding to the source-- crossovers, original characters, added scenes etc. I'm this case, the better written, more satisfying piece of media would, one assumes, have fewer reasons to fall into either category.

Another appeal for fiction is shipping-- I think most semi enlightened folks can understand that quality and shippability are not tied together (I anticipate there are fewer ship fics written for Stalker for instance, than their are for Law and Order). For a lot of that fiction, much of the ship interest revolves exclusively around shipping men with other men, specifically men who are seen as attractive by the community, so the more men are involved, and the more "attractive" they are, the higher the chance of ship fics being written (one reason you'll probably see more fic for Les Miserables than for Bridesmaids, for instance, despite the latter being more modern and seemingly more popular.)

The other element is suitability to tropes. Can I stick a fake marriage in it? Do any of these characters seem suitable as the owner of a florist shop? What does it crossover well with? Can I typecast one character as "sunny" and the other as "grumpy"-- in less flattering terms, how dimensionally flat is it/how similar is it to other things/how unimportant is the plot in molding characters or action? The less distinct it is and more easily its fits into common tropes, the more fanfic there will be. Generally any of these things tends to suggest (though not necessarily guarantee) worse quality source material.

These are all elements that a work specifically lacks which make it popular for fanfiction writing. Good quality fiction is likely to make satisfying use of its narrative, so there aren't dozens of empty plot areas for writers to fill, less likely to make terribly disappointing and ooc decision for fanfiction to correct. They probably have a strong plot, which ties characters and action to time and place, making disconnecting any of these elements while retaining the flavor of the original more difficult, and which allows for less easy insertion of fluff or sex into that narrative. And they don't have to appeal to endless romantic tension to keep audience interest (a romance might build its narrative on that, being a plot centered on romance, but an action series has other concerns that should come first). And, in my opinion, well crafted fiction is more likely to have a well rounded cast of all genders, rather than being a sausage party and 2d female supporting cast waiting to be fucked or fridged. All these elements make the better written piece obviously less conducive to fanfic production.

And then you look at the most legendary (or infamously) popular characters and series to produce fan content and most of them all capitalize off one or more of these big narrative lacunae. Supernatural has a week plot with few well developed female characters and multiple big m/m ships, none of which were satisfactorily handled but frequently teased, and ended horribly. Hannibal took plot that belonged to a female character to spin a central m/m ship that also never coalesced into anything concrete, ringed them in with a decent female cast who tended to die off or end up narratively unimportant (including a wife), and left fans with unfulfilled desires to see the central ship living in domestic bliss or fucking nasty or both, perfect fanfiction making material. Even with HP tanking in acceptibiltiy here, I'm still subjected every day to gay Marauders content, which seems fueled entirely by the potential attractiveness and male-dominateness of the era (Peter Pettigrew always seems to be absent from these things) anf its undefined and unconcrete nature (for example, a core element being the presence of Regulus who in canon we never see, know almost nothing about, have little reason to connect to the Marauders, and who is dead the whole series and only vaguely discussed towards the end). Again, built on the most un-written parts of a narrative, centering on elements that most appeal to fic writers. And then, the cockroach-like flourishing of Sanders Sides content, where the guy who makes the content was washed up a decade ago and it's literally one guy rping with himself, and yet not a day goes by where I'm not having to see content for it, despite my having blacklisted it. It has a. character over plot b. majority male cast (who are apparently "attractive" and appealing to see fuck each other, even tho they are all basically the same guy) and c. elements easily applied to other genres/tropes/series etc. (And of course, Osumatsusan had a similar thing happen, but with setting and genre mood that were almost completely removed from the original-- the existing plot and setting were fluffy and inane enough that fan content almost entirely skewed to extremely dark and fucked up, and of course, centered on multiple guys who were carbon copies of each other fucking.) All of this without even addressing the go-girl-give-us-nothing fan content wunderkind that is The Onceler. Like, what a tour deforce. The soft kids movie plot completely abandoned, all attention on one "fuckable" male character with no official ships and no female characters to get in the way, the entirety of fandom energy channeled into shipping one guy with himself. Its absolutely a fan content triumph, latching on to something with almost no existence and completely filling in whole cloth, completely reinterpreted, and duplicating ad nauseaum to make content from. The success of Goncharov has similar roots (combined with just Tumblr commit-to-the-bit-ness) allowing people to just completely fabricate a plot from a handful of elements, focus almost entirely on characters and most importantly ships, and inventing male characters to have unresolved homoerotic tension with each other.

Which is all a very long-winded supporting argument to my first point, that people are increasingly judging the quality of a work by its fanfic presence, despite the appeal of making fanfic hinging on the weakness and disappointing qualities of the original works.

People will be reading War and Peace or The Hour of the Star likely far longer than anyone will care about Supernatural. Meanwhile, Sherlock is sure to have more fanfic written about it than Dom Casmurro. Far from proving the superiority of the works woth more fics, it rather proves the opposite. Furthermore we can tie the amount of fanfic not even to a grade up or down in fictional quality, but specifically to a list of elements which allow fic writers to fill in extremely large blank areas or get them frustrated enough to "fix" themselves.

So stop saying x work not having much fanfic presence means its somehow bad, and admit that it just means it has less scope for people to imagine characters as breedable omega werewolves.

[ct-hardcase]

missing the phase 1 wave 1/2 polyam firebrand vibes today especially

[trashbatistrash]

,

[giantkillerjack]

Those are the same thing.

No you won’t ever be exactly the same again and that’s fine, actually.

[forgaeven1]

madge is considerably "plain and boring" but only because she's never really lived and she holds her emotions so tightly to her chest because it's what she's been taught and instructed by her dad and i dont think she's ever really felt real or alive and she literally is the way she is because she does not have an identity nor is she encouraged to develop one and when u don't have an identity, how can u truly perceive anything properly, so u learn how to be quiet, and u learn how to repress, and you learn to take everything and put it inside and live with it

[stupendouspaintblob]

One of my favourite things about the epic fandom is the little phases it goes through. The time after the release of the thunder saga where everyone was feeling bad about the siren and her special interests. The popularity of the trope where astynax survives before the cyclops and ocean sagas came out. The obsession with elpenor and perimedes. The winion Polites smuggles onboard the ship. Ctimene and Eurylochus. Hell, the manwhore au. The warrior penelope. One of the best fandoms I have been in, hands down. Everybody is so sweet. I absolutely adore how close the fandom and jay and the cast are. About how artists like wolfy and gigi are closely tied to the cast and people within the fandom. The fanfiction authors, ranging from people just beginning their writing journey to proper established authors. The artists. Basically its late and im slightly sleep deprived and overcome with emotions while listening to the entire saga.