Cliches
Okay, so often when I read fanfiction, I hear people complain about cliches. It makes sense. Some things are so overdone, it makes you want to puke, but honestly if you put it into perspective, it's not the repetitiveness so much as the poorly written, saccharine, shoot-me-with-a-gun "romantic" moments.
Cliches, themselves, I feel are not bad. In fact, I believe that most ideas become cliches because they work well, and why fix things that work well. I myself enjoy the overly done Romeo and Juliet story where two enemies fall in love, whether of their own volition or through forced contact. I feel what everyone HATES is that really just sickening Barbie plastic moments that just would never happen in real life. Perhaps if life was directed by the Sopranos director or Stephenie Meyer. Even then, only maybe.
Imagine this.
A girl is strolling innocently along the sidewalk. Walking and breathing, enjoying perhaps too much of a perfect day. Then, uh oh, her high heel stiletto (yeah I have no clue why she's wearing this either) gets caught on a loose rock, and she goes headlong into concrete. Through some miraculous miracle (I understand it's repetitive) an arm reaches out to grab her and she saved from a concussion (or at least getting her perfectly manicured nails broken). She looks up into the face of her savior and simply melts into the man's gaze like she's made out of ice cream or something (which she knows is impossible because she's on a diet to maintain her perfect figure). They stare longingly into each other eyes noticing how the other's looks like jewels or the sun's rays (need sunglasses?) or limpid pools of... Limpidness... Time has stopped because my god this scene is so important that even time has decided to pause a moment to gawk at the beauty (stupidity?) of this newfound couple. Electricity racing down their nerves, skin burning where they touch, the two not even aware that their symptoms sound a lot like being electrocuted. They know by some weird fandom-only instinct that THIS is the person that they're destined for...
And then you puke all over your keyboard and wonder why the hell I would subject you to such torture.
Hmm I'm not really sure myself. It all comes down to a single realization. It happened while I was reading someone's author's note. They wrote how they were improving fanfiction with their story. Wow what an egotist! I mean I understand that most of fandom is crap, but really! Put yourself up on a pedestal! Then they put in all caps STOP THE CLICHES. I paused. What? Yet another person against the cliches. She (or he, I always tend to think fanfiction writers are girls) then continued about how they were improving fanfiction by making an original story. I paused another second, clicked on the back button, and re-read their summary. Original? Perhaps I was a little confused about their story, but no matter how I looked at it, it's essentially about how two enemies fall in love as they're forced to work together. Overdone. To death. My god even Death himself gets pissed when he has to take another love hate story to the fanfiction graveyard ( yeah that sounded a lot more clever in my head).
Honestly it wasn't her/his use of a cliche that bothered me (in fact, I picked that story because I like that cliche), but the subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) proclamations that they were better than other writers because they were writing something "original."
Original my ass.
I mostly believe to write something truly original is very difficult. It takes a wild imagination and perhaps some detachment from the cliches to think of something truly original. Stories tend to derive from others and at the basic core, all stories have one of at most twenty basic premises. Even if someone comes up with something truly original, it's difficult to appreciate because people like familiarity. People LIKE cliches and their familiarity, that's why they're popular. Essentially over time, even new original ideas become beaten into a standard, and they themselves become cliches.
Stop the cliches? Don't make me laugh. You might as well just kill the writing industry. What you really want to say is stop writing cliches in a way that makes me want to gouge my brain out with a salad fork.
Much better right?