Talking Meme 4: Thoughts on tropes
rogueslayer452 : Do you have any favorite tropes? Any least favorite and/or any tropes you feel are overused?
Okay, so as all of you probably know, by favourite kind of fic is friendship fic. IT IS THE BEST. I'm always a little hazy on what counts as trope and what doesn't, but I think that's not one.
I'm reasonably sure that "people on opposite side who care about each other" is a trope and it's probably my favourite kind of friendship fic. It's a subset of "friendships in unlikely places" which are my favourite broad subsets of friendship tropes, I guess. There's no kind of "people on opposite side who care about each other" that I don't like, be that friends-turned-enemies or enemies-turned-friends or any other variations upon this theme, including shippy ones.
But, really, there's no kind of friendship fic I don't like. I do also have a spectacular fondness for the "found familes" and "you and me against the world" tropes.
Relatedly, I also love the "people forced to work together" trope.
Identity porn is a trope I really like. Not sure why.
It does tie in nicely with my love of fandom AUs, though. Like most AUs, I tend to prefer it to be canon-plus rather than instead-of-canon (unless that's not possible, like, say, IN SPACE AUs). Instead-of-canon would be, for example, in the Rise of the Guardians fandom, a fic where the Guardians are not supernatural beings but regular humans with fandom identities (and then Pitch tries to C&D fandom into oblivion and lands them on CNN, oops). Canon-plus would be, as another example, in Young Avengers fandom, if the Young Avengers are all in fandom, fighting over who get to take over mod ownership of a fan exchange while still being superheroes on the side. (To pick two examples I've been toying with for years.)
Does that distinction between instead-of-canon AUs and canon-plus AUs make sense? I suppose another way to separate AU types would be setting-replacement (instead-of-canon), canon-compliant (canon-plus) and canon-divergent (what-if). Although, since there can be trope overlap between setting-replacement and canon-compliant AUs (like the fandom AU example above), that's not always the best way to differentiate, either. Especially since I would tend to classify canon-divergent AUs as canon-plus.
I think what I'm getting at is that in my fandoms, I like the settings and changing them are only interesting to me if you add stuff to them or make them more interesting in some way. (This isn't to say I don't like some setting-displacement AUs, but then my taste run more to the IN SPACE end of the scale than to the coffeeshop end of the scale.)
The reason I put IN SPACE in all caps all the time is that I'm secretly twelve it's one of my favourite kind of AUs. Probably my favourite outside of canon-plus AUs, actually.
I haven't seen this a lot, but one thing I absolutely love is in-canon myths or canon-retold-as-myth (with a broad definition of myth).
Time-travel and time-loops and assorted tropes are often awesome.
As far as tropes I don't like go, I think the tropes I tend to dislike most are tropes that take away something I see as fundamental to canon, which is a very subjective thing, I know. I tend not to like setting displacement AUs for this reason. (Let me put it this way: Without Auschwitz, Erik Lehnsherr is not Erik Lehnsherr, he's Max Eisenhardt. Granted, this is a rather extreme example, but it does explain why I lasted about three modern AUs into X-Men: First Class as a fandom.)
(While I'm on the subject of modern AUs, why is that so often used as a synonym for modern US AUs, even when the canon isn't set there? I hear that's common in Les Mis fandom (I stay away from that canon for reasons*, so I also stay away from the fandom, but I trust my source) which strikes me as strange, because I'm hard-pressed to think to think of a more French author than Hugo**.)
(No, wait, I know that one. Starts with "US" and ends with "centrism".)
Okay, so that ended up a lot closer to "thoughts on AUs" than to "thoughts on tropes", but as I've said above, I find tropes somewhat hazy to define. If anyone would like to name some in the comments, I'll give more specific thoughts.
I do enjoy, in general, trope subversion rather than tropes played straight, because those tend to have more worldbuilding. And worlduilding is AWESOME.
* Mainly that it's fucking weird for me.
** Molière's it, honestly. This entry was originally posted at http://dhampyresa.dreamwidth.org/58504.html and has
comments over there.