Snowflake Challenge, day 10: favorite tropes
Huh. So a little while ago LJ started sending me "statistics digests" emails, which are actually kind of neat, but the most recent one makes me wonder if this post from yesterday (posting about 
fandom_stocking and Snowflake Challenge day 9) didn't show up on people f-lists? I wasn't expecting many comments, since it's mostly links, but it's not even showing any views, which is weird... (And I have had it happen that LJ randomly chose not to display certain entries in my friends page.) Anyway, weird! But if it didn't show up for you and you want to see what I got/made/wrote for
fandom_stocking, it's there, along with some self-recs for Snowflake.
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Day 10: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!
My tastes in this regard don't tend to change, so previous years' answers are still true: 2015 (family and high school/Hogwarts AUs), 2016 (animal companions, Proud Warrior Race Guy, competence kink, Tam Lin motif, chibis), 2017 (Action Girl/Non-Action Guy). But there are a couple I guess I haven't covered yet.
So it turns out mostly I have favorite tropes and such in original canons, not so much in fanworks. I mean, focusing on these aspects of original canon in the fanworks probably would mean that I would enjoy them, too, but I generally don't read fic "by trope" -- just by ship/fandom in my small fandoms and by author in the larger ones.
One that appeals to me a lot in original canons is what I've been calling magic-as-science, which I guess is what TV Tropes calls Fantastic Science (with elements of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic). Well, TV Tropes applies this trope much more broadly than I would -- for me, it needs to be internally consistent, it needs to function believably as a science, and it needs to... make intuitive sense to me, I guess -- which I think ultimately means that it needs to, like, obey the underlying rules of physics/thermodynamics, while allowing for energy and matter to be manipulated in ways not accessible in real life.
This one occurred to me because I'm reading a book right now which does this quite well, and I'm finding myself enjoying the hell out of it in a way that I haven't wholeheartedly enjoyed anything in, I think, over a year: The Philosophers Flight by Tom Miller (in ARC, which ms_geekette graciously shared with me). It's got all the hallmarks of what I love about this trope: magic that requires study, calculations, and practice; magic that requires the knoweldge of math of science to do it properly; magic with a community of practitioners who are advancing scientific study of it, and magical institutions which regulate the study and practice of magic; magic that experiences scientific progress, that contributes to and feeds on progress. So, like science, only more.
I'm not sure WHY I'm such a huge fan of this trope/approach, other than just, well, I love science and I love magic, and there's a lot of room for nerdery in this type of magic, which I can appreciate . Scientifically rigorous magic (if done right, and not just a bunch of pseudo science-babble thrown at it) is also one way to ensure that the magic is internally consistent, which, the absence of that is a big pet peeve of mine in fantasy. But part of it might also be that magic-as-science ensures the magic feels more "real" to me -- and who wouldn't want to have real magic?
Here are several examples that I love:
- Kingkiller Chronicles (Name of the Wind, Wise Man's Fear, and whenever Pat Rothfuss gets around o actually finishing the damn thing, The Doors of Stone). I know this is a polarizing series -- some people think Kvothe is an insufferable Gary-Stu, others think this book has the best prose since the invention of human language, etc. etc. I like a lot of other things about the books, dislike a few, but the magic? The magic is amazing. The magic is basically applied thermodynamics: if humans had the capacity to directly manipulate energy, this is pretty much how magic would work, I'm convinced of it. There's magica friction and heat losses and efficiency coefficients, and reading about all of it filled me with immense glee. (It was also kind of awesome to learn that Rothfuss started his college education as a chemical engineering major. That may well be why his magic makes so much sense/is so delightful to me -- it's rooted, I think, in all the same things *I* use to think about the physical world. And there's a University where magic students study real scientific subjects in addition to magic, and have labs. Magic labs FTW!
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch -- my favorite urban fantasy take on this trope. First, I love the concept of Newtonian magic, because why WOULDN'T the father of calculus and modern physics also be the father of "modern", scientific magic? I love Peters empirical approach to magic (and relief in confirming that it obeys the inverse square law), the way that while there are different approaches and styles of magic, one gets the sense that the underlying principles are the same, just utilized differently in different cultural approaches (comparative thaumaturgy being a discipline still in its infancy, thats a bit of an extrapolation, but seems to be true to the underlying premise of the universe).
- Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also kind of urban fantasy, in the sense that there's magic and it is set in the modern(ish) world, but really IMO it's closer to Discworld, where it's in large part satire-through-fantasy, while still being its own story. The book takes place in and is entirely about a magical research institute, including academic rivalries, competition for grad students and machine time, and they make references to Lomonosov-Lavoisier law, and it's just great fun. (I keep hoping B will read it some day, because I think he would get an absolute kick out of the magical academia types.) And magic as congruent with progess, and bureacracy as the antithesis of both, is something the book does very well.
- The Broken Earth books (The Fifth Season, etc.) by N.K.Jemisin have a lot of other things going for them, obviously, but I ALSO appreciated that orogeny, as a discipline, worked to rigorous scientific standards: the energy has to come from somewhere, and go somewhere, and there is a lot of careful calculation and pracitce involved in making sure that it comes and goes in the right amounts.
- This is also something I like a lot about Lev Grossman's The Magicians books -- I far prefer the studying-and-grinding parts in Brakebills to the Fillory stuff. It maybe makes the magic not very romantic, but it's tough and grounded, and I like that.
And a bit of a regretful anti-example: I had been hoping that Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn novels would work for me as a magic-as-science fantasy (especially given that the author has a first degree in science (biochem), but I found the rules of Sanderson's alloy-based magic just kind of counterintuitive. There was enough of a nod towards magic-as-science that I kept trying to figure out the science behind the magic, like I do with the other books of this type, and that kept breaking down for me. I know the series has a lot of scientific-type fans, and have even read through some equation-laden explanations for how the magical science, but it just doesn't make sense with the rules of the universe that apparently magic is not allowed to violate in my mind if it's going to be treated scientifically, so this aspect of it proved more irritating than enjoyable alas.
But I do have one purely fanwork-based trope that I have a huge fondness for: fusions. I spoke about a couple of specific forms in the past years -- Hogwarts AU is one, as is daemons AU, and what I think of as Temeraire AU, and even a Raksura AU! I also love seeing any kind of "sorting" based AUs, not just Hogwarts houses -- nations of the Four Kingdoms, Hexarchate factions have actually started making an appearance, to my delight, and if someone ever writes a characters-in-Dragaera-houses fic, I should probably expire of sheer joy. I'm even reasonably partial to "drift compatible" AUs, and I didn't even lice Pacific Rim that much! Some recs, where I tried not to repeat the fandoms too much:
- AtLA characters at Hogwarts art b viria13 on dA
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams art by guad
- The Slaked Vengeance by Missy, Princess Bride-Pacific Rim fusion (drabble-ish, gen)
- Trade Show by Flamebyrd, MCU-as-Raksura (<1k, gen, Pepper/Tony)
- A Vor and His Dragon by sahiya, Vorkosiverse-with-Temeraire-style dragons (5k, gen)
- Through the Fog by perpetual, Firefly-with-daemons (8k, gen)
- Like a Comet Streaming On by
sineala, Avengers-with-Iskyrne-style psychic wolves, (32k, Steve/Tony, E-rated)
- Eudaimonia by Poetry, Rivers of London-with-daemons, (9k, gen)
(Do you have favorite fusions with fandoms I know? Rec me them!)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1068035.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
fandom_stocking and Snowflake Challenge day 9) didn't show up on people f-lists? I wasn't expecting many comments, since it's mostly links, but it's not even showing any views, which is weird... (And I have had it happen that LJ randomly chose not to display certain entries in my friends page.) Anyway, weird! But if it didn't show up for you and you want to see what I got/made/wrote for
fandom_stocking, it's there, along with some self-recs for Snowflake.
*
Day 10: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!
My tastes in this regard don't tend to change, so previous years' answers are still true: 2015 (family and high school/Hogwarts AUs), 2016 (animal companions, Proud Warrior Race Guy, competence kink, Tam Lin motif, chibis), 2017 (Action Girl/Non-Action Guy). But there are a couple I guess I haven't covered yet.
So it turns out mostly I have favorite tropes and such in original canons, not so much in fanworks. I mean, focusing on these aspects of original canon in the fanworks probably would mean that I would enjoy them, too, but I generally don't read fic "by trope" -- just by ship/fandom in my small fandoms and by author in the larger ones.
One that appeals to me a lot in original canons is what I've been calling magic-as-science, which I guess is what TV Tropes calls Fantastic Science (with elements of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic). Well, TV Tropes applies this trope much more broadly than I would -- for me, it needs to be internally consistent, it needs to function believably as a science, and it needs to... make intuitive sense to me, I guess -- which I think ultimately means that it needs to, like, obey the underlying rules of physics/thermodynamics, while allowing for energy and matter to be manipulated in ways not accessible in real life.
This one occurred to me because I'm reading a book right now which does this quite well, and I'm finding myself enjoying the hell out of it in a way that I haven't wholeheartedly enjoyed anything in, I think, over a year: The Philosophers Flight by Tom Miller (in ARC, which ms_geekette graciously shared with me). It's got all the hallmarks of what I love about this trope: magic that requires study, calculations, and practice; magic that requires the knoweldge of math of science to do it properly; magic with a community of practitioners who are advancing scientific study of it, and magical institutions which regulate the study and practice of magic; magic that experiences scientific progress, that contributes to and feeds on progress. So, like science, only more.
I'm not sure WHY I'm such a huge fan of this trope/approach, other than just, well, I love science and I love magic, and there's a lot of room for nerdery in this type of magic, which I can appreciate . Scientifically rigorous magic (if done right, and not just a bunch of pseudo science-babble thrown at it) is also one way to ensure that the magic is internally consistent, which, the absence of that is a big pet peeve of mine in fantasy. But part of it might also be that magic-as-science ensures the magic feels more "real" to me -- and who wouldn't want to have real magic?
Here are several examples that I love:
- Kingkiller Chronicles (Name of the Wind, Wise Man's Fear, and whenever Pat Rothfuss gets around o actually finishing the damn thing, The Doors of Stone). I know this is a polarizing series -- some people think Kvothe is an insufferable Gary-Stu, others think this book has the best prose since the invention of human language, etc. etc. I like a lot of other things about the books, dislike a few, but the magic? The magic is amazing. The magic is basically applied thermodynamics: if humans had the capacity to directly manipulate energy, this is pretty much how magic would work, I'm convinced of it. There's magica friction and heat losses and efficiency coefficients, and reading about all of it filled me with immense glee. (It was also kind of awesome to learn that Rothfuss started his college education as a chemical engineering major. That may well be why his magic makes so much sense/is so delightful to me -- it's rooted, I think, in all the same things *I* use to think about the physical world. And there's a University where magic students study real scientific subjects in addition to magic, and have labs. Magic labs FTW!
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch -- my favorite urban fantasy take on this trope. First, I love the concept of Newtonian magic, because why WOULDN'T the father of calculus and modern physics also be the father of "modern", scientific magic? I love Peters empirical approach to magic (and relief in confirming that it obeys the inverse square law), the way that while there are different approaches and styles of magic, one gets the sense that the underlying principles are the same, just utilized differently in different cultural approaches (comparative thaumaturgy being a discipline still in its infancy, thats a bit of an extrapolation, but seems to be true to the underlying premise of the universe).
- Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also kind of urban fantasy, in the sense that there's magic and it is set in the modern(ish) world, but really IMO it's closer to Discworld, where it's in large part satire-through-fantasy, while still being its own story. The book takes place in and is entirely about a magical research institute, including academic rivalries, competition for grad students and machine time, and they make references to Lomonosov-Lavoisier law, and it's just great fun. (I keep hoping B will read it some day, because I think he would get an absolute kick out of the magical academia types.) And magic as congruent with progess, and bureacracy as the antithesis of both, is something the book does very well.
- The Broken Earth books (The Fifth Season, etc.) by N.K.Jemisin have a lot of other things going for them, obviously, but I ALSO appreciated that orogeny, as a discipline, worked to rigorous scientific standards: the energy has to come from somewhere, and go somewhere, and there is a lot of careful calculation and pracitce involved in making sure that it comes and goes in the right amounts.
- This is also something I like a lot about Lev Grossman's The Magicians books -- I far prefer the studying-and-grinding parts in Brakebills to the Fillory stuff. It maybe makes the magic not very romantic, but it's tough and grounded, and I like that.
And a bit of a regretful anti-example: I had been hoping that Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn novels would work for me as a magic-as-science fantasy (especially given that the author has a first degree in science (biochem), but I found the rules of Sanderson's alloy-based magic just kind of counterintuitive. There was enough of a nod towards magic-as-science that I kept trying to figure out the science behind the magic, like I do with the other books of this type, and that kept breaking down for me. I know the series has a lot of scientific-type fans, and have even read through some equation-laden explanations for how the magical science, but it just doesn't make sense with the rules of the universe that apparently magic is not allowed to violate in my mind if it's going to be treated scientifically, so this aspect of it proved more irritating than enjoyable alas.
But I do have one purely fanwork-based trope that I have a huge fondness for: fusions. I spoke about a couple of specific forms in the past years -- Hogwarts AU is one, as is daemons AU, and what I think of as Temeraire AU, and even a Raksura AU! I also love seeing any kind of "sorting" based AUs, not just Hogwarts houses -- nations of the Four Kingdoms, Hexarchate factions have actually started making an appearance, to my delight, and if someone ever writes a characters-in-Dragaera-houses fic, I should probably expire of sheer joy. I'm even reasonably partial to "drift compatible" AUs, and I didn't even lice Pacific Rim that much! Some recs, where I tried not to repeat the fandoms too much:
- AtLA characters at Hogwarts art b viria13 on dA
- ASOIAF Quidditch teams art by guad
- The Slaked Vengeance by Missy, Princess Bride-Pacific Rim fusion (drabble-ish, gen)
- Trade Show by Flamebyrd, MCU-as-Raksura (<1k, gen, Pepper/Tony)
- A Vor and His Dragon by sahiya, Vorkosiverse-with-Temeraire-style dragons (5k, gen)
- Through the Fog by perpetual, Firefly-with-daemons (8k, gen)
- Like a Comet Streaming On by
sineala, Avengers-with-Iskyrne-style psychic wolves, (32k, Steve/Tony, E-rated)
- Eudaimonia by Poetry, Rivers of London-with-daemons, (9k, gen)
(Do you have favorite fusions with fandoms I know? Rec me them!)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1068035.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).