Fandom Snowflake 10 - These May Not Be The Tropes You Are Looking For
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.
I don't know if it's a specific trope, but I seem to be very much on the path at this point toward liking media that subverts or averts their tropes. And not just in a way that makes it painfully obvious that it's really a horrible story Recycled IN SPAAAAAACE, either.
For example, one of the most fearsome foes of the Final Fantasy franchise (Added Alliterative Appeal) is the Tonberry. Tonberries are slow, they don't attack quickly, but odds are good that the first time you encounter one, it's going to one-shot a character, if not the entire party. Because Tonberries usually have a move that deals damage to a character based on the number of other monsters and creatures that have been killed. Or the amount of steps the party has taken. Or some other hidden counter that springs forth in vengeance and then has to be dealt with on a regular basis. If you play the game the way the designers intended, retribution arrives.
I also like games like Undertale, where the player has to make real choices with consequences and players with Genre Savvy often find themselves strongly in the category of Wrong Genre Savvy. It's good to have your expectations shifted.
Witty banner also helps. Whether Beatrice/Benedick, Laharl/Etna/Flonne/Mid-Boss, or Vash/Wolfwood/Millie, a character group that can sustain some zippy remarks without falling too far into "that's what [x] said" sorts of territory, things are usually going well.
The early Big Bang Theory had gestures of this, but with increasing Flanderization, is become apparent that instead of setting out to write a properly geek sitcom, they decided to write a generic sitcom and then apply various geek flavorings on top. Contrast, say, Welcome to Night Vale, where the weirdness is so thoroughly cemented into the world that is not possible to tell the story without it being there.
I guess that's why it's a little harder to write Dear Author letters - because I'm not looking for specific storytelling tropes that characters can be slotted into. I'm looking for stories that grow organically and can't be separated from their characters and settings. So I'm thinking in plots instead of tropes.
I don't think I'm the only one, either.
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I don't know if it's a specific trope, but I seem to be very much on the path at this point toward liking media that subverts or averts their tropes. And not just in a way that makes it painfully obvious that it's really a horrible story Recycled IN SPAAAAAACE, either.
For example, one of the most fearsome foes of the Final Fantasy franchise (Added Alliterative Appeal) is the Tonberry. Tonberries are slow, they don't attack quickly, but odds are good that the first time you encounter one, it's going to one-shot a character, if not the entire party. Because Tonberries usually have a move that deals damage to a character based on the number of other monsters and creatures that have been killed. Or the amount of steps the party has taken. Or some other hidden counter that springs forth in vengeance and then has to be dealt with on a regular basis. If you play the game the way the designers intended, retribution arrives.
I also like games like Undertale, where the player has to make real choices with consequences and players with Genre Savvy often find themselves strongly in the category of Wrong Genre Savvy. It's good to have your expectations shifted.
Witty banner also helps. Whether Beatrice/Benedick, Laharl/Etna/Flonne/Mid-Boss, or Vash/Wolfwood/Millie, a character group that can sustain some zippy remarks without falling too far into "that's what [x] said" sorts of territory, things are usually going well.
The early Big Bang Theory had gestures of this, but with increasing Flanderization, is become apparent that instead of setting out to write a properly geek sitcom, they decided to write a generic sitcom and then apply various geek flavorings on top. Contrast, say, Welcome to Night Vale, where the weirdness is so thoroughly cemented into the world that is not possible to tell the story without it being there.
I guess that's why it's a little harder to write Dear Author letters - because I'm not looking for specific storytelling tropes that characters can be slotted into. I'm looking for stories that grow organically and can't be separated from their characters and settings. So I'm thinking in plots instead of tropes.
I don't think I'm the only one, either.
comments on Dreamwidth.
LiveJournal, Wordpress, and other compatible blog service users can comment on DW posts utilizing their accounts through OpenID.