Fandom Snowflake Challenge
Jan. 22nd, 2023 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI liked this one.
Challenge #11 - In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
Several.
But I'll limit it to two.
Enemies to Lovers trope is a favorite, so is the back from the dead - second chance at love trope.
I really like the enemies to lovers one. Not quite sure why. Also, a fan of the redeemed villain or the hero who becomes a villain. I like ambiguous characters with a lot grey in them. More realistic. There's no such thing as a purely good or purely evil person. All people are capable of horrible and wonderful things, often at the same time. That's the danger - by the way - thinking that you aren't.
I think I like enemies to lovers - because love overcomes hate in the end. It gives me hope. That we can rise above our differences. Also there's friction and sizzle.
I love it when the villain falls for the hero or vice versa, best when its both.
The back from the dead - second chance at love is a trope that I working on now in a novel, with a wounded hero trope entwined within it. I like that trope quite a bit. The idea of mourning someone, only to find out they aren't dead. Or having everyone think you are dead - and navigating that terrain, how do you approach them - if you are now someone else? I'm reading a historical romance novel that's playing around with that as well.
Soap operas and comic books love this trope, and it has admittedly been done to death. But I find the difficult emotions that it explores fascinating. The idea that we don't really know each other, that our perceptions of one another are skewed. That who we are mourning may never have existed. And the person in front of us - we never really knew. Also,
there's a kind of comfort - when you are grieving - of the idea that they aren't really dead and can return, as someone else.
Also the idea of a second chance. That things aren't necessarily finale.
I like stories that are hopeful. Open-ended. That end...with a kind of rainbow after a storm. Not quite a happy ending, so much as a hopeful one?
Challenge #11 - In your own space, talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
Several.
But I'll limit it to two.
Enemies to Lovers trope is a favorite, so is the back from the dead - second chance at love trope.
I really like the enemies to lovers one. Not quite sure why. Also, a fan of the redeemed villain or the hero who becomes a villain. I like ambiguous characters with a lot grey in them. More realistic. There's no such thing as a purely good or purely evil person. All people are capable of horrible and wonderful things, often at the same time. That's the danger - by the way - thinking that you aren't.
I think I like enemies to lovers - because love overcomes hate in the end. It gives me hope. That we can rise above our differences. Also there's friction and sizzle.
I love it when the villain falls for the hero or vice versa, best when its both.
The back from the dead - second chance at love is a trope that I working on now in a novel, with a wounded hero trope entwined within it. I like that trope quite a bit. The idea of mourning someone, only to find out they aren't dead. Or having everyone think you are dead - and navigating that terrain, how do you approach them - if you are now someone else? I'm reading a historical romance novel that's playing around with that as well.
Soap operas and comic books love this trope, and it has admittedly been done to death. But I find the difficult emotions that it explores fascinating. The idea that we don't really know each other, that our perceptions of one another are skewed. That who we are mourning may never have existed. And the person in front of us - we never really knew. Also,
there's a kind of comfort - when you are grieving - of the idea that they aren't really dead and can return, as someone else.
Also the idea of a second chance. That things aren't necessarily finale.
I like stories that are hopeful. Open-ended. That end...with a kind of rainbow after a storm. Not quite a happy ending, so much as a hopeful one?
no subject
Date: 2023-01-23 04:11 am (UTC)1. Time Travel. Love time travel stories, both literary and cinematic. Not so much when the protagonist is simply visiting another era; I'm more into predestination paradoxes and "bootstrap" stories. Favorite time travel novel: "The Man Who Folded Himself," by David Gerrold. All time greatest time travel story: "All You Zombies," by Robert A. Heinlein. (Now that I think about it, they're practically the same story...)
2. Metafiction/Breaking the Fourth Wall. When done badly, this trope can be irritating to the extreme. But done well...it can shine a light on how a piece of fiction is constructed and perhaps allow for some critical self-assessment on the part of the creators. My favorites? Kurt Vonnegut freeing his characters at the end of "Breakfast of Champions"; the end of Blazing Saddles (literally breaking the fourth wall!); and--of course--Animal Man #26, where Grant Morrison steps into his own comic to explain his motivations to his main character, the fans (and maybe to himself).
no subject
Date: 2023-01-23 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-24 01:10 am (UTC)The problem with the Time Travel trope - is the human brain doesn't understand how time actually works. We think linear-ally or we're taught to. And time isn't linear. It doesn't go in a straight line, it goes in a circle. It bends, like light. And unless you are a physicist, you won't get it. Most time travel narratives make no sense - they aren't possible.
If you go back in time, you create a new present for yourself, with your past the future, which you can never legitimately return to. Because you've created a new time line - just by going back.
The only one who kind of got it right was Avengers: Endgame because the writers locked themselves in a room with astro-physicists for a month.
That's why most time travel stories annoy me. I know it's not possible the way they are telling it. Also, a lot of them just use it as a gimmick to either a) bring a modern back in time or vice versa (Time After Time by Jack Finney; Outlander by Diana Garbaldon), b) create an alternate universe scenario (see Back to the Future, which did both) or Ray Bradbury's Sound of Thunder.
Metafiction/Breaking the 4th Wall is also really hard to do well - without losing the story, characters, and being silly.
I think Pirandello did it well with Six Characters in Search of an Author, and there are a few theaterical works that pull it off. Most television shows use it as a gimmick - and it just is annoying. Novels are more interesting - I've seen it done in a few novels in an interesting way - where the characters start talking to the author. Comics have pulled it off, here and there.
(I'm not a Grant Morrison fan - so unfamiliar with Animal Man). I have read Breakfast of Champions (in the 80s, so don't remember it well) but he was good with the fourth wall.
She-Hulk is an example of it not working - they went too far and it was just silly. Most of the docu - style sitcoms irritate me because of how they handled it. (YMMV).
I'm on the fence about Cabin in the Woods which was Metafiction, without quite breaking the fourth wall. The Truman Show played with the fourth wall conceit in an interesting and similar way to Cabin in the Woods.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-24 01:10 pm (UTC)First of all, it doesn't bother me that the physics isn't accurate. That's not why I'm watching (or reading). As the Better Call Saul finale said so well, time travel stories aren't really about physics (the time travel part is just the hook)--most of the best ones are about regret, retracing your steps to a point where it all went wtong. Can you change your destiny and forge a new path? Or, if not, can you learn enough about the past to change your life in the here and now? (Serling's "Walking Distance" and Ellison's "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" are classics of this type.)
I enjoy the other types too: didactic warnings about the future, straight ahead adventure tales and all that; but for the most part, I'm interested in how the protagonist reacts. In a really good time loop story, he (or she) considers options, re-evaluates decisions, experiments with solutions, and maybe has a chance to grow from the experience. (ANGEL's "Time Bomb" episode is a good example of this...)
Now, as to why that one subset of the time travel trope--the protagonist as his own mother/father/alpha and omega--really appeals to me? That requires a bit more digging...
Is it because I really, really love myself? Possibly. (Talk to my wife about that. She'll have opinions.) But, speaking as someone who lived entirely too much in his own head for most of his life, it's an (almost absurd) external representation of an internal state. Epistemologically speaking, reality is filtered through individual consciousness. We are our own alpha and omega. It is a singular, inescapable truth.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 03:56 am (UTC)For someone who claims to dislike the time travel trope - I've admittedly watched a lot of movies and television series in it. Also read quite a few books and short stories.
Kate Atkinson's book..Life After Life is kind of groundhog day in hell.
Time Traveler's Wife - is tragic and disturbing. The series even more so.
Outlander - is kind of romantically ludicrous
The Butterfly Effect - interesting, and innovative - it follows the view of Sound of Thunder, the Bradbury story. Which is the more you go back to change your future, the more you screw it up.
Time After Time - can't go wrong with Malcolm McDowell playing HG Wells hunting Jack the Ripper through time
Frequency - preferred the movie to the series.
Doctor Who - handles it better than most.
Marvel Comics - I like best.
Sara Connor Chronicles...best of the television serials with it. Mainly because wasn't the focus, and it worked.
Time After Time by Jack Finney - a precursor to Somewhere in Time...both interesting in their own way
Quantum Leap - it was okay, I got disappointed.
Star Trek Next Generation - similar to Marvel, I liked it best, dealt with it as temporal anomaly. I think the series Picard revisits it.
It's kind of mainstay in sci-fi.