bulletproof story kinks meme
May. 7th, 2009 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingSo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
askerian did a bulletproof story kinks meme, and I got to thinking.
Here are five things that always turn me on (metaphorically or literally speaking) and often induce me to read a story despite various grammar, characterization, or plot issues that would otherwise make me hit the back button:
1. The willing restraint of power: It doesn't matter if it's physical power, magical power, psychic power, or even emotional or political power. It's the idea that a person could do all kinds of drastic things, and chooses not to, for whatever reason. It's even better if a powerful person deliberately hands another character the key to stopping him or her, should the powerful person ever lose control or go too far... because then the person with the key is also in a position of restraining power, both his or her personal power over the first powerful person, and that powerful person's own power. (And wow, is that a convoluted sentence.)
2. Difficult ethical choices with actual consequences: I almost don't even care whether I agree with eventual choice, so long as the characters are suitably torn by the consequences, whatever they may be.
3. Lightly to moderately eroticized fighting and/or physical torture, particularly with knives or swords: What? Nobody ever said kinks had to be unembarrassing. This one embarrasses the hell out of me, and it can very easily tip over into being a squick... but I find it extraordinarily compelling even if I am simultaneously covering my eyes and going, "Oh my god, why am I still reading this?" (Actually, so long as the presentation isn't going for maximum physical revulsion, I can eroticize these scenes just fine on my own, and tend to do so involuntarily. *headdesk*)
4. Culture clashes: If and only if neither culture is portrayed as Good/Right or Evil/Wrong, because that misses the point. The point is that humans are capable of arranging ourselves into so many and so wildly varied patterns, and I love when people run up against something that challenges their most basic, most deeply ingrained assumptions about how the world must work, and discover that actually, no, sometimes people think it works this way instead, and they get by just fine despite that.
5. Storytelling: In the sense of one character telling folktales or legends or bits of history to another character. I like this best when the stories have nothing to do with the plot -- in other words, not a Wise Mentor explaining the conflict between the Forces of Light and the Dark Lord, but maybe a tour guide telling the history of a beautiful palace, or a group of travelers trading tall tales around a campfire to pass the time, or children reciting mangled stories about the magician who lived on the mountain (and later being proved wrong about half the details, especially if the story drift was away from the magician's personal idiosyncrasies and toward a general archetype of an evil magician). Stuff like that. If you put the stories into the characters' own voices, I am in love.
And a bonus 6. A sense of historical perspective: The idea that the world has not been frozen in its current political, economic, and technological state for thousands of years. The idea that things change, and have changed, and will continue to change. The idea that nothing lasts -- old stories are lost or adapted to fit new circumstances, artwork fades or is burned, monuments erode or fall to earthquakes or are torn down by people who've forgotten their significance, errors are made when copying books, languages mutate, religions come and go and grow and change, fashions alter, ethics shift, etc. The idea that life goes on regardless, and it's important to live and take action now, even knowing that you, too, will fade into the sands of time, and your works will be forgotten. I love that.
askerian did a bulletproof story kinks meme, and I got to thinking.Here are five things that always turn me on (metaphorically or literally speaking) and often induce me to read a story despite various grammar, characterization, or plot issues that would otherwise make me hit the back button:
1. The willing restraint of power: It doesn't matter if it's physical power, magical power, psychic power, or even emotional or political power. It's the idea that a person could do all kinds of drastic things, and chooses not to, for whatever reason. It's even better if a powerful person deliberately hands another character the key to stopping him or her, should the powerful person ever lose control or go too far... because then the person with the key is also in a position of restraining power, both his or her personal power over the first powerful person, and that powerful person's own power. (And wow, is that a convoluted sentence.)
2. Difficult ethical choices with actual consequences: I almost don't even care whether I agree with eventual choice, so long as the characters are suitably torn by the consequences, whatever they may be.
3. Lightly to moderately eroticized fighting and/or physical torture, particularly with knives or swords: What? Nobody ever said kinks had to be unembarrassing. This one embarrasses the hell out of me, and it can very easily tip over into being a squick... but I find it extraordinarily compelling even if I am simultaneously covering my eyes and going, "Oh my god, why am I still reading this?" (Actually, so long as the presentation isn't going for maximum physical revulsion, I can eroticize these scenes just fine on my own, and tend to do so involuntarily. *headdesk*)
4. Culture clashes: If and only if neither culture is portrayed as Good/Right or Evil/Wrong, because that misses the point. The point is that humans are capable of arranging ourselves into so many and so wildly varied patterns, and I love when people run up against something that challenges their most basic, most deeply ingrained assumptions about how the world must work, and discover that actually, no, sometimes people think it works this way instead, and they get by just fine despite that.
5. Storytelling: In the sense of one character telling folktales or legends or bits of history to another character. I like this best when the stories have nothing to do with the plot -- in other words, not a Wise Mentor explaining the conflict between the Forces of Light and the Dark Lord, but maybe a tour guide telling the history of a beautiful palace, or a group of travelers trading tall tales around a campfire to pass the time, or children reciting mangled stories about the magician who lived on the mountain (and later being proved wrong about half the details, especially if the story drift was away from the magician's personal idiosyncrasies and toward a general archetype of an evil magician). Stuff like that. If you put the stories into the characters' own voices, I am in love.
And a bonus 6. A sense of historical perspective: The idea that the world has not been frozen in its current political, economic, and technological state for thousands of years. The idea that things change, and have changed, and will continue to change. The idea that nothing lasts -- old stories are lost or adapted to fit new circumstances, artwork fades or is burned, monuments erode or fall to earthquakes or are torn down by people who've forgotten their significance, errors are made when copying books, languages mutate, religions come and go and grow and change, fashions alter, ethics shift, etc. The idea that life goes on regardless, and it's important to live and take action now, even knowing that you, too, will fade into the sands of time, and your works will be forgotten. I love that.
