[Meme] Ultimate Fanfic Trope Showdown

[edenfalling]

Ultimate Fanfic Trope Showdown, where twenty-eight narrative tropes fight it out to see which ones you love best. :D

My results are as follows:

1. Found Families
2. Loyalty Kink
3. Role Reversal AU
4. Soulmate Identifying Marks: Tattoo, Red Thread of Fate, etc
5. Enemies to Friends to Lovers
6. Rivalmancy
7. Coffee House AU/Food Service AU
8. Friends to Lovers
9. Espionage AU
10. Age Difference (possibly due to time travel)
10. Vampires/Werewolves AU
12. Hurt/Comfort
13. Sex Pollen
14. Magical Connection (telepathy, etc)
15. Royalty/Arranged Marriage
16. Reincarnation/'25 Lives' AU
17. Selfcest (possibly due to time travel)
18. Amnesia
19. High School/Uni AU
20. Adopting/Raising a Baby
20. Fake Dating/Fake Marriage Accidentally Turns Into Feelings
20. Trapped in an Elevator/Snowed-In Cabin/etc
20. A/B/O
24. 'Groundhog Day'/Karmic Time Warp
25. Incest
26. Seemingly Unrequited Pining
26. Actually Unrequited Pining
26. Fake Out Make Out

Found families and loyalty kink are on top, as they should be. I love those tropes to ridiculous degrees. :D

I don't have remotely the same emotional attachment to the other tropes the generator thinks I like, which makes their positioning fairly arbitrary. That said, I am not sure how coffee shop AUs ended up higher than vampire/werewolf AUs, because given a choice I will always go for the inclusion of more fantasy elements rather than the removal of pre-existing fantasy elements. I'm also not sure why soulmate marks are so high. I suppose they kept being juxtaposed against things that are more definitely not my delicious cup of tea. (Well, and I do like the idea of soulmate marks in general, because I think they say all kinds of fascinating things about determinism, and also writing-based marks raise interesting questions about names and language and the origin of literacy and stuff, except people tend not to explore those implications in practice and just write fairly standard genre romance. *sigh*)

The relegation of pining (requited or otherwise) to the bottom of the list, even below incest, is absolutely accurate. I mean, I'll read and even enjoy stories built around pining if there's other stuff going on and I like the narrative voice and the non-pining aspects of the characterization, but the trope itself makes me want to shake the pining person and shout, "Would you just pull yourself together and DO SOMETHING ALREADY! Stop living in limbo and GET AN ANSWER! Even a solid 'no' would be better than this interminable wishy-washy self-absorbed self-inflicted suffering!"

...

...

I think this is where I say, your trope is not my trope and that's okay? *wry* But yeah, pining is really not my trope.

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In other news I got a haircut today. I really should have gotten it trimmed last weekend, but my trip to New Jersey precluded that and so I suffered through excessive shagginess this past week. My life: so hard.

(The annoying thing about short hair is that you notice relatively minor length differences a lot more than you do when your hair is already halfway down your back. The nice thing about short hair, though, is that it is so easy to deal with in the morning. I mean, I have started having vague thoughts about, 'hey, what if long hair and ponytails and braids...?' again, but they are still extremely vague and half-hearted even though this is the longest I've gone with short hair since, uh, ever. I dunno if they'll come to much of anything or if I'll settle into a more permanent hairstyle.)

Comments

[marmota_b]

I'm 54% through and what I've discovered so far is that yes, my previous impression that I use/enjoy fanfiction for completely different things than most people seem to do is perfectly accurate. I don't care for most of the things it offers, and even those I do care for would be somewhere lower on my list than absolutely basic things like, ahem, "love" and "faith" and "hope". I find that fact that the latter two are not a trope and the former only in twisted variations rather disconcerting.
What does it say about me? *is wry back*

[edenfalling]

The tropes I look for tend to be very broad -- along the lines of 'functional friendships' or 'interesting world-building that actually considers the implications of a superficially nifty concept' -- and so don't translate well into snappy one-line scenario sketches. I consider most other tropes like spices: they can make some dishes taste better when used right, or make other dishes taste awful when used inappropriately or in the wrong quantities, but either way I don't go tasting the raw contents of my spice shelf for fun!

[marmota_b]

That's a very good way to put it (are you a writer or something? ;-).
I simplified a lot, of course, but when I think about the things I enjoy, it does tend to boil down to those three things in the end: friendship and family and respectful romance; and stories that may not necessarily have completely happy endings but don't leave me feeling bleak; and... some sort of feeling that things have a purpose?
But I also like world-building and gap-filling and character studies and good storytelling including stylistic choices, always and ever more than stories that exist just to put two or more people together. Whereas the majority opinion seems to be that the latter is what fanfiction is for. So I guess I have much more affinity to general storytelling tropes than I do to fandom-specific ones. I just ended up playing in the fanfiction sandbox because worldbuilding and gap-filling and character studies!

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

I actually found that quiz a tad tricky, because I like different things from fanfiction and canon! For example, in canon I love established pairings, but in fanfiction one of my absolute favourite tropes is pining. Ridiculous mutual pining. Similarly, found families is one of my favourite tropes in stories, but I'm far more romance-focused usually when it comes to fanfiction.

(And my top 3 tropes were groundhog day - which I enjoy in fic, mutual, and unrequited pining. :D)

[edenfalling]

My canon and fanfic tastes are closer together than yours, I think, so I didn't have trouble on that front. My issue is that most of the tropes in this quiz don't speak to me one way or the other -- I don't seek them out, nor do I avoid them. My opinion of a fic rests on other factors. (Mostly power fantasies, to be honest, plus world-building and explorations of ethics. I live for power fantasies, world-building, and ethics, in addition to the aforementioned found families and loyalty kink.)

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

But the best part of the groundhog day scenario is the power trip that comes from it! Or perhaps too many Naruto time travel and groundhog day fics have made me biased.

[edenfalling]

Hmm! I do see what you mean, but I think... what I want from a groundhog day scenario (insofar as I want anything, since they're a neutral trope for me) is self-awareness, not a power-up. Also discussion of the ethical problems inherent in a situation where one person can do whatever they want without external consequences (because of the reset button) and where that person can learn really personal stuff about everyone around them without reciprocity, because everyone else gets wiped back to square one and then doesn't remember consenting to the repeater knowing these things.

So level-grinding is not what I look for, except insofar as it serves the growth of self-awareness. I don't want a groundhog day scenario where you can get out of the loop by punching someone really hard; I want one where you have to accept or change something about yourself and your interactions with other people.

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

I think it's a fanfiction vs. canon thing again? If it were a original story, then I'm far more into the ethics and character building side. But my fondness for the fanfiction version stems entirely from curbstomp no jutsu, and applies only to characters I want to see get that powerup.

[edenfalling]

I see! I think this is where we part ways, because I have a knee-jerk feeling that a curbstomp no jutsu earned via groundhog day shenanigans is cheating and doesn't actually count. (I could probably work up some rational arguments to that effect, but at the end of the day it's a purely emotional reaction so I won't try to dress it up as anything more than that. Particularly since some of the curbstomp no jutsu scenarios that I do like are not actually any more fair or plausible. Like curbstomp no jutsu via time travel, for instance... *headdesk*)