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paulamcg… we revel in the tropes -- we take those tidbits from favorite canons and twist them, turn them, fix the way the tropes were done wrong and come up with brand-new tropes so we can do them right.
Challenge #14
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) What makes it particularly appealing for you? What do you like in fanworks featuring that trope?
I can’t remember people using the word trope before my hiatus, before 2011. Perhaps I could mention something less specific, and name it Hurt/Comfort and Angst With Hope. But having checked the definition of trope in fanlore (devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations), I got the idea to write about a couple of tropes related to a these situations in Remus Lupin’s and/or Sirius Black’s lives: Lying Low At Lupin’s and the Lost Years.
When I entered fandom, Wolfstar people had already made a lot of fanfiction and fanart about Sirius coming to Remus’s cottage to shag him, or Remus mourning twelve years in that cottage, or becoming a prostitute while Sirius was in Azkaban.
Before I read those fics, I’d decided that my Remus was too poor to even have a cottage, and that Sirius came to his crumby rented room in London. And I wrote several stories about Remus’s (not lost) drifting years, set around the Mediterranean, where he met some people who helped him become the person Harry met in PoA. So I guess I enjoyed twisting the tropes and making new ones, not writing what readers expected.
But I loved reading about the reunions in the cottage and about Remus suffering in various ways in the lost years. Another favourite trope of mine was puppyshippy encounters during GoF winter, in a cave – because there was a shortcoming in LLAL: Dumbledore ordered Sirius to Lupin’s in June, when there wasn’t much chance for a snowstorm-related Hurt/Comfort.
I wrote all that in the past tense, because people must have moved on. I’ve written my LLAL and a lot about the Lost Years, and recently I’ve focused on the Pre-Azaban Era. There must be tropes there, like sharing a flat – and I twist that, too, making it take a long time (and I’ve got more time, because the year when the Marauders were born is not stated in the five books which I follow, and I’ve decided that they left Hogwarts in 1976) before Sirius and Remus (dare) move together, and making Remus move out once and then back again.
In my recent stories the theme is perhaps against some general fandom expectations. Maybe in 2020 we are supposed to write about queerness as something less problematic… than it was in Britain in the 1970s, which is the context (with added bigotry in the wizarding world) in which some of my characters struggle to come out, or accept or even recognise their own sexual orientation or asexuality, and to dare live according to their love.
However, at the recent R/S Small Gifts I’ve read new stories in which the LLAL and Lost Years tropes are alive, just twisted into AUs, where Sirius comes to the cottage after escaping Azkaban earlier or having not been imprisoned at all. And there it is again: the cold weather, our puppies freezing.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand is my kink. Generally poverty. I’ve claimed to write about a serious theme and to try my best to do it realistically, because it’s an important issue, and fiction as art should not shy away from making us feel uncomfortable. But when my character suffers from hunger and/or cold due to poverty, I actually find it erotic. I’ve found it hard to confess this, but recently an essay about kink made me realise that perhaps some of the fics about my poor Remus are that kind of kinky stories where the characters themselves don’t find the kink erotic. I don’t know if any readers find my stories kinky, but I guess I do, and that is the reason I continue enjoying my fic and the tropes I’ve mentioned, in their more and less twisted forms.
Challenge #14
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) What makes it particularly appealing for you? What do you like in fanworks featuring that trope?
I can’t remember people using the word trope before my hiatus, before 2011. Perhaps I could mention something less specific, and name it Hurt/Comfort and Angst With Hope. But having checked the definition of trope in fanlore (devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations), I got the idea to write about a couple of tropes related to a these situations in Remus Lupin’s and/or Sirius Black’s lives: Lying Low At Lupin’s and the Lost Years.
When I entered fandom, Wolfstar people had already made a lot of fanfiction and fanart about Sirius coming to Remus’s cottage to shag him, or Remus mourning twelve years in that cottage, or becoming a prostitute while Sirius was in Azkaban.
Before I read those fics, I’d decided that my Remus was too poor to even have a cottage, and that Sirius came to his crumby rented room in London. And I wrote several stories about Remus’s (not lost) drifting years, set around the Mediterranean, where he met some people who helped him become the person Harry met in PoA. So I guess I enjoyed twisting the tropes and making new ones, not writing what readers expected.
But I loved reading about the reunions in the cottage and about Remus suffering in various ways in the lost years. Another favourite trope of mine was puppyshippy encounters during GoF winter, in a cave – because there was a shortcoming in LLAL: Dumbledore ordered Sirius to Lupin’s in June, when there wasn’t much chance for a snowstorm-related Hurt/Comfort.
I wrote all that in the past tense, because people must have moved on. I’ve written my LLAL and a lot about the Lost Years, and recently I’ve focused on the Pre-Azaban Era. There must be tropes there, like sharing a flat – and I twist that, too, making it take a long time (and I’ve got more time, because the year when the Marauders were born is not stated in the five books which I follow, and I’ve decided that they left Hogwarts in 1976) before Sirius and Remus (dare) move together, and making Remus move out once and then back again.
In my recent stories the theme is perhaps against some general fandom expectations. Maybe in 2020 we are supposed to write about queerness as something less problematic… than it was in Britain in the 1970s, which is the context (with added bigotry in the wizarding world) in which some of my characters struggle to come out, or accept or even recognise their own sexual orientation or asexuality, and to dare live according to their love.
However, at the recent R/S Small Gifts I’ve read new stories in which the LLAL and Lost Years tropes are alive, just twisted into AUs, where Sirius comes to the cottage after escaping Azkaban earlier or having not been imprisoned at all. And there it is again: the cold weather, our puppies freezing.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand is my kink. Generally poverty. I’ve claimed to write about a serious theme and to try my best to do it realistically, because it’s an important issue, and fiction as art should not shy away from making us feel uncomfortable. But when my character suffers from hunger and/or cold due to poverty, I actually find it erotic. I’ve found it hard to confess this, but recently an essay about kink made me realise that perhaps some of the fics about my poor Remus are that kind of kinky stories where the characters themselves don’t find the kink erotic. I don’t know if any readers find my stories kinky, but I guess I do, and that is the reason I continue enjoying my fic and the tropes I’ve mentioned, in their more and less twisted forms.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-27 07:09 pm (UTC)And how interesting about your poverty kink; thank you for sharing. I can see how a certain hurt/comfort element would come into it. :)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-27 07:42 pm (UTC)And thank you for acknowledging my kink – if it really is one! Yes, you’re right about the Hurt/Comfort (even though I’ve often felt that it’s not clear enough to meet readers expectations, and often there’s no sex scene). Besides, while you were commenting, I was reading your post and it occurred to me that also a shame element often comes to it, even shame related to body – shame for being too thin due to malnutrition. But hardly anyone’s admiration? Just coping and keeping your dignity with/despite someone’s help.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 03:53 pm (UTC)I think it's up to you how to frame your own experience. The whole conceptual space around kinky feelings, erotic feelings, sexual feelings, and just plain emotional feelings is... just expansively vast and messy, and I don't think there is a good way to clearly separate different aspects. If it feels right and helpful to you to consider this an erotic kink, then you can just go ahead and do that, and you don't have to meet any external objective standard of what an erotic kink can look like, because such standards don't really exist. Whatever it is for you, it is. If that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 04:58 pm (UTC)I suppose my kink can appear to readers as just a narrative one – but possibly more central than any common trope. When reading some trope-challenge posts, I’ve understood that I’m not very much of a trope-writer. A trope like hurt/comfort is not essential to me in the sense that it would be enough for me (as some people have said it is for them) to just get immersed in the mental images of suffering and caring. I do want plot and character development, a wider theme and a meaning, and in my writing that’s often partly related to my less commonly-written source of suffering, but also to circumstances and events in the (wizarding) world and other characters’ lives. And I assume that also writers and readers with other kinds of kinks are interested in different issues like that in fic.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-31 06:10 pm (UTC)About kinks, anything could be a kink. The notion of a kink has become so broad over the years that it seems to transcend a concrete, written definition at this point. We write what we love to write, and that's good enough.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-31 07:08 pm (UTC)Perhaps if anything can be called a kink, the word loses its function? But I’ve felt that using this word for what gives me the feels helps me understand my passion for these stories and to connect with other passionate participants in fandom. It also encourages me to simply continue to write what I love, regardless of feedback or other people’s interest in it, just as I believe that everyone else has the right to express and share their kink.