elanya

This came to me while I was falling asleep, thinking partly about trope bingo and how I am planning to do a fantasy AU of a fantasy setting...

I wonder if there would be any interest in a Trope Remix? I don't have a tine of time to write this out but I wanted to get something down before I forgot - you would be given a trope or a series of three, maybe, in a week or 10 day period, and you would take a pre-existing fic and write maybe 500 words of a remix of that story reworking that trope into it. What would X story look like in an AU setting? With an accidental baby acquisition instead of whatever maguffin it uses currently? The goal would be to keep things recognizable to some extent. This is more of a writing exercise than a story generation thing though. I dunno. You could remix your own story, anything from someone with a blanket transformative work permission, or anything you had explicit permission for, just to keep things kind, I think? You wouldn't have to complete a whole story, just a snippet that demonstrates the changes.

I don't know who would be interested in such a thing. I don't know that *I* would even be interested enough in it (certainly not enough to run it >.>), but it would be an interesting challenge I think? And it would certainly get me playing more explicitly with tropes than I do now.

Anyway, it was a random falling asleep thought that I thought worth throwing out there. Discuss amongst yourselves?

fishmalk asked me about what tropes annoy me the most.

I actually have a hard time with this because I don't personally tend to think in terms of tropes unless I'm challenged to do so, and I can get behind most anything if it is well executed - especially if the resulting story hits points on my list of things I like in fanfic (as an aside, having that is going to be super useful in the future I expect, for exchanges and the like. If this year's yuletide author is stalling me over here - I hope none of that gave you any bears! But it isn't a checklist and I really am pretty easy to please :)

Trying to think about it - I think the ones that annoy me the most are character-related tropes: things like overly excitable girls, or waif-fu type stuff. Especially when applied to female characters, even? This might be because female characters often get the short shrift and when I see them relegated to to tropes it seems insulting and lazy. Female characters can be tropey, but if that is all they are, it annoys me. It bothers me less when male characters are walking character tropes though, I think because a: it doesn't happen as often and b: there are plenty of well developed ones to chose from!

I think this applies more to TV and movies than to fanfic though. I'm not a seeker of tropes, generally speaking, so I don't read it a lot. I did do the trope bingo thing but that was a stretch for me.

Anyway, I apologize, this is not my best developed answer, but it has been a busy, and distracted, day!