ext_12512: Hinoe from Natsume Yuujinchou, elegant and smirky (happy chibi youkai!Hakkai in snow)
Smilla's Sense of Snark ([identity profile] smillaraaq.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] redbrunja 2009-04-27 10:43 am (UTC)

I absolutely share your #2 and #5, as we've discussed before. "Romance with an equal" is pretty much essential for me to truly like a ship. They don't have to have the same status and skills; it's more that the story shouldn't treat one character like they're superior to their other half, there should be opportunities for both to display their particular fields of competence and rely on each other's strengths, they should both get chances to save each other, etc.; and the characters absolutely have to respect their partner as an equal, even if they're in a setting where the societal default is that one of them is from a devalued class. Without that sense of respectful equal partnership, I can't ship it and I can't bring myself to care that the author wants me to. (Even my fondness for enemy pairings I think overlaps that in a large way, since the progression there is from repeated conflict -> growing mutual respect for a noble, skilled enemy -> attraction)

And "gender reversals", I quite like, although I think for me that's more of a subset of deep love for subversion of stereotypes in general. I really, really love it when a story doesn't go for any of the lazy expected defaults of "if you're this sex/race/age/etc. then you must be written like this", or when a Genre Savvy writer plays with your expectations to tweak a seemingly predictable storyline into something wonderful and unexpected, or goes along the expected plot arc from Point A to Point B, but gets there in a unique way. This is a big part of why I loved how Lirael tweaks the Unhappy Orphan Finds Real Family And Magical Destiny archetype, or Saiyuki where the characters with the usual heroic traits are the antagonists, while the "heroes" have the sort of vices and flaws that are usually assigned to the villains of a piece.

Other than those two, hmm. #3 would I think be first-person narratives, if they're exceptionally well done. Bad first-person is excruciating, and mediocre-but-competent first doesn't do anything special for me. But once in a blue moon, there'll be something written in tight first where the character's voice is so distinct that it just lives and breathes, and I finish the book feeling like I've gotten to know a real person on an intimate, almost telepathic level, as well as I know myself; finding one of those is a rare and irresistible thrill. (Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow and Joan Vinge's "Cat" series would be two of my biggest examples here.)

For #4, I'd say a sense of grounding in depth of culture and history. Tolkien was an absolute master of this, Dune did it well enough that I still love it despite its flaws, Courtship Rite is the most recent thing that's pushed this button for me; a lot of other SF and fantasy, though, tries to do this by just throwing around a lot of "As you know, Bhob" infodumps or tons of supplemental materials, but this is the sort of thing where IMO if it's done right you'll get that sense of all this weight of history just from the allusions people make seamlessly in the text, even if you never turn to the appendices.

And for #5, another of my biggest long-running narrative kinks is portrayal of alien cultures/POVs that are truly alien. This can be literal non-human extraterrestrial life forms, or supernatural creatures, or intelligent animals or sentient machines; or in a broader sense it can be human cultures, imaginary or historical, that are sufficiently distant in time as to be like writing another world. If your talking dog/computer AI/little green Martian reptiloid/immortal telepathic vampire/Neandertal cave painter/etc. looks at the world with the same attitudes, morals, and governing metaphors as an educated modern human from the First World, UR DOIN IT WRONG. If your character has a completely different body, life cycle, sensory apparatus, abilities, I want to see how it affects the way they look at the world. If your far future/distant past human character has no attitudes and beliefs that would seem strange or even slightly alienating to a modern sensibility, Do Not Pass Go.

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