There's A Woman Inside Of All Of Us Who Never Seems To Get Enough

[redbrunja]

 Okay, so I haven't done the last two week's fannish5, because two weeks ago, my answers to the question (Five reasons you only get into one fandom at a time - or - five reasons you are multi-fannish") just didn't parse nicely into five answers, and this week's (Name five imaginary places you would like to go on vacation) frustrated me, because honestly, the places I'd like to go would require me to be printed with special skills to not die.

So, I'm making my own questions and posing it to you.

So, flist, tell me five of your bulletproof kinks in storytelling.

I talk about a lot of them here, but I'm going to give you five more, to start the ball rolling:

1.) Nakama.

2.) Gender-reversals. Everything I'm really digging right now has some nice gender reversals deep in the text.

3.) Complicated father-daughter relationships. (See, Jack and Sydney Bristow, Keith and Veronica Mars, Noah and Shiloh from Repo!) This ties into the idea of gender reversals. So many author just focus on the whole father/son dynamic.

4.) Glasses. Especially hot, dark hair guys with glasses.

5.) Romance with an equal. I like contrast between two people in a pairing, but I also want them to also be equals in some kind of root way. Zuko and Katara are actually a really good example of this. Despite their sociocultural and (initial) nationalistic differences, they're very similar in a lot of deep ways (importance of family, the ways they decide to protect their family, a total disrespect of other people's property....)

Comments

[ryanitenebrae.livejournal.com]

^^; That's really funny - I actually did one of these last year. (http://ryanitenebrae.livejournal.com/27348.html) I completely agree with. . .every last one of these, really. My big thing for romances is partnership, though, and I prefer my romance to be somehow plot-based. Gender reversals are very good, but need to be done very, very well in order to be pulled off.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*scurries off to read*

Honestly, and maybe it's because I have so many that I like, gender reversals don't seem that difficult to me.

[ryanitenebrae.livejournal.com]

It's kind of old, just so you know. I may do a follow-up to that sometime later, as my media intake has definitely improved in the last six months and I could probably be more analytic and come out with more examples in that respect.

Okay, maybe it's just that, for me, it's not that it's hard to do so much as. . .well, define.

For example. I am writing a story with a female protagonist that goes through a transformative journey, so to speak. The primary male character has a largely passive role in the story, and is responsible one simultaneously huge and small action at the very beginning that essentially acts as a catalyst for the whole story, but afterwards, does not in any way actually effect the events.

Is this role reversal? To say that it is would be to say that by definition the female has the passive role and the male the active, and I am, by writing the story, reversing those and making a statement about gender. But I'm not - this is just how the story forms organically in my head.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

To say that it is would be to say that by definition the female has the passive role and the male the active, and I am, by writing the story, reversing those and making a statement about gender. But I'm not - this is just how the story forms organically in my head.

But in a larger context, men are typically given the more active role and females the more passive. So while it is great it it organically forms in your head as male/passive, female/active, I would call it role reversal.