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

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

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.;

*nods* Enemy pairings totally tie into this, because they're about two people both competing as equals and competing on the same field.

And for #5, another of my biggest long-running narrative kinks is portrayal of alien cultures/POVs that are truly alien.

I need to send you a link to this - because I've got a sci-fi story on a back burner and one things I'm currently tripping over is how to make the hero alien in both realistic, interesting, and consistent ways.

And would you mind talking about how Lireal tweaks the 'unhappy orphan' sterotype?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I need to send you a link to this - because I've got a sci-fi story on a back burner and one things I'm currently tripping over is how to make the hero alien in both realistic, interesting, and consistent ways.

Oh, please do; that's absolutely the sort of thing I adore, and would be happy to brainstorm with you 'til the cows come home.

As for Lirael, I would have sworn I babbled about that a lot when I'd finished it, but it might have been to Megan or Cho so I guess I'm not repeating myself too much here. :) The classic version of that trope when you see it in a lot of fairy tales or genre fiction is the sort of thing you see in Cinderella, or the first Harry Potter book. You've got the unhappy misfit child who doesn't fit in, longs for a better, more exciting or magical life, a loving family, etc.; and in the usual happy ending versions, they get all that. The ugly duckling turns out to have a grand destiny or amazing magical gifts, they're reunited with their loving family or discover they're really a long-lost princess, etc., and everything ends happily ever after. It's a very Sue-ish/Stu-ish sort of childish wish-fulfillment fantasy -- you're not my real parents, I don't belong in this boring stupid life, I want to be SPECIAL and loved -- which is probably why you see so much of it in children's/YA fic.

But Lirael twists all of that around in very subtle ways. On the surface it looks like it's following the pattern to a tee -- she's the subject of prophecies, wonderful magical companions and tools fall into her lap, she discovers loving relatives she never knew when she was growing up, and she's the next Abhorsen, one of the most powerful and unique beings in her world. There's even hints of a developing future romance, total fairy-tale happy ending, right?

Except none of this is exactly what she wanted. When she was longing for the Sight, that wasn't a dream of being special and unique: that was a dream of being *normal*, just like all the other Clayr. And all of those magical, unique things that happen just reinforce that she isn't a normal Clayr and never will be. She discovers her grandmother is alive and is much warmer to her emotionally than her aunt ever was -- but the timing is such that she never really gets to build up a real family relationship there. She finds out who her father was, but he's already long dead. So it's not strictly an unhappy ending -- she has at least found her place in the world, friends and a potential love interest, and a sense of purpose -- but a little bittersweet nonetheless, because the things she got were not the things she always wanted, and they actively remind her that her deepest childhood wishes will never come true.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Okay, email sent.

And yeah, I remember you talking about this. Poor Lireal. Actually, now that you mention it, I bet her desire to be normal is one of the reasons that I connected more with Sabriel, who always knew she was different and accepted it.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

*nods* And Sabriel I think was set up to have an easier time being different thanks to her upbringing -- she knows her background, she's growing up knowing that she'll be Abhorsen someday, and she's different from the caravan folks she's raised around at first, and then different from the girls in the boarding school over the Wall, but thanks to her father she still has a sense of place and continuity and belonging -- and the moving back and forth between different cultures that they've done throughout her life also helps to sort of normalize that sense of difference, if that makes any sense? She knows the world is bigger and more diverse than whatever subsection of it she's living in at the moment. Whereas Lirael, she's got the Gojyo thing going on where her very appearance instantly marks her as obviously different from all of the rest of her blood relations that she knows about, and she has no idea about the unknown father her looks take after; and I can vouch from experience that even in the best of circumstances where you're not being teased or called ugly, looking so drastically different from your family can be...an odd experience. And while she's adequately provided for physically, her emotional needs for a warm parental figure weren't being met, so she doesn't have that foundation for a secure sense of self that Sabriel did with her relationship with her father. Finally, growing up immersed as she did in a single rather insular culture, I don't think she got the same sense of relativity Sabriel did at an earlier age; sure, she saw the occasional visitors from other groups, but day in and day out her total cultural experience was the Clayr.

It could have been much much worse, of course; nothing in the books even seems to hint that there was any sort of teasing or cruelty based on her appearance or obvious "racial" difference, or being an orphan; and nobody ever even teases her about being a late bloomer where the Sight is involved. (Which was actually one of the little bits I found a little harder to believe, because kids are kids and even if the Clayr were blessedly free of deliberately cruel bullies, teasing happens, and it doesn't have to be mean-spirited or deliberately cruel to hurt, especially when the target is as insecure and sensitive as Lirael was.)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Yeah, the lack of teasing is surprising - but her childhood is already SO HARD to read that I don't think I could have taken anything more than what we got. And I do like that she realized how sensitive she was - when she saw the body of the guy that was flirting with her, she talks about he meant to be kind, and she wished she'd spent some time with him.