#that's an entire sci-fi subgenre btw | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

avelera · 1 year

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For the fic asks: ❌

❌ What's a trope you will never write?

There are so many but honestly... coffee shop AU or tattoo artist/florist AU... basically that entire subgenre of "Characters I ship from a work of sci-fi/fantasy/historical genre fiction suddenly are completely normal people living in the modern day real world and have normal every day jobs and don't/haven't undergone any sort of parallel version of the harrowing plot events that brought them together. They're just normal people who meet at a coffee shop and have a nice fluffy little romance utterly stripped of almost all resemblance to the source material events."

I will read the absolute cream of the crop of that genre on occasion, btw. I've seen some fabulous takes by fabulous authors, but generally speaking unless I trust that author to my bones and/or something really special is happening in that fic like incredible poetry or emotional realism or just a really beautiful romance worthy of mainstream publication, I absolutely loathe to my very core the coffee shop AU fic genre and its equivalents.

I will never write a fic where Dream was never Endless and Hob was never immortal and they didn't meet in 1389 but instead are just like... rival shop owners or college students or something. (In part because Dream is an absolute prick if he doesn't have the trauma of being a billions-years old concept with all the trauma to match, trying to be better than he was, and Just Some Dude Hob is made interesting by his immortality and if you strip that away he truly is Just Some Dude in a way I find almost inevitably dull as watching paint dry.)

I might, on rare occasion, read it but I would never ever write it, it strips away from them everything I find interesting about the characters. At that point, IMO, I would be better off just writing an original novel, I'd at least have a chance of getting paid for it!

I will never ever, similarly for my other fandoms, write Nicky/Joe from the Old Guard if they didn't get together because of the Crusades and their immortality, I won't even read it in that case, it's just not the characters or the conflicts that make that love story interesting anymore if they didn't fall in love despite everything about the Crusades making that nearly impossible. Likewise, I've no interest in Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes if they didn't grow up together in the 20s and have to cope with the traumas of WWII. I'll read a fic where they avoid the super soldier stuff, but I've no interest in them as like... modern college students, especially if they didn't grow up together, because that's the allure of the ship for me and I will Nope out of any fic where they didn't at least know each other as kids and form a bond of friendship then. Or Newt/Hermann from Pacific Rim, I could read a fic where the Kaiju never happened but I'd never read one where they weren't scientists. Our Flag Means Death is the fandom I've read the most modern AU-ish stuff for but that's because the story itself is a workplace comedy so it actually updates pretty well, but even then I've got a very narrow definition of which modern AUs I find interesting there, and the number of times Ed isn't shown to be a wildly successful superstar but is instead some kind of failure that Stede sugar daddies is truly mindboggling to me given it's the exact reverse of what happens in canon and why I liked the characters in canon, the incongruity of a superstar like Ed liking let alone loving someone like Stede. ANYWAY.

This is by no means meant to make fic writers who write this subgenre feel bad! As I've said, I've seen some utterly fabulous takes on this trope by other writers and enjoyed them thoroughly!

But I, personally, absolutely loathe the subgenre that strips everything that I think makes the characters interesting, doesn't replace it with a modern update, and doesn't include any elements of how the ship initially got to know each other (usually in some action packed or magical scenario in most genre fiction) and just... strips away everything but their appearance and some vague nods to their canon personalities and makes them fall in love in some bland, milquetoast, vanilla world that isn't even a realistic take on what working those jobs would be like in the real world!

I understand the pleasures of that genre is usually to strip away the conflict and ugliness and blood and just write a cute fluffy romance but my god, I can't stand it 90% of the time because it is so polished clean of any kind of conflict or plot or emotion, let alone anything to make the characters actually feel like the ones I fell in love with in the first place!

That's why I mostly write canon divergence AU! :D

#maggie rambles #with great apologies to lovers of that genre but I just CAN'T

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