#then again i was in a space horro kind of mood

[joeys-piano]

Heya, happy STS! How do you spot, create, or develop sexual/romantic chemistry between your characters?

Wassup, Nico!

Well, being a fanfic writer and asexual, I guess my approach to it might be a little different from general writing convention. So I'll break it down with brief overviews, and you can hear my thoughts about it.

Spotting sexual/romantic chemistry between characters

Being in the fandom space can help sharpen your radar for these kinds of things. There are tropes you can identify that seem to correlate with chemistry: enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, rivalry (two-pronged or one-sided), partnership of convenience, etc, etc. And those are generally good places where you can find chemistry between characters, because they can bring out the character driveness of whoever you're writing for. Each trope has its "plot points" of how that relationship can develop, and you can use those as sign posts to show that chemistry is changing, intensifying, what have you. And so forth.

But I think it's very important to keep in mind that tropes, on their own, aren't the reason why there's chemistry between characters. They're more like catalyst points where something could happen, and it's up to the writer's abilities and their approach to this that teases out why certain pairings grip the audience harder than other ones, even though those two pairings might be following the same tropes and whatnot.

For me, I like to look beyond the tropes involved to see how the characters involved influence each other. That's where I think chemistry comes from - whether sexual or otherwise. It's seeing these characters, knowing they have a life of their own, and in those moments where they intersect how do they push and pull each other from the kind of people they want to be. It's that push and pull, the give and take, the betterment or detriment, that molds the chemistry between for those involved. And I think what elevates that chemistry is when those pushes and pulls oscillate between each other, like the characters are two giant planets neither dominating nor submitting but they keep circling, again and again, and it's like this tipsy dance before they eventually pull out, but keeping come back again.

That's how I would spot a real genuine, a real good chemistry between characters. It's something organic, it doesn't feel like it just happened to happen.

Creating sexual/romantic chemistry between characters

Despite being a fanfic writer, I'm not the best person to turn to for this. While it's true that I can spot chemistry, that doesn't mean I know how to take the things I like and try to spin it in my own writing. That's a very different skill from observation, and one you have to practice like any other muscle.

It's why I prefer writing for established relationships and not developing ones. Haha!

But in those moments where I'm in a mood to challenge myself, this is my approach to creating that charged chemistry. As I mentioned earlier, I have a preference towards the continuous push-and-pull between characters. So I use that as my basic setup: I'll have two characters whose worlds wouldn't necessarily collide under typical circumstances, until something caused a push. Perhaps they share an interest in one or a few things, they think the other person might be good for them as a friend or at least somebody they don't mind hanging out with, until something else causes a pull.

A conflict, perhaps. They differ somewhere. I'll give an example.

I have a project in the vault where an ex-Christian mortician is unfortunately on the radar for a seemingly fanatic religious spiritual leader at their small town church. They met one night while the mortician is doing laundry at 3 a.m. He first meets the spiritual leader when they walked in, carrying blood stained clothes, looking shifty, and the mortician isn't entirely sure if they're supernatural or just a serial killer. So there's this what-if tension going on (not really chemistry, but just horror vibes), and the mortician is keeping to his own shit but clearly feels a hard, piercing stare on him as he's waiting for the wash machine to give fucking spit out his clothes so he can leave.

And we got the spiritual leader, staring away and being a horror weirdo, slapping the bloody clothes into a washing machine. And the mortician's watching because he might need to be a witness for some testimony, so he's gotta pay attention a little bit. And he's clearly not doing well at hiding it because the spiritual leader calls him out, and the mortician tells him an easier way he could clean those bloody clothes. Because these are things you just learn as part of being a mortician, and the dude is mortified that he might be giving a serial killer advice on how to clean up his act once the words come out of his mouth.

And then the spiritual leader - he just laughs. He says thank you, and strikes up a little conversation on how he wouldn't expect someone like the mortician to know that kind of stuff. Because at this point, they haven't shared anything about who they are, they just see what the other looks like and make judgment from there. But not who the other really is, yet. So mortician, laughing gruffly, weasels little tidbits of information because he still knows shit about the spiritual leader. And he's fairly competent that serial killers can be charming, so being vigilant is good for him. So they start talking, they talk about how funny it is that they're probably the only two people in town still up and doing laundry at this hour. And that leads to talk about work, and how their work hours are during graveyard shift. So they have something in common.

They talk about how they don't often do laundry at this time, but when you get the chance it's kind of nice. This opens to the mortician sharing a bit that he's a mortician. And then the spiritual leader shares that he's a support group leader for a nigh group at the local church. And that's when the mortician eats his own boot - metaphorically. Because he's not religious. But he has a good idea of what support group leaders for church night groups are like, and that's arguably than a serial killer in his opinion. But at the same time, despite him trying to gauge what kind of person this spiritual leader guy is, he doesn't seem too overly suspicious. Other than the bloody clothes he's washing for god knows what. And even too, the guy seems like a good conversational partner. So the mortician has a dilemma.

He kind of like this stranger's company, but he doesn't quite know what sort of crazy he's about to get into. So the mortician jokes out loud that he thought the other guy was a killer or something, and the spiritual leader's eyes widen and he quickly explains that he has a brother, they had an incident, and he's helping to wash their things and was going to go to the general store to help them through something. And now the mortician feels like shit about that, thinking that a religious person who's taking of their trans sibling can't be the worst person out there, so he feels mortified that he thought of serial killer first. And if this spiritual leader seems cool around people like him, the mortician, he could almost let down a little of his guard around this guy.

So they continue talking. They talk a little about what the spiritual leader does and what he does in this support group he leads. It leads to a conversation that the mortician doesn't go to church anymore, because he feels safe enough to admit to this seemingly cool guy in their small town at the night. And he felt safe, until the spiritual leader pulls out a pamphlet and suggests that the mortician comes along to one of the group sessions. And though it's not a pushy suggestion, the mortician's walls immediately shoot up. Because they're not interested. Okay, they can kind of understand the statement is coming from a seemingly good place, but the mortician is not going. And that's when the spiritual leader's facade starts to slip, and the mortician kind of pinches himself for thinking he found the one cool person he could hangout with in this small town.

And that's pretty much their first interaction. There are small, but considerable pushes and pulls from both characters as they glean from each other, and now they both have an interest and a conflict that will continue to push and pull them with every interaction they have and knowing that their schedules line up too well for this to not be their only encounter with each other in town. And that's what setups the chemistry. And that chemistry deepens as they bring out the worst and the best, the hurt and the comfort, and ping pong around each other because it's tempting to fight someone who you can view as sort of your own equal and trying to get the other person to bend to see your perspective of things when you're forced to bend to theirs.

So yeah. That's an example of my approach to creating chemistry. And if I continue this vault project, I'll tackle how that chemistry warps and changes over time. And yeah.

Developing sexual/romantic chemistry between characters

Again, I'm not the best person to ask for this because I'm asexual. So the things that interest me might not necessarily interest others. And that's a given. But again, if I'm following the same guideline I've been illustrating, the push and pull orbital thingy, I'll use the characters' share interests and what differs them from each other to ferment the chemistry I'm developing.

It's very important for me to that the characters have their own lives that they live, outside of each other. Having that, I think, is crucial because it makes the romantic/sexual nudges, gestures, and vibe you're bringing in as a writer stand out even more and you'll be able to portray it in a way that meshes with the chemistry that the characters have.

I love the concept of shared experiences, where characters share bits of what makes them different about their own life and letting the other character get a slice of that. I think that's a really fun, organic way of getting romantic/sexual vibes or content across. Because, in my mind, I think being in a relationship is when you can share bits of your own world with someone and getting to share what you enjoy with them. So, I like playing with that a lot.

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