Soulmark AUs!

[melannen]

Talk to me about Soulmate marks! Love them? Hate them? Like them okay in small quantities? Only want a very particular version that you want to expostulate on? Want to like them, except for that one thing that bothers you?

Poll #23640 Actually here

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 99

View Respondents

Soulmark AUs?

View Answers

Love them!
15 (15.2%)

Hate them!
15 (15.2%)

Like them, in moderation.
24 (24.2%)

Like them but only when done in very particular ways -
43 (43.4%)

Wish I could like them but there's these aspects that bother me -
13 (13.1%)

Dislike them, in moderation.
6 (6.1%)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
14 (14.1%)

Wish other kinds of soulmate fic were still more common.
13 (13.1%)

At least they started to dilute the torrent of A/B/O soulmate fic?
21 (21.2%)

Am confused by them.
1 (1.0%)

In theory dislike them please ignore all these stories I've come up with
6 (6.1%)

What's your favorite variant on the trope - timers? names? first words? scars? Something else?

What do you wish got done better, differently, or more often? How do you like to see the tropes subverted?

Where do you define the edges of soulmark fic vs. other kinds of soulmate fic?

Any recommendations?

Any fic bunnies you want to share?

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I really don't enjoy the idea of everyone having a single unique romantic soulmate, and also only tend to enjoy romances where everyone is consumed with self doubt. So only tend to enjoy soulmate stories which play around with the idea: it's just one person who is very significant to your life but maybe not romantic, or the people in the ship don't have matching marks, or the marks just cause more drama for the ship.

One fic I really enjoyed involved a tragic, shippy friendship from canon, where A had been working under a false name to destroy B's family for revenge. Adding soulmarks with each other's names just made things worse for both of them: B pined for A while knowing his enemy was his soulmate (but not knowing this was A), while A still did his revenge, it just got angstier since he knew he wasn't just destroying his friend's life, but that of his soulmate. It also has worst enemy soulmarks which is a cool idea and similarly added to all the angst. Knowing the pairing is a spoiler for canon, but here's the fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17523995

[isis]

Have you read An Ever Fixed Mark, the Pride and Prejudice soulmark AU which is exactly about this, the idea that soulmarks may perhaps just indicate important people in your life? It definitely plays with the trope, and it's a wonderful fic.

[primeideal]

I like the "last words" idea in theory. I guess I'm kind of cynical about the idea of determinism (and "romance is for everyone," natch).

https://archiveofourown.org/works/10755801 Rogue One rec--mostly for the Chirrut/Baze.

I couldn't find it last time I looked but there was a great Hamilton one about "Alexander's soulmates just have words all over them because he never shuts up, even when he's dying."

At the risk of kissing butt OP's Enjolras/Grantaire fic was great also :)

Edit: oh, here's another amusing "last words" one, it's Luke/Bodhi. Luke's just like "...who the hell is Galen." https://archiveofourown.org/works/13028973

[melannen]

Ah hah, I was just going to say I'd never seen the last words version but I wrote one sort of like that! I will have to look at the others. Mine wasn't quite last words, but it does seem like it's a version built for exactly the kind of horrible tragedy I was going for. :D

[hannah]

The show Justified makes a weirdly good case for non-romantic soulmates, if you want to look at it with that set of heuristics.

[melannen]

Interesting! I do love anything that goes for the non-romantic versions.

[mecurtin]

The only ones I like are where the trope is subverted HARDCORE.

The soulmate fic I've been *looking* for is one where scientists (or at least Our Hero(es)) investigate where the soulmate marks & matching system comes from. What kind of power/entity is involved? Can this entity be tricked, can the system be gamed? What parameters is the matching service using in its calculations?

That sort of thing! I don't recall that I've ever seen it, though.

[melannen]

Oooh. I want that, too.

The closest I can come up with is you favorite old-fashioned fairytale romance, which is White Collar OT3 and is soulbond from first touch rather than soulmarks, but treats it in a very sciencey way (including excerpts from papers.) Possibly I'm also remembering some of that from the Suits fic it was based on.

[trobadora]

The determinism inherent in the trope is the opposite of what works for me in shippiness.

[melannen]

Yeah, I think part of the reason I went for the "last words" version as mentioned above is that it can be viewed as less deterministic. I'm also in for the subversions where nobody's sure if it's really deterministic, or everybody believes it is but it turns out not to be, or it's all self-fulfilling prophecy, or things like that. But the determinism is exactly what works for a lot of people, I think. I can absolutely see the wish-fulfillment in a world where you know you are with the right person.

[sholio]

The version of it that works best for me, although people rarely write it, is the version where no one actually has any idea what it means and people are just guessing, and society might put a whole set of romantic assumptions on it, but sometimes it's also just two people who went through a traumatic experience together, and sometimes it's siblings, and some people don't have one at all, and some people who started out with mismatched ones find that they change to match when they get together, and some people have it for a person who doesn't have it for them. Basically, I like it weird and slippery and liminal. It's very rare to find that, though. I've written it a couple of times just because apparently if I want it I gotta write it myself.

I can enjoy the played-straight version because in the right mood, I do love a fluffy romantic scenario for my OTPs, especially my OT3+ pairings - I think it also tends to work best for me when it's more than just two people.

[melannen]

I think most things work best when it's more than two people. :P

But yeah, in some ways it works best when it's done with ambiguity like you're describing, but sometimes you do just want your OTP with absolute certainty.

[genarti]

On the whole, I'm not especially interested in the concept of soulmates, especially in the versions where everybody has one single destined-from-birth soulmate. Which sets me up to solidly not care about the trope.

But, the other side of the coin is, I'm really interested in worldbuilding, including worldbuilding of AUs. And I'm also interested in taking relationships or worldbuilding or characterization that's already in a canon (and many canons do have characters whose relationship is next door to soulmates, if not in fact already there) and then literalizing something so you can lean harder into it and bring it into relief. So there are a number of soulmates I'm really quite interested in, not so much because of the soulmates thing as such but because of what the trope's being used to do.

...Also, I really enjoy crackfic played with deadpan seriousness, which means I'm a total sucker for an occasional well-written "Original Character/Original Character, AU: Everyone Has An Angry Goose Herd Them Towards Their Soulmate" or whatever.

[melannen]

I always always want more soulbond AU with deep worldbuilding, agreed. (As with most AU tropes.)

Ah, angry goose. Has that been crossed over with Goose Game yet?

[fairestcat]

I'm mostly only interested in pretty much any soulmate tropes if they're being subverted in some way.

Which is to say, a straight-up one-to-one soulmate AU is inherently a dystopia for at least some percentage of the population, and I need to know the author is aware of that as well.

I feel the same way about A/B/O, or any other tropes built on some level of biological or mystical determinism.

That said, I LOVE soulmark stories of the "everyone has multiple soulmarks for multiple reasons" variety. My favourite is myrmidryad's Les Mis fic Where I Fall is Where I Land, which is also an AU set in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire.

[melannen]

...come to think of it, maybe the reason I like it is because it's much harder to hide the dystopia. It takes the hetoronormativity and compulsive monogamy that's just kind of background radiation in our culture, and writes it on everyone's skin.

And if the writers do factor it in, the invisible sexual minorities don't get to be invisible, because there it is written down. Which in some ways is a dystopia, and in some ways is a sigh of relief.

...And I guess I need to read the Les Mis one.

[wolby]

Like others, "just one soulmate" and predestination ruin soulmarks for me. I tend to like trope subversions, but I haven't sought it out for this one, and now I have to think about that. Maybe a tyrannical government that gives people soulmarks as a way to control them? Rebellion against the gods and the "natural order" of a rigid fantasy world? Birthmark divination is part of a culture one character comes from that another character finds totally bizarre? If anyone's seen these, I'm interested!

[lea_hazel]

I like that last one a lot. The idea of different cultures interpreting soulmarks differently isn't exploited nearly enough for my liking.

[allekha]

Like other people above, I prefer them when they're subverted (siblings, people without soul marks for whatever reason, falling in love with someone else, government-mandated soulmate marks) or there's uncertainty built in. Does sharing marks mean you're romantic soulmates, or does it just mean you're important to each other in some way? I also like versions with both romantic and non-romantic soulmates - I remember one lovely fic where people saw all of their soulmates' footprints in shimmering colors, but when someone touched a romantic soulmate for the first time, little fireworks went off between them, which just sounds super cute.

I also can't do any kind of linguistic soulmarks because I'm the kind of weirdo who starts thinking too much about writing systems and what counts as the right name, what about illiterate people, what about languages with multiple or changing writing systems or none at all, etc and I just cannot turn that off even for a fluffy fanfic. I do like pretty pictures/marks, 'can see your soulmate's wings', or cultural differences in how the marks appear or are understood.

[melannen]

Yeah, the first one I tried to write was in a fandom where it was an important part of the setting that a lot of people aren't literate, and it's a class distinction, so I solved it by having soulmate words be also a class marker. But without some kind of worldbuilding around the literacy issue, the symbolic ones make more sense.

The footsteps one sounds lovely though!

[megpie71]

For me the answer is very much "it depends". It depends on the author, it depends on the pairing, it depends on the world-building, it depends on where they go from there.

One of the better soulmate fics I've seen is an FF7 one of the "red string of fate" type, where the string changes colour according to the relationship between the pair (and where the soul-mated character grows to hate and loathe his soul-mate, due to an early encounter which went badly wrong). Another is a Captain America one, where his soulmate was... Johann Schmidt (the Red Skull).

Quite honestly, the best canon handling of the whole thing I've seen was done in "Loveless" (where it's presented as incredibly problematic, along with just about everything else in that world...).

Like a lot of people in the answers here, I'm just a tad leery of anything which smacks of "ultimate destiny" and "predestination". Seems too much like the author making up their mind early and ignoring all the evidence along the way.

[melannen]

I have heard about the Captain America/Red Skull soulmates one before and never dared read it because that's the kind of thing that's gotta be either amazing or awful no middle ground.

The Red String of Fate is another one where I get too tangles up the the practicalities. How does it interact with the material world? Can you just follow it home, like Theseus in the labyrinth? What happens if it gets tangled??

[pedanther]

I'm another one who doesn't like straightforward "these two are destined to be together" soulmark stories. I like stories which poke at the concept of soulmarks, which might be more about my feeling about stories which poke at concepts than about my feeling about the concept of soulmarks, and I like stories where having a soulmark doesn't exclude an element of choice for the characters.

Some specific stories I like include:

* "An Ever-Fixed Mark", in which the soulmarks are ambiguous both in the sense that nobody really knows what they mean, even if English society tends to the assumption that they're for romantic partners, and in the sense that they don't completely identify a person: each soulmark is just a single name, which might be a forename or a surname, and it's set in a time and place where a particular name might often be found as either.
* "J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste", in which the soulmark is the first thing your soulmate says to you after they become your soulmate, which they might or might not be when you first meet them. Technically, it's still got the predestination aspect, but the acknowledgement that people aren't always one thing makes it more palatable somehow. Plus, the bit about Grantaire's soulmark is painfully great.
* "True Colors", in which the soulmark only appears after you meet for the first time, so no predestination, and explicitly includes types of soulmates other than romantic. Also, it's non-exclusive; it's the kind where a person's skin changes color in the first place their soulmate touches them, but in this version every time you make a new contact has some visible result, it's just more dramatic the more important the person is going to be in your life.

...and having said all that, I also like:

* "Gentle Antidote", which is a fairly straightforward fluffy soulmark AU featuring Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. I think it disarms me partly because obviously Peter and Harriet are soulmates and partly because, being Peter and Harriet, they spend a fair amount of time interrogating the situation and asking all the awkward questions that would have bothered me if the story hadn't addressed them.

[edit to add: I just re-read "Gentle Antidote", which is as wonderful as ever, and was reminded that among its attractions is some solid world-building which includes establishing that this is another setting where nobody really knows for sure exactly what soulmarks signify, and that while many people do end up in romantic relationships with their name-mate that's not a given. So there's that, too.]

[melannen]

I did not post this to get my fic recs, I swear! :P

I haven't read the Lord Peter one - that sounds really good. I think "True Colors" is one I was trying to describe elsethread!

[extrapenguin]

I don't believe in soulmates or predestination or any of that stuff – but I also don't believe in magic and unicorns. And in theory, the played-straight soulmate stuff would be the best romance stories for me, since none of that "does the other person like me????" faffing! ... except the plots inevitably seem to forget that the worldbuilt cultural expectation is that soulmates are destined romantic life partners (as established in chapter 1), and instead goes for the basic slow burn contemporary romance "Does X like me back?" stuff, except that now in addition to being an annoying focus on the bit of romance I like least, it's also inconsistent with the worldbuilding.

In general, I'm willing to read any soulmate narrative that doesn't try to have its cake and eat it too (such as the above, or "we hate soulmates, let's get together – oh look we're soulmates after all!"). That mostly means stuff I've written myself. *g*

[melannen]

Yeah, I feel like soulmarks have to either lean into the trope hard or subvert it to work for me - the ones where it's window dressing just really don't work.

[lea_hazel]

I have so many mixed emotions about soulmarks. I find them potentially interesting as a complicating plot device, for certain kinds of characters and certain kinds of pairings. There are pairings I ship that I would never put in a soul bond or soul mark AU, because the driving force of their romance is all about choosing each other and it's just the wrong kind of complication.

I'm intrigued by the idea of platonic soul marks or nemesis soul marks, but haven't seen enough of it in practice to have really well-formed opinions.

I like the idea of soul bonds complicated by scope, like the idea that "everyone" has a soulmate somewhere in the world, but there's no guarantee that they live in your country or speak your language or that you'll ever get to meet them. Then you can ask all sorts of questions about who can afford to go on a "finding yourself" type coming of age world tour to try and find their soulmate, and who just gets really lucky. And the sort of characters who would pine for and daydream about their theoretical soulmate, versus the kind who would say, forget it, the odds are against us, and just carry on with "normal" unbonded relationships. There's a lot of narrative tension to mine.

My favorite is characters who are reluctant or ambivalent. This especially applies in cases where soul marks are in some way open to interpretation. I tried to write a story where the mark looked like a regular birthmark, but became more defined over time after meeting the soulmate.

And twice I tried to write what I call "soul bond fever" which is when the marked/bonded character tries to reject their fate and develops physical symptoms because of the separation or the refusal of the call, as it were.

And those are the many overly specific ways in which I enjoy soulmark fanfic. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[melannen]

I enjoyed your TED talk!

I do like the idea of soulmates who have very low odds of ever actually meeting. That can complicate in interesting - everyone is constantly calculating whether this is the person they should commit too, or if they should keep holding out for the ideal, and most people trying to make it work with someone they know for a fact isn't their best possible match. It's almost an anti-soulmate AU at that point, come to think of it, because 99% of the world ends up matched with not-their-soulmate and can't fool themselves about that. (And of course it makes your pairing who actually did match all the more special.)

[lannamichaels]

OKAY SO the thing is, it's the worldbuilding that will kill me on these. I need the worldbuilding to work. And in some cases, the worldbuilding is just never gonna work and that's the price of admission (every single "it's the first words someone says to you" has to deal with "how does the soulmark know about punctuation" AS WELL AS "how does the soulmark know it's the first words said to you vs in your general vicinity" and none of them ever do, and I must either accept that or not read it). But if we assume that you've got the name of your soulmate, and that the name is assumed to be your soulmate's and not yours (which, if people suddenly had names showing up on them, why would they assume it's someone else's name and not their own?), how did homophobia ever develop? You have to explain this. I can't with most soulmark AUs that have homophobia, from a worldbuilding perspective.

Also marks shouldn't be called tattooes or looking like tattooes. Soulmarks would have come first.

It also gets a bit headachy. The idea that you could have a soulmark but never meet your soulmate, that doesn't make any sense.

I like "first words" soulmarks that deal with the unequal problem: someone has to say theirs first and then the other person gets to decide if they even talk at all. There's still a headachy thing going on there. At some point, gotta assume that once the soulmates meet and do the thing, the words go back in time and mark them, I guess???

Anyway, yeah. Soulmark stuff is ice cream eaten with a spoon. Sometimes it makes sense enough to be worth taking up freezer space. Sometimes it doesn't.

Also, in general, I despise the idea that there is only one person for you in the entire world and that it's, so soulmark fics that take that as read and don't question it are not for me. (Even in the one I did where there's an actual Voice Of God telling you that you're soulmates, the culture around it is entirely "yeah well that's just your opinion, man").

[primeideal]

Oh, plus one for sure to the homophobia thing! It makes no sense.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

I'm into soulmark fic as long as Everything Is Complicated and/or characters decide they'll reject destiny and substitute their own. :))

Can rec the love, unscripted series by The_Eclectic_Bookworm, in the Buffyverse, and Fate, At Your Fingertips by radialarch, in the BBC Sherlock fandom. And the Jane Austen fic series that was mentioned a couple of times already.

[melannen]

That is indeed the best kind! :D I really need to get around to the Austen one, I keep seeing recs and then putting it off because I'm so picky about soulmates.

[fred_mouse]

I love them all, with the singular exception of 'last words', which completely miss the mark for me. I love the ones that investigate what it means to not have one, ones that look at the dark side of how this might work, the schmoopy ones where it comes together, the slow burns, the lot.

... and I nearly posted this, and then realised there is another version I hate -- that when you touch/meet/whatever, the world is suddenly in colour. Although if someone were to write on that interrogates what that means for someone who is also genetically colourblind, I'd read that.

I hate the idea as a real world thing, and I roll my eyes* at anyone who ever declares their partner to be their soulmate, but as a trope I am *there* for it.

* I wait until they can't see. I have *some* manners.

[melannen]

Oh, yeah, the colorblind one - while it's an interesting metaphor, nobody ever seems to address the disability worldbuilding around that, how things would change if everyone grew up colorblind, and I can't get past that in reading them (even more than I can get around the worldbuilding issues with soulmate fic in general.)

[lannamichaels]

I got silly on discord, so I propose a new soulmark trope: your soulmark is your favorite book (called bookmarks). So, naturally, these change all the damn time, sometimes multiple times per day.

Dating sites that try to pair people with compatible favorite books, and the ones who are like "eh, we'll match the one with the cookbook and the cannibalistic murder mystery, what could go wrong". And the horrible nature of high school english, someone ends up with a bookmark that just says "any book but great expectations" and it stays that way for 30 years.

[melannen]

THAT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE! OMG, no. I can't pick a favorite!

[cadenzamuse]

I am in the minority around here in that I absolutely love all versions of soulmate/soulbond/soulmark/TiMER/red string of fate/etc. etc. stories. They are my one true trope--I am apparently hardwired to love the determinism idea in fiction even though in real life I would hate it. I really love how much angst and confusion and romcom fuckwittery characters can get up to while knowing that they are perfect for each other and will end up with each other in the end. (I know this is true of like 99% of fanfic in general, but something about the soulmate bit gets to me more.) I also think soulmark stories tend to be mystery stories to some extent, which I like.

I do sometimes wish there were a service for giving people the correct statistics for what they want the emotional impact of someone having a soulmark to be, though. "Soulmarks are very rare, only 10% of people have them!" will kill the story for me.

[melannen]

You aren't that much in the minority! Love vs. hate is about tied! (Picky is winning, but then we wouldn't be fans if we weren't picky.)

I do tend to like soulmate stories that are set up as a mystery, where it's about solving the riddle to find your person. They can complete rewrite the narrative of finding love in a way that circumvents some of the things that can go wrong with soulmarks.

[polarissruler]

Soulmates are my pleasure - I like every version out there! Short and sweet, long and drawn-out, tearful angst and everything in between! I especially like the variants with symbols - people have something an image on their body, like a tattoo, that references their soulmate. I remember how much I loved those fics - especially when the images are very symbolic and the characters understand their meaning as they get to know each other.

[melannen]

Ooh, yeah, the symbol ones can be very cool! I like the ones with abstract swirls of color, too.

[sunlit_stone]

I think what I really enjoy in soulmark fic is when the discovery of the soulmark (by one or both of the characters) is a complication, not a resolution. Sineala is really good at this, imho & for example.

I've got a Laurence/Napoleon one sitting on the backburner, which I've never actually managed to write down but shush, which is a first-words one where Napoleon and Laurence are soulmates. As Laurence, but not Napoleon, discovers when he brings over the medicine...

(Laurence thinks Napoleon doesn't realize because his first words to N were 'Your Majesty,' and that's got to be a lot of people's first words, right? But actually, when Napoleon's words came in, his mother saw them and thought they were very dangerous and tattooed or branded them over or something. Because of my undying dislike of the trope in some soulmark fics where a person takes their canonical path because of a desire to meet their soulmate--I hate that, when they usually have strong enough canon motivation..)

It mostly ends up being an even angstier look at some moments in canon under this lens--he is for example significantly more conflicted/emotional when talking to the Empress at the end of the series--because soulmark or no soulmark, Laurence knows he has to do his duty, and he has to do the right thing.

Emotions are had. And then, at the end of everything, after Napoleon's been locked up--because Laurence will always do the right thing--he goes to Napoleon, and tells him...

[melannen]

Yes! I appreciate ones where the soulmarks make it harder, not simpler. Or where one character doesn't know, or doesn't tell, or doesn't realize for a long time.

And I like your outline of the Temeraire one! Good luck with writing it. :)

[bookblather]

I really like soulmate AUs where it isn't necessarily romantic. I have one for my original fiction where it just means the most important person in your life, and the words themselves are hard to interpret. Like, it might be the name of the song you dance to at your wedding (how does the mark know? My characters have no idea!) or a mantra you like to recite, or stuff like that. Still kicking worldbuilding into shape but there's no homophobia because fuck that, I'm writing wish fulfillment here.

[arcanetrivia]

I don't mind soulmates but this whole trope of soulmarks just leaves me like blaaaahhhh. "Hate" is a strong word so I checked both "hate" and "dislike in moderation"... but also "at least it dilutes A/B/O" which is something that really turns me off a fic. Like, I'll try something with soulmarks if it's otherwise recommended/seems like it would do well, but A/B/O is just like, "no thank you, next", to me.

[doranwen]

I'm clearly in the wrong fandoms, lol. The *only soulmate fic* I have read to this day is a Rizzoli & Isles one (TV show, of course), and it didn't have soulmarks. (It had where you feel physical pain that your soulmate experiences, so Maura figures out after a bit that Jane is hers - for obvious reasons if you know the R&I backstory - but it takes her awhile to tell Jane.) So I've in theory heard of this soulmark thing but never actually read one. I don't think I like the idea of soulmarks as much as soulmates in general. I think while I would like ones where the trope is not straightforward (like many of the commenters below) I really do love the idea of it pure and simple because it's sweet and feels all warm and fuzzy to me, lol. Go figure.

Mostly what I know of them is the tropes I saw in Multifandom Tropefest, which I have stashed away in a spreadsheet to give me plot bunnies should I actually have time to write (which, given that I'm still working with heaps of spreadsheets and terminal commands and Python scripts processing the metadata from the Yahoo Groups Fandom Rescue Project… will be a while). I remember having to extricate myself from TV Tropes after reading up on a ton of them… (Like, "red string of fate"? "what on earth" was my reaction when I heard of that one, lol.)