(no subject)

[melannen]

What's something that really ought to be a fandom trope, and you really wish it was, but people hardly ever write it?

The two that have been on my mind today:


--Jury Duty! I particularly like the "my fake ID was too good and now I have to go to jury duty" variant, c.f. Alice on Leverage (I am rereading Murderbot right now and would give a lot for "Murderbot passes for human too well and is immediately called for jury duty"), but it would also be great as a AU to throw a bunch of strangers in a high-pressure situation together.

--Homestuck (the game) AU. No trolls, no cherubs, just a bunch of characters playing this weird new immersive video game they just got an advance copy of. I've seen a few of these and written a couple, but I don't know why it was never a big thing even when Homestuck was.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Levirate marriage. I feel very strongly about this. How is this not part of the pantheon of forced dating tropes?

[melannen]

That is a very good question! It 100% should be.

[beatrice_otter]

Ooooh, I like that! It should be a thing, totally.

I dunno, I've always liked wishbabies as an interesting variation on kidfic.

[writerkit]

...I didn't know that was a thing. Had to Google it.

[eleanorjane]

Oh good lord. I just had to google it, but that would be tremendous.

[lannamichaels]

Me: huh, that was just mentioned in a shiur I was in last night, funny old world!
Me: ...oh right.
Me: *goes to sheepishly count the omer because what is memory*


Anyway. Yes. Good trope. :D

[superborb]

I think because then someone has to die...

[longmagpieroads]

Oh that could be very interesting.

[slashmarks]

Judging by the number of comments in this thread, we could probably make it a trope.

[yourlibrarian]

Seems like a really obvious lead-in to a threesome story as well.

[lea_hazel]

*googles* Oh, I knew that was a thing, I just didn't realize that there was a term for it in English. We learned about it in school ages ago.

I wonder that it didn't make a showing in the freeform tags for justmarriedexchange, but maybe I just missed it in the crowd.

[mindstalk]

There's a yuri manga, Koburiawase, that claims to be about the custom of a widow(er) marrying a spouse's sibling. However, the term doesn't have any hits other than the manga, and Japan isn't listed on the Wiki page for levirate, so I am skeptical it's real. (Girl's A father was being set up to marry Girl B, the younger sister of A's dead mother.)

Wiki links to another version, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widow_conservation

[doranwen]

Rofl - I *just* got into Leverage, slowly watching through (avoiding spoilers - I'm being careful not to read fic posted after the next episode air date)… and earlier today the episode I watched (for the first time) was The Juror #6 Job. There's something too perfect about that coincidence. :D (And I definitely agree that juror duty is a fun one!)

Hmm… I can think of quite a few that are not common in my fandoms, but which everyone seems to have read multiple fics of. Tropes that are rare in fandoms in general, I don't know.

[duskpeterson]

I saw that episode for the first time last week. :)

[duskpeterson]

"What's something that really ought to be a fandom trope, and you really wish it was, but people hardly ever write it?"

Housework. I don't want to tell you the lengths I've gone to in order to find a good homemaking story (in or out of fandom). Cooking fic, yes, but almost nobody except me seems to be interested in writing about other forms of homemaking.

[doranwen]

Huh, I never thought about writing housework. I don't think I'd have all that much trouble doing it, either. But I don't know if we share fandoms other than Leverage, lol (though you can look at my AO3 dashboard and see if there's anything you know). Might be a challenge, but I could try to write a Leverage housework fic! (I have a feeling it'd end up more comedy than anything.)

[hannah]

I've got a fic where a couple of characters allay their worries over living rent-free in someone's house by doing pretty much all the domestic chores. It's not the focus of the story, but it's a plot thread running throughout.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Huh, The Sentinel seemed to have a lot of curtain fic, some inspired by canonical French doors being added to a curtain. Some by a chili pepper apron. Martha!Jim

That's Jim. He will match the swatches.

[impala_chick]

Jury Duty!! You are right, there are so many possibilities with this. Like, even jury duty in space with my space fandoms. With non human members on the jury! Or it could be an outsider POV of a jury having to decide the fate of a main character after that person is prosecuted for breaking the law (which happens frequently in American television). I am loving the possibilities.

[writerkit]

I find there's never enough "let's go to therapy" tropes-- either an informed-of-what's-going-on therapy session (because do the characters on most supernatural dramas ever need therapy!) or the "I have been forced to see this Muggle therapist and now I have to talk about my problems without saying I'm actually a werewolf" variant.

[yourlibrarian]

True! I've seen a few but they are surprisingly scarce on the ground.

[hannah]

Established relationships. That right there - have the story start with them together, and let them stay together. Put them in peril, sure, threaten their lives, separate them due to unfortunate circumstances, and let their relationship stay strong and intact through all the work it takes for them to survive the story and return to each other's arms.

Not quite a trope, but: I always joke that I cast my original demons and aliens from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and I'd love it if more people did that, too.

Also not quite a trope is "female characters living long enough to go through menopause" - which I'd still like to see more of, in fandom and mainstream fiction.

[longmagpieroads]

Yessss this would be awesome.

[lannamichaels]

You know all those time travel things where The Timeline Is Supreme and you have to keep to the timeline, or some thing are set and have to happen because Reasons, and just the idea of time travel is you have to keep things exactly the same, because otherwise paradox and the "universe snapping back" or etc?

Nope. Time travel where you deliberately prevent your own birth. Time travel where you never get back to the original. Time travel where that is the entire point.

Also, arranged marriage fics where they don't fall in love with each other and that's okay.

[falkner]

"The Timeline Is Supreme" is my least favorite thing in time travel stories. It basically takes away most of the fun out of it! I want to see characters wreaking havoc in the timeline and the exploration of all the consequences!

[mindstalk]

It's not a generally applicable trope, but if the source has telepathy or mental connections then I'm a sucker for fics that use it, especially as a back channel during a vocal conversation. Naoha, Madoka, and post-end Macross Frontier are the main candidates; fics do use it, but want moar.

Jury duty wouldn't fit a lot of my fandoms: Japanese or teenager or fantasy that isn't imitation England. AIUI jury duty is a pretty peculiar cultural trait.

This could get skeevy for some people, but not assuming every culture has the same age of consent. If a culture uses superpowered 10 year olds as child soldiers and generally follows "if you act responsible then we'll treat you that way" for odd types of being, then adding "but you have to be 18 to sex" feels really artificial to me.

[krait]

I'm with you on the artificial ages of consent thing. It throws me right out of a fic when the author appoints some character as their mouthpiece to either explain why the couple isn't having sex despite wanting to, or explain why the couple can't have sex despite wanting to, when the canonical worldbuilding pretty clearly regards those characters as able to make their own decisions. :/

FF7 and Gundam Wing are two of my long-loved fandoms where I tend to trip over this. Canonically, Cloud joins a corporate military organisation at age 14 with the express intent of becoming one of its human experimental subjects. The Gundam pilots are performing terroristic combat attacks on military targets in giant mechs equipped with self-destruct options at the age of 15. Odds are good that nobody in their command structure cares about them potentially having sex, or considers it any of their business, and the characters certainly wouldn't, either!

[allekha]

I can remember ever seeing precisely one Heian Japan AU fic (it was for Tokyo Babylon) and a few pieces of art, and it would be nice to see more. It has court politics if you want them, ridiculous costumes, poetry, suffering for the common people, magic and spirits that may or may not be real....

[yourlibrarian]

Political campaigns, characters as legislators, or even mayors or school board members or pretty much any elected position.

[minoanmiss]

There was a cute AU once where Steve Rogers ran for president and won. I think it was only on Tumblr, though.