Arduinna

I'm so late with this -- sorry! It was mean to be for December 12. Apparently performance review week at work was just enough added stuff to push me off my schedule.

for sholio: how about your favorite fannish trope? Or any one of them that you'd like to talk about. :)

Oh, there are so many tropes that make me happy. I've been thinking and thinking about this question off and on since Sholio asked it, thinking wow, I'm just fickle; I keep veering from one to another. I mean, I've always known that I don't have a bulletproof trope kink the way a lot of people do, but still - surely I could settle on something.

So I settled on first time, then realized that well, first time but also all kinds of tropes that can lead to first times -- hurt/comfort; cave fic / desert island / Canadian shack; two men, one bed; huddling for warmth...

And then I realized that really, I like all of those for gen, too, if the point of them is warmth. Er, emotional warmth, not just physical warmth. *g*

Which is when the lightbulb went off: my bulletproof trope kink is intimacy tropes in general. And not really established intimacy -- which I also enjoy! -- but growing intimacy, or even surprise unexpected intimacy. I don't think there's one specific path that makes me happiest, but what I love is people realizing that they mean more to each other than they'd thought, or knowing that and finding the courage to say or do something about it, or realizing that the other person feels like that, too.

So in canons, one of the things I'm drawn to is characters who don't necessarily expect to like or trust each other, then that starts changing -- White Collar, where Neal and Peter like and trust each other even when they know they shouldn't, necessarily; Person of Interest, where Finch and Reese, who should be safely isolated from each other in their complementary paranoid distrust of everyone, instead grow together to the point that have rainy-day activities and walk their puppy together and panic if one of them loses contact; Haven, where Duke-the-smuggler and Nathan-the-cop bitch and moan about each other and declare to anyone who'll listen that they don't like or trust each other, but who have each other's backs without a blink (okay, maybe with a blink *g*); Grimm, where Nick runs into people who should hate or fear him, or whom he should be lying to to protect them, and instead just talks honestly to them and builds himself a Scooby gang like no Grimm has ever had before, with people willing to go to the mat for him on all sides (and vice versa); on and on.

Give me a mismatched set of people, or people with obstacles between them that they overcome to deepen their relationship, and I'm there. (Or, for that matter, characters like Magneto and Xavier, who started out friends, realized that they have intensely fundamental differences and wound up on opposite sides, but who never lost their connection; see also Doctor and Master, etc.) Found families ftw.

In fanfic, I like that extra little (or big) push than we tend to see in canon, whether gen or slash -- the h/c, the bed-sharing that isn't played for a joke, the intimacy that can come with isolation. I also like a particular version of WNGWJLEO; not in a "we could never be *gay*, ew" way, but if one or both characters has always thought he was straight, and finds himself falling for his partner and realizing oh, er, not so straight after all - I love that. It's a huge obstacle, and it tends to work best for me in buddy pairs that would expect to get along -- cop partners, fellow soldiers, fellow scientists. Which really should have a different acronym, I guess -- something like Huh, I Never Knew I Was Queer (HINKIWQ). (Which in my head is now "hinky-wick", which is cracking me up.)

So, yeah. Tropes that lead to intimacy; they'll get me every time.

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Full request list here, still open!