Oh Boy I Get To Feel Embarrassed About Being Incredibly Transparent, Not The Mortifying Ordeal Of Repeat

oh boy I get to feel embarrassed about being incredibly transparent, not the mortifying ordeal of repeat themes being seen

uhhhh

Dialogue or introspection and nothing else- self explanatory XD I have a dialogue problem. Things are emotion driven, or thought driven, and then action is driven by interactions, and the rest is a walking simulator in nondescript anywhere-land. The only thing that could be added are action scenes, because I go from never describing anything environmental or tactile to taking pages on a fight like it’s a DBZ saga

Anger issues- I have a tendency to give my main protagonists anger problems that steer their plot or come up often in introspection, ho boy. Often if they have a foil antagonist, they’d be guilty of this too. I’ve got too many povs that are just angry hurt people with bad coping skills. There’ll be plots based out of the consequences of actions, but there’s also just the aspect of having some empathy for them; you don’t have to forgive them, but you can see where they’re coming from and see that they’re people too. (I also just have an easier time writing what I am familiar with, and I’m familiar with rejection, bitterness, lashing out, and other unpleasantries as an angry person myself lol)

Fall from grace/dethroned power figures/gods/etc- happens to protagonists and antagonists in my sandbox often and I'm sure they hate it

intense (homo)erotic enemies/rivals dynamics- listen…there’s no excuse Half of the time I don’t even intend to set out for this to happen but it does anyway. I blame being a Transformers fan. So many hate boners and murder soulmates and homoerotic enemies ahoy therein. Will they kill each other from being stuck in a box together too long? Will they decide to see their familiarities and improve as people together? Will they make out? Who knows

Weird sadomasochistic vibes going on in the POV (especially in fight scenes)- this comes up whenever the above theme comes up and I have no escape. Fight scenes and memories of all the reasons you hate a dude aren’t supposed to sound so horny, and yet. And yet. You know what, I'll blame transformers for this one too.

mercy/cruel mercy- I have this habit of preferring characters to live, because character death means I can’t play with them anymore outside of the instances where it serves to impact another character/the setting in important ways. Since I was a kid, I’ve liked seeing themes of what ramifications would/do come from a character being spared, and its twist side of cruel mercy, whether because it’s the best option out of all bad options (stares at you, Wakfu season 2 and what horrors you did to my little child brain) or it’s a protag/antag deciding sparing an antag/protag is the worse fate and they’re feeling vindictive. 

Nonhuman characters and inhuman povs- I feel like most of the fandoms I’ve ever been in have few to no humans, and either that influences how I want to see more aliens/constructs/monsters in og works or I gravitate to those fandoms first, but either way, chances are high there will be aliens, monsters, androids, artificial constructs, fantasy races, or eldritch creatures playing large roles in anything I make. I really love playing around with povs from these types of characters and just trying to keep inhuman povs inhuman but also explore how that would look. I’m not sure I’m really able to explain it but let’s just say I’m the type of writer to look at a one-off character like Armus in Star Trek TNG and then spend over a year of notetaking going ‘but what would that existence be like’. Happy to report that someone told me I managed to make a comprehensible but very non-human alien narrator (in a Godzilla fic lmao).

Becoming more than what you were built for- tied to my above use of constructs or nonhuman forces, because a lot of times their stories involve having been created to be a tool/weapon for a single purpose and then, after either rebelling against that or having the environment remove that purpose, the slow journey to figuring out who they are, what they believe, and how they’re more valuable than they’d originally be able to think. Also goes for 'human' characters becoming their own person outside of whatever destiny they've been told they're supposed to have.

Found family- I just Like It. Happens in almost any of my fics and (eventually) happens in my og stuff too (or if not, it happened and then broke apart and the theme is instead how the hurt of betrayal/broken found family is just as valid as its counterpart tropes)

IMMORTALITY AS A HORROR CONCEPT- haha my beloved, thank you again wakfu for cursing me with the horrors

I'll tag @inthegloomglow @void-rainbow @ganondorf--apologist @loveandscience @darksidekelz if any of you wanna play too

Thumbprint challenge

I was tagged by the lovely @willtheweaver

Rules: look back on your works, both past and present, finished and unfinished. What are five to ten narrative elements or tropes that continuously pop up in your work? Give a list of these things!

OMG this one his hard, but I'll try.

Self-worth issues: most of my characters have to realize their own worth throughout the story

Love doesn't fix your problems but it gives you the strength to fix them yourself - that's it, that's what my stories are about and always will be

Supportive characters - I don't like my heroes to exist in a vacuum, they are always surrounded by people that support them and that they care about

Lovers coming from different backgrounds - I have yet to find true enemies to lovers but my MCs always come from the opposite end of a scale

Dreams and nightmares - meaningful (prophetic?) dreams or nightmares occur in all my works. I don't have a rational reason for that, maybe it's my own messy relationship with sleep 😄

Gentle tag for: @astorichan, @ramwritblr, @sunset-a-story, @satohqbanana, @sarandipitywrites