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Challenge #9
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
Longer talk about one trope rather than a list: I like soulmate fic as a form of mystery fiction! I love mystery fic in general, and have loved it since well before I got into shipping. For me, the fantasy of soulmates is “at some point in your life, you will have a mystery to solve and a notable degree of societal support for making solving that mystery some degree of priority over mundane daily concerns.” And then the romance element means it’s a mystery that doesn’t come at a cost to anyone like a murder or a robbery would (especially appealing if you’ve ever gravitated to characters who tend to get killed off to create the mystery in conventional mystery fic. which. I have.), and/or adds a “hard mode” to the mystery for characters who have some reason not to be together. The mystery can even be solved by the POV character from the word go (e.g. someone living a dangerous life and trying to keep their soulmate out of it), while also giving me their “outside” POV on how the soulmate is trying to piece together what they have and move toward finding someone making a serious effort to keep them away—it doesn’t have to be written deliberately as a mystery, but that’s the lens I end up looking at it all through, and as long as it satisfies me on that front I’m good.
Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)
CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).
Well, the thing I most hoard is musical associations (and use them to make playlists to put on in the background for writing/drawing particular faves), but at the same time that feels embarrassing to talk about. Weirdly more revealing than actually posting fic or whatever. So, here’s some songs off a playlist for the ship that keeps pulling me on-off back into YGO:DM (Jounouchi/Kaiba), because I’m not in a phase of being deep into YGO right now and consequently won’t get weird about posting that. Yet also it’s one of my longest-term ships: it and Raine/Sheena both turned 20 for me last year.
Heart - Straight On (“what the winner don’t know, the gambler understands” like come ON. Also crucial to my interpretation of them is that I consider Jounouchi the stronger one in p much every way that actually matters)
Suzanne Vega - In the Eye (“if you were to kill me now right here, I would still look you in the eye”—Jounouchi’s greatest wins come through what Kaiba rejects [connections and, at least when he doesn’t have the time to think himself out of it, the capacity for much greater emotional honesty when it matters most] and that can be used to haunt Kaiba with a technical win that somehow feels like a loss)
The Aces - Just Like That (“I think you love when we fight / so you feel something inside, what a depressing sight”—there’s quite a few bad-end songs on this list, because there’s reasonably decent potential for that with them! Whether it’s Jounouchi rejecting himself before giving Kaiba a chance to do so or Kaiba being more comfortable with aggression than vulnerability, there are so many ways they could go wrong)
My connection isn’t good enough for Youtube right now, so lyric snippets rather than vid links.
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
Longer talk about one trope rather than a list: I like soulmate fic as a form of mystery fiction! I love mystery fic in general, and have loved it since well before I got into shipping. For me, the fantasy of soulmates is “at some point in your life, you will have a mystery to solve and a notable degree of societal support for making solving that mystery some degree of priority over mundane daily concerns.” And then the romance element means it’s a mystery that doesn’t come at a cost to anyone like a murder or a robbery would (especially appealing if you’ve ever gravitated to characters who tend to get killed off to create the mystery in conventional mystery fic. which. I have.), and/or adds a “hard mode” to the mystery for characters who have some reason not to be together. The mystery can even be solved by the POV character from the word go (e.g. someone living a dangerous life and trying to keep their soulmate out of it), while also giving me their “outside” POV on how the soulmate is trying to piece together what they have and move toward finding someone making a serious effort to keep them away—it doesn’t have to be written deliberately as a mystery, but that’s the lens I end up looking at it all through, and as long as it satisfies me on that front I’m good.
Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)
CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).
Well, the thing I most hoard is musical associations (and use them to make playlists to put on in the background for writing/drawing particular faves), but at the same time that feels embarrassing to talk about. Weirdly more revealing than actually posting fic or whatever. So, here’s some songs off a playlist for the ship that keeps pulling me on-off back into YGO:DM (Jounouchi/Kaiba), because I’m not in a phase of being deep into YGO right now and consequently won’t get weird about posting that. Yet also it’s one of my longest-term ships: it and Raine/Sheena both turned 20 for me last year.
Heart - Straight On (“what the winner don’t know, the gambler understands” like come ON. Also crucial to my interpretation of them is that I consider Jounouchi the stronger one in p much every way that actually matters)
Suzanne Vega - In the Eye (“if you were to kill me now right here, I would still look you in the eye”—Jounouchi’s greatest wins come through what Kaiba rejects [connections and, at least when he doesn’t have the time to think himself out of it, the capacity for much greater emotional honesty when it matters most] and that can be used to haunt Kaiba with a technical win that somehow feels like a loss)
The Aces - Just Like That (“I think you love when we fight / so you feel something inside, what a depressing sight”—there’s quite a few bad-end songs on this list, because there’s reasonably decent potential for that with them! Whether it’s Jounouchi rejecting himself before giving Kaiba a chance to do so or Kaiba being more comfortable with aggression than vulnerability, there are so many ways they could go wrong)
My connection isn’t good enough for Youtube right now, so lyric snippets rather than vid links.
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I wrote about soulmates as my trope too. :D