Snowflake Challenge #11

In your own space, Talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.

I'll stick to one pairing trope and one... IDK motif I guess it is.

In terms of character dynamics I'm a big fan of loyalty kink, and specifically the sub trope where the loyal character either has significant self esteem issues (I am trash but I am your trash and you are marvelous) or was an adversary that was shown mercy/kindness from the person they are loyal to. Pairings get one million bonus points if one of them isn't human or is straight up a monster, multiplied by two if the loyal character is the human one, as that tends to be a rare dynamic.

A classic example of the trope is Benkei in the Heikei Monogatari (I wouldn't say I ship this though only because I still haven't read the Heikei Monogatari).

I like this sort of dynamic for post-novel Javert/Valjean. Novel Javert I do not like to think of as self hating. I think he generally is very confident in his position and thinks of himself as a policeman par excellence, but if he survives the bridge scene I like to think he's at the very least stuck finding a new lodestone as it were and Valjean is right there.

And Reyes/Cassidy is another pairing I associate with the opponents > loyalty arch, which is a big reason they're my OTP. That pairing is extra tasty because they end up opposed to each other again. I'm a big fan of when that internal conflict creeps up regardless of how things resolve.

A loooot of my OC fiction has this in it.

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Outside of things like fannish dynamics I have some preferences for things like fantasy fiction. I like close-up stories, aka stories that don't deal with the fate of the universe and just engage with regular people, only, in a fantasy world. And I like the unknown end of the spectrum when referring to Sanderson's Laws of Fantasy. A lot of people interpret the first law as fantasy needing rules to be "good," but that's not what it says. It says you just can't solve problems directly with magic when the magic is inscrutable. And I like my stories like that, where the magic is not a bunch of stats and abilities that you just throw out but a dangerous and changeable element that people have to work around, and the central problems have to be solved in ways other than having the biggest fireball.