Favourite cliche?

[doyle]

The lovely wisteria_ had a discussion a while back on people's least favourite words in fic. I was thinking a bit about that, and got on to the topic of people's favourite plots.

Is there a plot device or cliche or just a fic subgenre that's been done many times but you love and adore? (From the stuff I've written I think it's fairly obvious I love '___ woke up gay!' Other favourites: someone has amnesia and wrongly thinks themselves in a relationship with somebody else; the couple gets trapped in a snowstorm/elevator/cave/etc; human AUs. Yes, they're mostly awful, but that's almost always due to woeful spelling and other technical stuff. I just wish human AUs weren't restricted to Spuffy and the odd B/A. There are one or two Spike/Angel and S/X ones out there, but where is my 'Buffy and Tara have a sekrit lesbian relationship in high school - but Buffy's a cheerleader and Tara's on the yearbook committee! The shame! How will their relationship survive?' AU?)

ETA: I'm also a sucker for post-apoc. And fic set under Jasmine's influence. And 'the Tabula Rasa spell was never broken', though I guess that comes under amnesia.

Comments

[bailunrui.livejournal.com]

Post-apocalypitc and isolation/trapped fic are my favorites. Amnesia ranks up there too.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I forgot post-Apoc. Love that; in danger of overusing it in my own stuff.

[patrizia.livejournal.com]

lmao. I think I'll have to go for the good old elevator or something like that. Characters locked together, yes. Though it's not like I've abused of the subject. I do love reading them though.

[yin-again.livejournal.com]

I shamelessly love scenarios where two male characters have to pretend to be gay to catch the bad guy and - gasp! - fall in love.

I know, I know. ::is ashamed::

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Hee! Oh, now I want to read Spike/Angel fic with this plot...

[yin-again.livejournal.com]

Oh, no - me, too.

::is doubly ashamed::

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Icon!!

[quinn222.livejournal.com]

This is where you lose out being a QaF fan. Our guys are gay so that one never works, lol.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

In the case of the UK series you could potentially have Stuart and Vince pretending to be a couple for some reason (like getting rid of Martin Brooks)...

[lilith-morgana.livejournal.com]

I do so love a nice trapped and/or post-apocalypse fic myself. It's very much omgh!the tension and angst how will they ever manage oh look they fell in lust how neat. But yeah.

And I've also a soft spot for the Mentor thing, as is shown in my Giles/Anya stories - somebody is ALL ALONE, god how sad, but there is always this one person who'll tuck you in and make you believe you can cope. Snogging is naturally a part of the process. Duh. :) Extra points if the person is also stoic and generally not sexual, until, of course, the lonely one arrives. Ah, the wonder.

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

Love Jasmine era stuff. Also big with "I'm in love with you but you're in love with someone else".

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

"I'm in love with you but you're in love with someone else"

Poor Angel, thwarted by Wes's one true love for Fred... :ducks:

[tablesex.livejournal.com]

I love anti-cliche, where like, people take a cliche and pervert it so often that it becomes a cliche. One of my favourites is Buffy/Angel get together post-Shanshu and discover that the curse wasn't the problem with their relationship it was all their differences. Mwa ha ha ha. It's evil but fuuun!

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I love that one. I've *written* that one *g*

[wickedprincess3.livejournal.com]

Hate sex, comfort fucking (Oh wait lets take a guess at why S6 is my favorite season). Post apocalyptic everybody dies except these two characters, being trapped in cabins/elavators and other closed in spaces.
I'm easy and transparent.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love the two main characters being the only ones left.

[yin-again.livejournal.com]

Oooh, grudge-fucking - always a classic!

"I hate you!"
"I hate you, too!"
"Let's fuck."
"K."

Hee.

[flurblewig.livejournal.com]

Word on amnesia, trapped together & post-apoc - big weaknesses of mine.

Also a total sucker for:

Role-playing/being undercover (particularly playing gay lovers or master & slave)
Love/sex/truth spells
Anything using email format

[missambs.livejournal.com]

I personally adore post-apocalyptic, everyone-else-is-dead-so-now-these-two-characters-bond fic. *giggles*

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Mmm, love those. (One day I will write that Dawn/Wesley/Connor post-apoc...)

[netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com]

but where is my 'Buffy and Tara have a sekrit lesbian relationship in high school - but Buffy's a cheerleader and Tara's on the yearbook committee! The shame! How will their relationship survive?' AU?)

Somebody write that! I will perform deviant, unnatrual sexual acts to get that written.

My favourite cliche, Drunk!fic.
first beer: I hate you, I'm not actually sure why I'm sitting drinking with you, cause I really really hate you.
Second beer: You're not actually that bad.
third beer: You're alright really, I might even kiss you if I still had enough cordination and/or braincells to remember how.
Fourth beer: C'mon then, we probably won't remember this in the morning.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Ah, drunk fic, how I love thee...

[electrcspacegrl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can't stand Buffy AU Human fanfic. If you're going to write about humans in a universe where there are no vampires, why use the Buffy characters???

But that's just me. I do like the idea of the Tabula Rasa spell never having been broken. I never thought about that before.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

I'm going to do the thing I do where I speak entirely for my own case and assume it applies to everybody in the universe, because I do that *g*

Explaining why anybody should write/read character AUs is kind of like trying to explain mpreg (I assume, since it's not my thing), or even slash. They don't appeal to everybody. That's understandable. Most of them are horrifically bad, and they attract teenybop shippers like no other genre. Still, I keep wading through in the hopes of finding something decent.

If the characterization's good I can overlook the setting. I hate human AUs where Buffy's the geeky shy girl in school, because they're so often thinly veiled Mary Sues. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to have a high school fic (say) set in a universe with no slayers and vampires and still have every line of dialogue be perfect for the Buffy characters. The next question is obviously "in that case, why make it AU at all?" Well, the author might want to explore the relationship between two of the characters while letting them start with a clean slate (the cynically minded might call this taking the easy way out of the canon baggage. Buffy fandom is in no way unique in this, there are lots of Oz Beecher/Keller AU fics). Or they might just want to write a romance in a particular setting (I'm a huge sucker for high school fic. In canon I have Cordelia/Xander and Willow/Oz, and while I love them, there's simply not enough fic.) Or they might be written just for silly self indulgent fun (http://www.exitseraphim.net/doyle/au.html).

Human AUs: can't think of many I'd hold up as examples of great literature, but the well-written ones are great fun.

[electrcspacegrl.livejournal.com]

Point taken. I would read something if it's good. I don't read a lot of fanfic because it's hard for me to weed through the poorly written stuff. I like sites that only have well-written fics, but I still haven't made my way through the sites I've bookmarked.

What you said about the Buffy Human AU made me think of this music vid I came across that was for a fanfic story where Buffy and Xander were brother and sister, their parents were Hank and Darla, her father would abuse her and she got pregnant by Spike during a one-night-stand. Spike was the son of Giles and Joyce and they were wealthy. I tried reading it but it was just way too weird. And long too. When it comes to reading stories on the computer, I don't have a very long attention span.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Hee! I think there's one where either Darla or Maggie Walsh is Joyce's lesbian lover. There's definitely one somewhere with Angel and Andrew are twin brothers (!)

[xanphibian.livejournal.com]

I love amnesia, and 'omg xander's father is so abusive!!' fics. (big, big hurt/comfort junkie) But my favorite is time travel, where one character goes back in time a year or two or three or more. My perfect scenario fic is 'Xander and Spike have been in a relationship for ten years, but then Xander (or Spike) gets thrown back in time to S4! (or 2, I'm easy) Now he must woooooo his one true love!'

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Tabula Rasa ficathon ideas, swimming in my head...

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Woo! Dooooo. Itttttt...

(I'm hoping someone will do a post-apocalypse one and a Jasmine one, and I know somebody mentioned a 'rescue cliches' one... my organization skills suck, or I'd do them)

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Jasmine era ficathon?
I was always really fascinated by TBQ's AU idea in Strategy where the guys didn't win out early enough, and the Jasmania spread to Sunnydale. That'd be fun. Ooh, Jasmined Oz would be fabulous.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I love that concept. Plus, *no* pairing is too whacked out under Jasmine's blissful love...

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in LA, a bloodied Angel was preparing to slit open the mouth of an ooky alien, but Anya didn't know anything about that. And she wouldn't have cared if she did, because her interest in blood, slitting and ookiness had taken a blissful back seat recently to the two new great loves in her life. Jasmine, the Goddess who'd liberated the shiny happiness just waiting to wriggle out of Anya's brusque exterior, and Giles, who'd liberated her libido to previously unknown heights.

In the Magic Box, Giles was kissing Anya with a storybook slow perfection, so naturally Anya pushed him down on the ground and went for his crotch.

A weird nasty queasy thing happened to the world just as Giles was unhooking her bra. Just as Giles was... what?

Giles let go of her, looking almost as freaked out as she felt, and whispered, "We've got to stop waking up from dangerous illusions like this."

"Right. That slimy goddy bitch!" Anya tried to punch the air for emphasis and fell down on Giles again.

He lifted up her shoulders gently, and stroked her hair. "Or..."

Anya stared at him blankly.

"They do say third time lucky, you know."

"Oh, right!"

Anya went for Giles' crotch again. All in all, it hadn't been too bad a day.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Bwah! This is marvellous.

Reccs

[http://users.livejournal.com/lady_alatariel_/]

Have you read sangpassionne new human-AU WIP? Its only 3 chapters in and its very good so far.
And janedavitt's Snowbound is good, too.
And 's WIP which is set post-chosen so not post-apoc but it is still awesome!

/pimp
:)

[thawrecka]

Oh, I think I love most of the cliches. Cliches are fun. Seriously.

Human AUs, woke up gay, trapped in a small space, pretending to be a couple then fall in love, genderswitch, highschool AUs, elf AUs, amnesia fic, post-apoc, stories where everyone is secretly straight...

I love it all.

[fox1013.livejournal.com]

where is my 'Buffy and Tara have a sekrit lesbian relationship in high school - but Buffy's a cheerleader and Tara's on the yearbook committee! The shame! How will their relationship survive?' AU?

Stop. Giving. Plot. Bunnies.

*eyes menacingly*

[fenwic.livejournal.com]

In re: Human AU. As a rule, I don't read them. But for certain extraordinary writers, I smash all my fic rules into tiny pieces. Writers like nautibitz (Crash And Burn) and yourself (Fate Or Density). You also make me read pairings I'd never go near otherwise. (See again Fate or Density, heh.) I was suprised to see you've never written Spuffy. Although, I suppose I shouldn't be. They're so conventional, after all :)

On the flip side, there's a thing that I will crawl through the worst muck in the fanfiction universe to get to: Hurt and Comfort.

Sigh.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm a little surprised I haven't written Spuffy myself, since it was my first OTP and I still have a soft spot a mile wide for that pairing. Ah, well, I have to write something for the Spuffy ficathon, so maybe inspiration will come from there...