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

[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 (!)