Hey it's a post from that ridiculous/amazing/this is the worst idea/this is the best idea Make-Your-Own Meme "blog every day of November" thing! Original post/list of topics. Feel free to add more: LJ | DW — anon and openID welcome!
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lassarina: the trope that irrevocably destroys a story for you (here)So riding on the coattails of yesterday's entry, I guess my answer here is pretty obvious: probably no trope will, by itself, destroy a work for me.
Don't get me wrong, there are definitely tropes and clichés I'm predisposed against and I'll get to those in a minute, but overall I actually... tend to be more interested in a work if it has something I don't like in it but is good despite — or because of — that?
But let's back up a second. I said yesterday that I believe any idea can be done well. And I do think that's essentially true. But then for today's entry I realized that there ARE some tropes that just leave a sour taste in my mouth. I never really thought about them much before, and now that I HAVE I feel kind of... awkward? Cause it turns out that they're things like Wife Husbandry and Damsel in Distress and Magical Negro and Evil Cripple and Pet Homosexual and I kind of see a trend emerging =\
So I guess I don't like tropes that deny inherent agency or that disparage identity. And I guess that shouldn't be news to me, at this point — and in a sense it's not, because the more I've learned, the harder it's become to like things I once used to enjoy like, um, most Disney movies — but I still find myself wondering:
What IS the relationship between execution and idea?
Because some of these tropes sound less like ideas and more like executions. So I mean, a creator has an idea, something they want to express, and did they HAVE to express it by sticking a mysterious earthy black person in the story to guide the white protag along, or did they HAVE to have the person in distress be a lady or... etc. And I think I'm going to want to think/talk about this some more later, I suspect (now I am simply too TIRED), because this sounds really interesting to me, where idea ends and execution begins. LUCKILY YOU ARE ALL SPARED because ira needs some effing sleep.
INSTEAD, A CASE STUDY!
A short one >.>
So the first two Kushiel's Legacy trilogies are a study in contrasts wrt this post and the previous: I loved the first trilogy despite a lot of its content, but I just didn't like the execution of the second one even though it contained so many ideas I was predisposed to love.
( YAY CASE STUDIES! )
So I guess these two questions have given me a lot to think about. Also I am apparently very contrary: no amazing idea will save you from my GRUMPYFACE OF JUDGMENT if you can't execute it properly, but if you have some things I don't like and do them really well, you are apparently my friend. Everyone may begin despairing of me immediately.
