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Day 7
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (More than one is okay, too.) Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Trope: Pretty much anything that falls under the umbrella of Cosmic Horror Story. Anything by Lovecraft is an example and if you really want a mindscrew, go for Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow. For me this trope works better in print, because in visual medium there's too much of a tendency to show instead of hint and cosmic horror is always worse when you have to use your imagination.
Cliché: Love at First Sight, although I prefer it when people fall for each other but we still see them have to work at it to maintain the relationship. You know, like in real life. I even like it if the relationship doesn't last - hey, just because you don't end up with the person doesn't mean you didn't love them. It just means it didn't work out. Enchanted has a good treatment of this: it's not impossible but you should get to know the person you've just fallen for before committing to them for your entire future.
Kink: Long hair. Mmm. Especially on men. Examples would be Lord of the Rings, of course, and A Brother's Price which, taking place in a gender-flipped world, has long hair as a masculine trait and short as a feminine one. I also have a voice kink, although that one's a little harder to pin down and define. Some voices should do it for me and don't, some are unexpected.
Motif: Pretty much any fairy tale motif, especially if they involve dragons and/or female characters who win through by being clever. One of the first books I ever had headcanon for was The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch; I liked to pretend that at the end of the book Elizabeth managed to rescue another princess and they went off and had adventures together. Another favorite is All-Kinds-of-Fur, also known as Donkeyskin, Catskin, Cap O' Rushes and more. All-Kinds-of-Fur is beautifully put together as a comic by Erstwhile and is available here. (Seriously, check out Erstwhile, they do gorgeous work.)
Theme: Works that deal with the balance between good and evil. There's a lot of these, especially in fantasy. Eve Forward's Villains by Necessity is downstairs in my 'to-read' pile and it looks to have an interesting treatment: the good guys have won over, screwing up the balance and from there it does what it says on the tin. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I also like works that don't have a great overarching stop-the-world-from-ending theme but deal more with people and their development. I'm going to rec The Goblin Emperor for this because it's an amazing book and deserves all the love. In fact, that link will take you to an online excerpt of the first four chapters and I would be happy to see people come back and comment 'dammit, now I have to read the rest of it!' :)
