#trope dissection

[cloudstarcats]

Exposition and Handling a New World:

So, i've been thinking of writing a couple isekai/transmigration/time-travel/reincarnation novels for a while now, mostly because I am fascinated by how different they would be, as I'm aware the major tropes and stories come from a different culture than mine. (I'm American, born and raised (i'm so tired), and most of these tropes I find in asian centric media that's become more popular in my part of the world thanks to the internet).

And while doing this, I've come upon some interesting criticism and ideas about the genre thanks to this youtuber (Matty Bites), who brings up a lot of good points I struggle with when writing, and also makes me question a lot of tropes!

so the major thing I'm thinking of right now is that trope where the main character, aka our narrator and audience eye, becomes the exposition center for the entire plot. That and the fact the narrator is somehow totally fine with their reincarnation and not freaking out!

So In thinking I have two great examples of main characters who handle both these issues in ways I want to remember for my own writing: Edith from "Not your typical reincarnation" and Shen Yuan from "Scum Villain Self Saving System"

So, let's start with Edith, because I love her!

So, Edith is a character from a popular Webtoon "Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story", which I've been reading for a while now and absolutely love. Her story is one I find less trope-y and more fresh in a sea of character tropes and repeated story plots. For a better dissection on her, I recommend this video my Matty Bites: https://youtu.be/oiNJNVgyMO4?si=CAtALShJuZB_tnrZ

As Matty points out, Edith handles her new life in a way that is very different to most protagonists: she starts doing hobbies! And thats such a small detail, but it's lowkey my favorite thing? When given the chance to live a new life, one of luxury unlike her previous one, she takes the time to go out shopping, see what people her age in this time like, and take up the common hobbies of the time even though she has no experience. It's very relatable in that sense; in a world based on a cheesy Romance story she was reading, she finds the small things of life and decides to learn them.

Edith also handles the other characters differently than most other main characters I've seen. Edith is aware that side characters, or characters not often mentioned by name in the novel, are strangers to her. Thus, she doesn't treat them as disposable, but rather as real people. Her transition to accepting her role as Edith is quick, but also carries the weight that she sees characters as people first and foremost. I think the way she handles this change is in fact by starting out with the smaller, lesser known characters: people she doesn't have a basis for and thus should try to understand anyways. By doing so, it's probably easier for her to then see Killian and the other "major" characters as real people and not just fictional characters. It makes her transition all the easier.

We also get a good explanation as to why Edith is acting as exposition: in the beginning, it is because she is remembering the details of the text, like most main characters do. This was her favorite shitty Romance novel after all, she wan't to talk about it. As time continues, her exposition is less her explaining things the audience already knows, and more so her explaining conclusions she and the audience are coming to in a way to wrap up the final thoughts. When a mystery occurs, she acts as the detective, explaining the overall details to ensure she and the audience are on the same page. She also uses exposition to justify her own actions: recalling moments from the original text to then give her ideas on what to do during the day; "Oh, here is exposition on how Killian works out nearly every day... I should go watch him train!" Because Edith now has free time and lowkey wants to oogle her husband lol.

The exposition tapers off to instead fit the flow of story. I like it a lot, it feels natural, and it doesn't drag me out of the story.

now, what about Shen Yuan?

Look, I love the guy, but he has issues. The main thing about Shen Yuan and how he handles transmigrating into SVSSS is that he does so in a very unhealthy way; a fact the fandom loves discussing. Almost opposite to Edith, Shen Yuan does not start out by seeing any of the characters of SVSSS as people, but rather remains seeing them as characters. He creates a boundary between himself and his new role as Shen Qingqiu, becoming an unreliable narrator as he dismisses and pushes away his own thoughts and feelings for the sake of saving his own mental during the plot.

As opposed to Edith, who accepts she is now the character Edith Rudwick and thus takes full acceptance that while she may not have done those actions, she can't act as if they never happened- Shen Yuan tries very hard to act as if he and Shen Qingqiu are separate people and have never been the same. As pointed out, this is why the Peak Lords view Shen Qingqiu to be possessed, as he has changed so drastically.

In this sense, Shen Yuan handles his acceptance into this world Very Badly, but in a way that makes sense for his character. It takes him a while to accept that he is no longer Shen Yuan, and he has to accept his role as Shen Qingqiu. now, i haven't finished SVSSS so I may be wrong there, but I do believe that Shen Yuan's actions and coping mechanisms makes sense.

This is also why his use of exposition makes sense! Unlike Edith, who was a normal fan if not a little more into her story than a normal reader, Shen Yuan is explicitly described as someone who loves PIDW, to the point where he pays for early access and has a deep knowledge of almost every mentioned characters, plot, plant, etc.

Because of this, his reaction to transmigrating and his use of exposition makes a lot of sense: He's read this trope before, and as a nerd has thought of how he'd handle it based on all the stuff he's read about it. He also likes to exposit to himself, mainly because he likes to rant, which is seen literally chapter 1. His exposition and his reaction to transmigrating (staying calm and internally panicking, or breaking down later in private) is VERY in character for him.

Overall, these two character's highlight different ways to have your main character react to transmigration, react to characters, and handle exposition that make the stories feel better. I never felt like it was jarring to read exposition in either of these, because I personally found the exposition to make sense with the characters. I also liked the way it showed them acclimating; full acceptance vs a mental barrier, and how that remained in character for each.

For future writing, I want to keep this all in mind. How do I write exposition in a way that actually feels natural to the world? How should my character's actually respond to transmigration or reincarnation, and how does that reflect on their personal character's and backstory? It can be a tricky first step, because the start of a story is always exposition, and I don't want a reader to drop my story because it's boring, or hand holding them. I want them to read it and go "this is good, this makes sense, and this makes me interested".

[byoldervine]

Enemies To Lovers - My Insight And Preferences With The Trope

So I’ve been working more on the Byoldervine series and there’s an enemies-to-lovers-esque romance in this. As an aroace I’ve been doing a lot of research to ensure I’m getting all the romance stuff right, and this has lead me to study up a bit on this trope. I know this one is shaky ground, you have to make them hate each other enough to warrant them being enemies, but if they do anything too bad then the ship comes off as toxic, so it’s inherently a tough line to walk

I’ve just been watching a video on YouTube dissecting the trope and it’s sub-tropes and getting to the bottom of why it’s all so appealing or unappealing to people, and this raised an interesting point; the biggest divider between loving and hating the trope seems to be how much you can separate fantasy from reality, and what the reader is willing to excuse with ‘it’s not real, it doesn’t have to adhere to realistic dating standards’ in order to keep their disbelief suspended. And it’s got me thinking about where I fall into this

Personally, my experiences with enemies-to-lovers majorly stems from my werewolf obsession as a young teen. I read all the shitty Wattpad stories that all had a tendency to follow the same two patterns; either our female protagonist is horrifically abused her whole life only to escape and learn her mate is the alpha/alpha’s son of another pack, or our female protagonist was bullied her whole life and the alpha/alpha’s son instantly rejects her after discovering they’re mates, only to regret it as they spend more time together. The trope, of course, usually occurs in the latter

I remember this one story like that that really drew me out of the scene because the guy was really toxic, and the story actually acknowledged it; the same day the guy had instantly rejected the girl, on sight and in public around all their peers, he spotted her at the bar and repeatedly stole all her alcoholic drinks (she was old enough to drink) until she eventually gave up and ordered something non-alcoholic like he wanted her to. Only then did he allow her to have the drink she ordered. Guess who paid for all those drinks she didn’t get? The girl. And she snaps at him, telling him that he can’t have it both ways, that he can’t just reject her from his life and then insert himself into it regardless

His response? Something along the lines of ‘I can do what I want’

Aaaaand then we have him forcing her into his car - he doesn’t have any malicious intent, he just drives her home because it’s late, but a lack of intention to do anything worse doesn’t excuse the fact that she was minding her own business and now he’s dictating what she can and can’t drink, how long she’s allowed to stay out for, who she goes home with (she was with her friends celebrating her birthday but I guess fuck them and her plans right?), when and how she leaves, where she goes afterwards, etc. Not to mention this guy just downed like six beers trying to stop the girl from drinking, yet now he’s driving?

This is where I personally draw the line with suspension of realism; if I’m legitimately concerned about one character’s safety when they’re with their enemy, to the point where it’s setting off alarm bells in my brain consistently enough to break my immersion, you better hope there’s a shockingly good redemption coming up which somehow does manage to satisfactorily amend this issue. And there pretty much never is because that’s unrealistic to expect

And I get it, they’re enemies; being assholes and wanting to kill each other is what it’s all about and it wouldn’t be ‘enemies’ if they weren’t crossing lines. But the thing is, in my brain there’s a difference between reckless/toxic behaviours and dangerous/abusive behaviours, and I feel like the level of control exerted in my previous example, as well as forcing her away from her own birthday party into your car so you can drive her off while you’ve just taken spontaneous consecutive shots of whole ass pints, is crossing a line you don’t want to cross if you’re gonna be in a romance by the end of the book

Or if you are going to cross that line, at least let the girl do the same; if both characters are as fucked up as each other, it’s more of a ‘pick on someone your own size’ kind of deal rather than feeling tlike an abuser/victim romance. If it’s just one character repeatedly doing nasty, spiteful shit to a character who just wants to avoid them, eventually loses their patience and snaps at the perpetrator which causes them to finally see the error of their ways, it doesn’t feel like they’re enemies, it feels like one person targeting a chosen victim because they don’t fight back. You need them playing on the same field, because if they’re on the same wavelength it no longer feels like an abuser/victim pairing - you can’t define one as worse than the other. It’s enemy and enemy, with both fighting for the upper hand over the other. It’s not a constant pursuit to hurt someone who just wants to run and hide and has done nothing to warrant that behaviour. At the end of the day, some level of equal participation is key here

But then you also have the opposite end of the spectrum, in which it’s not really enemies at all because they do nothing that bad to each other to warrant enemy status. It’s just… a general dislike handled in the mature way of ‘we don’t really talk, maybe we glare at each other but that’s about it’. It’s natural that you won’t get along with everyone, and sometimes the both of you just can’t click to the point of not being able to stand each other’s company. But avoidance doesn’t make you enemies. Being civil about it doesn’t make you enemies. You might as well be strangers that got off on the wrong foot

I think at the heart of any good salvageable enemy relationship are two things; misunderstandings through differing contexts, and pettiness. The pettiness is obvious; if they’re both handling being enemies maturely and civilly, they’re not really enemies, except on specific occasions where the enemy ship is based more on principle than personal matters (opposing factions being the most obvious means of external conflict driving them to become enemies without their own actions mattering). The way to being enemies has to involve enough pettiness on both sides to continue this rivalry to the point of crossing the line from ‘I can be civil with this guy even if I can’t stand them’ to ‘if you put me in a room with this guy I’m not responsible if they end up with a knife to their throat’. Not to mention that establishing a little pettiness early on can pave the way for a quality they may find endearing in their partner as they start to fall for them, since pettiness can easily be used for banter and other smaller, inconsequential things that may be funny or cute

And as for misunderstandings through differing context, you get an opportunity here to delve into the mindsets of your characters, to explain what brought them to not see eye to eye. Say Character A wanted to do X thing because it would bring them closer to a lost relative who used to be a pro at it, meanwhile Character B has done X thing before and gained some trauma from it. The characters have differing perspectives on the same thing, one being optimistic and eager-eyed while the other is skeptical and disillusioned, but also afraid. Character B might strongly discourage Character A from trying it out, to which Character A may get defensive because how dare this stranger try and stop them from something so important and meaningful to them? And now the defensive reaction is causing Character B to also react defensively out of their trauma, because why is this stranger being so hostile and acting like their experiences don’t matter when all they tried to do was help them? And then the two are forced to interact more and the topic of X keeps coming up, maybe Character A is being all childish and petty about it and getting reckless showing off how they can totally do X, only for Character B to start taking more drastic measures to make them stop, like taking their equipment, and now Character A is furious because that was the equipment their lost relative used, so now this is personal. And of course Character A will lash out emotionally, which prompts revenge from Character B, and-

You see how much more natural that is, without either character being designated as the one at fault? By acting off of the context they have, which presents them with opposing views, we can have good intentions be perceived as challenges or slights and taken more personally than intended, without the other ever understanding why this person has reacted so badly and taking it to mean this is just a person looking for a fight. And when things escalate, grudges can turn to hatred, which can turn to enemies

Not to mention this also gives us trauma responses to overcome and established character flaws to work on. And as the characters work on these flaws and trauma responses that caused the hatred in the first place, there’s suddenly going to be less conflict, so the lovers part can begin slotting in more naturally as the characters evolve from their worst to their best selves

And that leads me to my final note; time. These things take time, and they go in stages. Enemies-to-lovers is a slowburn trope, which requires attention to all the little details and awkward stages in-between. You don’t go from hating each other to loving each other, you go from ‘hating each other’ to ‘begrudgingly tolerating each others’ presence’ to ‘not being phased by their presence’ to ‘being relaxed in their company’ to ‘being able to be civil and polite without insincerity’ to ‘actually being able to get along without it feeling forced or awkward’ to ‘casual maybe-friends’ to ‘definitely friends’ to ‘fuck maybe more than friends?’ to ‘no no way am I crushing on THEM of all people’ to ‘oh fuck I’m crushing on THEM of all people?!’ to ‘fuck it yep this one’s mine’ - bonus points if there are setbacks and regressions and an ungodly amount of denial along the way

Point is, this trope is messy, this trope is confusing and this trope is very very specific; you need to show every moment of change as you go. People are here to enjoy the clusterfuck of emotions that the characters go through as they start to fall for their enemy. It’s a huge switch for them, why are we not delving into it? Quit going from ‘they hate each other and one actively antagonises the other’ to ‘but by the end of the night they made out because they’re just so unexplainably attracted to one another’

I’ll tell you about another story I once read that scared the shit out of me with how the enemies-to-lovers trope was just abuser/victim; the girl had been bullied and harrassed by this boy at her school, including destruction of property, physical violence, setting her things on fire, humiliating her in front of the school, etc. She also lived right next door to him, and from as early as day one he was an absolute asshole to her. The reason? He saw her struggling to lift a heavy box out of a moving van and thought she looked weak. So he said it. And when she didn’t respond favourably to that, he decided that was enough of a reason to warrant constant bullying for years

When the boy leaves over the summer break, she’s able to have her blinds open at home because now he won’t be staring into her bedroom window. Unfortunately he comes home a day earlier than she anticipated and he takes pictures of her changing to use as blackmail against her. For the majority of the book she’s blamed by herself, him and a couple other characters for leaving her blinds open. He uses his blackmail to have her do horrible things, he sets up hate accounts for her on social media and encourages people at school to start sending horrible shit like death threats to her actual accounts and to these fake accounts to the point where she just deletes social media altogether, he even tries to murder her at one point. Most of this stuff he never so much as apologises for, and the stuff he does apologise for, he still blames her for ‘causing’ it

We eventually, at the end of the story, find out that he’s got some kind of mental illness that causes these behaviours, and the girl is torn between ‘I’m the only one who can fix him I have to stay’ and ‘his many doctors are telling me it’s not safe to be around him’. His mother encourages her to stay to be ‘the one constant good thing in his life’ and the guy is begging and then demanding that she stay, but thank god she manages to eventually break things off with him despite loving him for some reason. I deadass can’t remember a single redeeming quality this guy had. He even tried to hurt her again as she left him, all the while claiming he’d never hurt her and that he’d changed and was different now. And by the end she was still wondering if she’d made the right choice or not, with the guy’s mum saying she hadn’t. Like… what?!

That’s not enemies to lovers. That’s abuser/victim the whole way through, just with a surprise reveal that ‘mental illness made him bad so he’s not really abusive, even though he never so much as apologised’. Mental illness is not an excuse. Mental illness should not be the end all, be all of an enemies-to-lovers story. Besides, it’s not like he didn’t have the capacity to apologise, but he didn’t do it regardless! Not even going through the motions without following through! Just ‘nah it’s your fault for existing wrong in my presence’

You can’t expect me to take it seriously if the only redeeming factor for attempted murder is ‘mental illness made him do it’. You can’t expect me to still find this ship even remotely an option. Redemption after attempted murder is a challenge enough as it is, especially since for a lot of people that can easily be considered a point of no return. But the guy doesn’t even pretend to be sorry! And later on in the same day she’s hugging and comforting him over the realisation that he has a mental illness since she feels she misjudged him! And suddenly they’re not enemies, they’ve jumped right to lovers! That’s the most frustrating part; THAT was the catalyst for the switch in mindsets, and it was INSTANT! INSTANT!!

Where’s the legitimate angst?! The payoff?! The satisfaction?! If they go from literal attempted murder to ‘my poor baby it’s okay I’ll always love you’ in the same day, what the hell was the point?! You’ve written two different relationships here, not an evolution over time with work put in by both parties! This isn’t even love! This is a horror story!

Anyway, TL;DR on what I’ve learned so far about the enemies-to-lovers trope and my personal takes on it; you need to hit the sweet spot between ‘will commit irredeemable dealbreaker atrocities’ and ‘I don’t have anything nice to say so I’ll say nothing at all’; you need reciprocation so the enemy factor doesn’t feel one-sided and thus more abuser/victim; you need a little bit of pettiness to ensure the rivalry survives long enough to die in the desired way; differing context on the same situation can be a great way of birthing conflict and enemy-hood without making one individual out to be the aggressor over the other and allowing both sides to act on character flaws that they overcome as the rivalry fades; the story needs to be a slowburn with each stage of the relationship’s evolution experienced in full; and the redemption efforts must be appropriate and satisfactory so the characters aren’t rewarded for problematic behaviour and get the opportunity to grow for and with one another