Fifty* ways to twist your trope

[resonant]

*OK, not quite fifty, more like twenty. Don't ask me why I did this. One night it just seemed like more fun than going to bed like a normal person to see how many prompts I could come up with to play with a trope.

I did a thought experiment testing each of these prompts on three tropes: sex pollen, telepathy, and fake marriage -- I figured if it more or less works with all three, it will more or less work with anything you come up with.

Anybody else have ideas? If we all work together, maybe we can come up with a multi-use list to share.

1. Flip it. (It's not sex pollen, it's friendship pollen, and it's messing up the nice no-strings thing we had going. I can't hear your thoughts; I can't even hear you talking, though I can hear everybody else just fine. It's not fake marriage, it's fake divorce.)



2. We handled it OK the first time it happened. I don't understand why we're having such trouble with it the second time.



3. We didn't handle it well at all the first time it happened, but it keeps happening and it's actually getting kind of funny. (Great example: cesperanza 's Stargate Atlantis story Weddings, Plural, and a Yak.)



4. Lean heavily into the implied consent issues, because have you noticed there are almost always implied consent issues?





5. It doesn't happen between me and you; it happens between you and someone else, and I'm jealous or otherwise freaked out.



6. Unrelated problems. (The sex pollen was fine but writing the report afterwards was hell. I don't mind hearing your thoughts, but the things you know about your teammate are none of my business and a violation of her privacy. Does fake marriage require fake tax forms?)



7. All worldbuilding. (Is it an OSHA violation not to remove those sex-pollen-bearing plants from around your workspace? Does it meet the legal definition of slander if you said it via telepathic contact? What does Miss Manners say about wedding gifts for a fake marriage?)



8. Start in the aftermath. Make the reader reconstruct what actually happened.



9. It Came Back. (There's still sex pollen in your briefcase and your umbrella and between the laces of your shoes. Can't really tell if we're still in telepathic contact or if one of the voices in my head just sounds like you. My co-workers and your landlord sent us wedding anniversary cards.)



10. That wasn't the real me. (Sex pollen made me really uninhibited / with telepathy I shared my emotions all the time / when it was a pretend relationship I wasn't clingy. Now I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.)



11. Surprise; we're already doing it. (We've got a great sex life and sex pollen doesn't change it much. My species is naturally telepathic. We've been secretly married for years.)



12. I'm beginning to think I'm imagining it. (I'm incapacitated with lust and you're playing sudoku on your phone. I think the filthiest, most disturbing things into our telepathic bond and you don't even twitch. We got fake married and had a really intense fake honeymoon and now you treat me like the Grubhub guy.)



13. I fell for you because you didn't. (Didn't do anything under sex pollen but the kind of tentative kissing we'd already been doing. Didn't listen to my thoughts. Fake-married me and then slept quietly in bed beside me and didn't try anything.)



14. It didn't just happen to us; one of us did it on purpose. (from terminally_underwhelmed)



15. Give it to the couple where it really, really doesn't belong. (Sex pollen to the honeymooners. Telepathy to, say, Eddie and Venom, who already share a body and arguably a brain cell. Fake marriage to, say, John Sheppard, who's going to get kicked out of the Don't Ask Don't Tell-era military for marrying another guy.)



16. We need to do it for plot-related reasons but we can't. (Sex pollen is filling us with lust but all the reasons why we weren't already sleeping together are still there and stopping us from crossing the line. We were supposed to establish telepathic contact but we don't trust each other enough to open the door. The plot requires us to get fake-married, but either there's a serious legal complication like someone's divorce not being final or else I discover that I really can't look at the nice judge and say, "I do," if I know it's a lie.)



17. Unexpected positive side effect. (Post-sex pollen, we know some things we like that we didn't even know about. Telepathy means when your hands are full you cay say, "Hey, put this on the grocery list." Fake marriage made me unthreatening to single people, so now they trust me.)



18. It affects one of us but not the other.



19. You seem weirdly competent at handling this kind of thing. Has this happened to you before?



20. While all that was happening I learned a lot about how to please you. I don't understand why now that it's over none of that stuff works any more.

(Boy, I haven't done any html commands for a long time. Thank goodness for the Preview button.)

Comments

[ride_4ever]

*boggles at all the possibilities*

[resonant]

With any luck this will result in stories by someone.

[writedragon]

You didn't just turn this trope on its head: you folded it into a dodecahedron. Great thought experiment!

[resonant]

This is what I love about tropes. We're so familiar with them that you can origami them endlessly and readers will enjoy the exercise. Like jazz fans hearing a new version of "The Sunny Side of the Street."

[petra]

Mmm, delightful thought experiment!

[resonant]

If one person writes a story because of this I'll be ecstatic.

[trobadora]

This is excellent! :D

[resonant]

Tropes for everyone! But only one bed for all of us!

[celli]

ahhhhh this is amazing! (also, you had me at tax forms, you know that, right?

[resonant]

Tell us about the tax ramifications of popular tropes!

Enslavement By Aliens: See Lost Wages

Hurt/Comfort: See Deductions: Medical Expenses

Sex Work: See Income, Illegal

[jesse_the_k]

It’s delicious to watch you noodle.

[resonant]

I need (1) a noodling tag (ta-daa), (2) someone to hire me just to noodle, and (3) some method of turning noodling into actual writing.

[cimorene]

I once wrote a fic where everyone in the ensemble (band) except the POV character woke up in female bodies. I think this counts as #1, really. But interestingly, it seems it's not quite possible to do 'woke up in a body with the other kind of genitals' for all your proposed transformations. It's more of a personal transformation/journey, I guess. Telepathy stories can be like that too of course, but you can still include and exclude people as transmitters, so that allows it to happen, for example, between other people. Gendered body transformation fic can't really happen between particular people,so I can't figure how to make that work unless it's like a trans person watching someone else magically transition. Or watching someone else experience dysphoria differently.

[resonant]

I agree that that's a #1! I think you could do temporary gendered body transformation for things like "I handled this better the first time than I'm handling it this time" or "Here's what our friends *thought* was happening."

But I have to admit I can't really enjoy playing around with this one the way I could before I [was aware that I] actually knew anyone who was trans.

[laurenthemself]

These are SO GOOD.

I just had someone asking me in fic comments whether I'd seen any other soulmates AUs where the concept of soulmates isn't pre-existing but comes into existence during the fic, and I bet that if they're out there you've probably seen 'em.

[resonant]

I don't recall seeing that premise elsewhere, and it's an interesting one.

In fact I can see that added to the list, one way or the other - either unfamiliar (you're the first soulmate / werewolf / Vulcan / stripper / omega the world has ever seen) or familiar (oh, yeah, sex pollen / aliens / telepathy, that's chapter 2 of the employee policy manual).

[luthien]

I haven't had the will to write since Christmas - no real reason, I think my batteries just needed re-charging - but you've got my fic brain whirring. Terrific thought experiment!

[resonant]

I'm great at premises. It's the actual writing I have trouble with.

[lunabee34]

These are very fun. Would love to see stories of many of these.

[resonant]

Oh, me too. I'd like to see a dozen apiece.i think some writers think it's possible to make a reader go, "Not another sex pollen story," but not this reader.

[the_leaky_pen]

Oh this is very fun! Love thinking about this sort of thing. :D

[resonant]

I'm loving the conversations!

[unavee]

These are wonderful! I think some of them would mix together well, too, for even more fun.

[likeaduck]

Yeah and some that shade into each other: like, 3 + 7 + 14 + 6 + 8 = Your teammate has started getting really sloppy about taking their pre-mission sex pollen prophylactics and there was a near-miss and now you need to have a Talk.

[likeaduck]

I really want both fake divorce and surprise we've been secretly married for years but now we're *publically* fake married and that's real different.

[resonant]

Yes! I love that second one. Like our first wedding was a perfectly nice visit to the courthouse, but our families / friends / team weren't there.

Or what if you're really married but you've been hiding it so long that you can't fake it convincingly?

[silveradept]

It's Not This Thing, It Just Looks Like It. (It's not sex pollen, it's Pon Farr/a heat cycle and everyone here needs to mate. It's not telepathy, they're extremely fluent in reading body language. It's not a fake marriage, it's a legally unrecognized one.)

It Is This Thing, But It Looks Nothing Like It. (It is sex pollen, but there's never been any societal issues with casual sex, so... It is telepathy, but everyone knows what they think is a complicated sign language and uses it. It is a Fake Marriage, but the only thing that's weird about it is that nobody can figure out who the arranger of the marriage was.)

This Is Nothing Like What We Were Taught In School (whether because they were too embarrassed to tell the truth, they were maliciously hiding the truth, or because Somebody Interfered in accurate teaching.)

How, Exactly, Is This Being Taught In School? (Cringey textbooks? Same-gendered/social statused people trying to have a serious conversation in a room full of unwilling adolescents? The school punts and expects parents to do it instead?)

That? Was An Experiment Gone Wrong. (Sex Pollen was an attempt to create a therapeutic aphrodisiac, telepathy happened because we needed long-distance quantum communications, fake marriage happened to avoid soulmate-less stigma, or to cover up some other thing.)

(Those seem like other ways of doing it?)

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Oooh, nice! :)

[lobelia321]

I am loving your icon!

[spacetimeconundrum]

Somewhat late to the party, but I'm cackling because I've recently written at least two stories that hit on several of these points, more or less - one featuring an "accidental" marriage/fake marriage, another with not exactly telepathy, but magically receiving the other's person's sensory inputs (hearing for one partner, touch for the other). Can confirm that much fun can be had playing with these tropes!