Trope_Bingo

[thisbluespirit]

Look at me, absolutely not signing up for anything at all! *cough* Well, trope_bingo looked like exactly my sort of thing, it's very laid back, and you can make any sort of fanworks for any fandom for the squares. My aim, though is to double up most of them with my existing icon and prompt challenges, or to use things I already have scribbled in my notebook - it could at least be a way of picking out which ones to type up, as sometimes I sink into a sort of apathy of none of them being worth the tiring process that writing still is at the moment. So it shouldn't be extra things, as such. Mostly...

Anyway, in short, I have a lovely card! aralias said I could have one and just sort of pat it, and I didn't think that, even if I did, I should be inclined to pat it, but, actually... I am mentally patting and hugging this one already.

snowed in	rivals to lovers	locked in	matchmaker	against all odds
road trip	deathfic	reunion	rites of passage / coming of age	indecent proposal
handcuffed / bound together	twenty-four hours to live	FREE ★ SPACE	epistolary	sex pollen
trust and vows	metafiction	unrequited love / pining	unexpected friendship	transformations
au: other	au: crossover	au: mundane	futurefic	sharing a bed

Isn't it an exceptionally lovely card? *hugs it again* Now, I just need to decide which of my dodgy Silver/Steel scenarios gets written for it (only one of them can be) - indecent proposal or sex pollen would fit. (It might have to be the sex pollen one, just because of Sapphire and Steel being amazing and how you can put something like that in and have it be as explicable as anything else ever is, easily. S&S is a show that you introduce common tropes to and watch them curl up and die, or transform into something else. It's brilliant. This is one of the reason's I'm still obsessed with it.)

Anyway, I also have potential fics already in rough that might fit transformations, road trip and metafiction.

Plus, if all else fails I can do recs or icons, so that is all lovely and good.

*pats table on its top line*

But, yes, I have the willpower of a lemming or something, really. Still, I think this one shouldn't make me stressed or ill. Although I have already had to do snowed in twice for the Elements prompts list. I don't think I can face it again. :lol:

Comments

[seriesfive]

I very much approve of you considering to tackle that sex pollen trope. Also, I completely agree that S&S is probably the best fandom (if not one of very few) for coming up with very, very strange and curious variants of common themes. I had that experience during my last trope-bingo round.

Alas, this time I think I'll have to venture to other fandoms (as well). There are quite some kinky tropes on my card that definitely don't go well with S&S.

[thisbluespirit]

Well, when you had your card, I may have ended up scribbling some Silver/Steel fics that fitted First Time, F*ck or Die, and Sex Pollen. *looks guilty* So, I have it already written. I'm a little sorry, though, because I kind of liked the F*ck or Die one best, but at least it saves me from having everyone see that I can't even go round writing that word in its proper context. So I already have about 4 fics that would fit squares written in rough, for various things - only one being Silver/Steel.

I suppose you would, really. Although S&S and watching humans do weird stuff could probably be a thing, too. But not for that many fics.

[seriesfive]

But that is great! Oh, I'm so very much looking forward to what you've come up with! And you know what? I just realised that my lemurfic fills one square on my double bingo card: body alteration / injury + au: fusion.

[thisbluespirit]

:-)

That's because lemurs are awesome! ♥

Also, since I have two mods right here... I missed any discussions, if there were any, but of the tropes included, I went to check some definitions and also what were the specifications for an "au: crossover" and it seems to just mean "crossover".

If that's so, can someone please for next time alter it to "crossover" (unless I'm misreading it and it actually does require AU elements), because the assumption that all crossovers are automatically AU is an insulting one, usually used by people who dislike them. I've written so many crossovers I've lost count and there are probably only about 1 or 2 I would count as AU in any way. Maybe that's the fault of being a DW fan, but there are quite a few of us about. And if a crossover is automatically AU, then so is fic that contains a non-canonical pairing, or, frankly, any fanfic because none of this is canon.

If the comm team mean "crossover", they don't need the "au", and if they mean "the crossover should also contain an au element", then that should be clearer in the definition. Otherwise, it comes across as making an unnecessary judgement on a type of fic, and, in fanfic, it's much better to avoid that!

I'm not very good at commenting on sites and being a nuisance, so I thought I'd just mention it here and you (or aralias if she sees this, too) can bear it in mind for Round 3.

[seriesfive]

Duly noted! To be perfectly frank the blame lies with me. This trope was named crossover in round one. I voted for renaming it to au: crossover and got the change through. Obviously I haven't given the subject enough thought, because to me a crossover IS always an AU :D

I'll do some more thinking about it...promise!

[thisbluespirit]

Aha, you're an evil person, then. ;-p (No, not really - never!!)

A fusion is always an AU - a crossover, like any other fic, can be AU or canon-compliant as the author chooses. I love writing crossovers - and much of the fun of it is doing it a believable way so that the reader can easily imagine it fitting with canon, even if it's an unlikely combination on the surface. I know a lot of other people who also write crossovers and take that aspect of it just as seriously, so the casual assumption that any encounter with characters from another fandom somehow makes an alternate universe is just untrue.

An AU is where the whole point of the story is that some factor in canon is changed - a character makes a different choice, a canon event goes differently, it happens in a different setting/time etc. A crossover is a separate fic type in which two canons in someway meet or touch and it can be as canon-compliant or as AU as any other story.

Here are all the canonical Alternate Universe tags from AU from AO3. As you can see, there are 8 pages of them, but no such tag as Alternate Universe - Crossover, because they are two separate, established types of fic.

Anyway, as you can see, I feel quite strongly about this! (Sorry.) It isn't important in the grand scheme of things, obviously, but if you substitute "non-canonical pairing" (which often has the same "is an AU" criticism levelled at it as crossovers), you see how uncertain the ground starts to get - where do you stop? Isn't all fanfic AU by that definition? Besides, "crossover" as a trope is long-established and perfectly clear as it stands - why add an extra element that makes treop_bingo's square less clear?

But it is an awesome comm and challenge and you're doing a marvellous job! I am a bit of pedant, it's why I've taken to tag wrangling anyway...

[seriesfive]

'staggers back slightly*

Ahem, okay. Would you say a fusion is always an au? Or should we, following your definition, take the au part out too? :D

[thisbluespirit]

I'm sorry! /o\

I don't really know so much about fusions - they usually are AUs, so I'm sure that's fine. A fusion merges two fandoms, so that the characters of one fandom enact out the plot of another, or have always lived in another fandom's universe, or one character is now in another show - again it's a specific change that makes an alternate universe, really.

[seriesfive]

I'm just making fun at you! :D

I would call my lemurfic a fusion and an au. Would you agree? (I'm trying to feel my way around now...)

[thisbluespirit]

I'd say a crossover is where Captain Janeway meets the Doctor (may have done this one, heh), shenanigans ensue, and then they both carry on their way, no AU elements needed, while a fusion would be more like the Doctor is a spaceship captain trying to get his oddball crew home across x light years while fighting Cybermen a lot.

Your lemur!fic could be anything really! It fits reasonably well into both fandoms as a straight crossover (possibly with an AU element in the conclusion - er, no pun intended!) but it could possibly be a fusion, as it accepts the HDM as a known universe to Silver and Steel, so... could be either, really. Fanfic isn't really organised to always have hard and fast categories - despite all my waffling above! ;-)

Anyway, it doesn't matter what your lemurfic is - it's a lovely crossover fic of some description that has Silver as a lemur and Steel's daemon. It is awesome. ♥

[seriesfive]

Hmmm, lovely to get my fur stroked like that. Thank you! :)
Personally (in my head or my book) I'd say it's a fusion, but
mostly it's just shamelessly self-indulgent idfic. ;)

[thisbluespirit]

And I should add that trope_bingo looked good fun last time - but this time it's even better - I love what you've done with the tropes! I think I'd have struggled if I'd joined in last time, but this round's list was incredibly enticing and shiny.

:-)

[seriesfive]

The funny thing is that I'm really itching to work through that trope list all over again. There are still too many au tropes for my taste, and I think I'd like to take some of the overtly sexual tropes out or rename and broaden them....Oh well, we'll work on that in autumn.

[thisbluespirit]

Sorry, that all sounded a bit serious, and it should be somewhere on the comm, not in a comment to you, but if you could bear it in mind between you modly types for the next round? And now that's said, I'll just enjoy my shiny card (and I do have a sort of AU crossover planned out, so I can fill it properly, either way). ♥

*heads off to meditate on sex pollen and Silver and Steel*

[seriesfive]

No worries. ♥ Now, go away and write some fic! :D

[aralias]

hooray! i'm glad you have a card. i hope it works out.

(also - i wish i had got handcuffed together...)

[thisbluespirit]

You were right! It is nice to have a card! ♥

Well, you have curtainfic - and I was going to do my BBC Henry V picspam as a crackfic story about desperately making costumes out of curtains if I got it, which sounded like something different and fun. But I didn't get it, (and that's not really what the prompt is, anyway. I could be very bad at this re. prompts.)

:-)

At the moment, I already have fics in my notebook that would match indecent proposal, sex pollen and transformations, also road trip and possibly metafiction - but that definitely gives me the end right vertical line as the surest bet for a bingo. (And "angainst all odds" sounds fun, while sharing a bed... could be cracky Avon and Vila fic, in which they're stuck on some hideous planet overnight in a hovel with only one bed. Or anything, really.)

But mostly it's matching up with my Element prompts, because they were already trope-related prompts, anyway.

But, yes. The mods of the comm are quite wonderful, especially the two on this post.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Bingo cards are always so tempting. :P

What exactly does the "indecent proposal" square mean, though? That is not a trope I'm familiar with.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

the idea is loosely 'i'll give you a million pounds if you sleep with me' or some variation of the same #modlyknowledge

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Ahh, thanks for the clarification.

[thisbluespirit]

but presumably any indecent proposal is okay, even if it isn't including money, but is a request or offer to sleep with someone?

Or do I have to better behaved about how freely I interpret prompts here than my usual cavalier attitude? Because I have an Element fic that would probably fit, but not if people have to offer money. Maybe it isn't indecent enough... It might be sort of a decent proposal?

[aralias.livejournal.com]

yes, any indecent proposal is ok! money and sex do not have to be included, but it has to be some sort of bribery business. and i think we encourage not playign the tropes straight.

[thisbluespirit]

Good! Thanks. (It doesn't involve any bribery, but there's an offer of sex to pass the time on one side and educate on the other. So it's definitely a bit indecent. It's S&S, naturally, which of my other fandoms would be that strange?)

I am very good at not playing tropes straight. I thought from seriesfive's S&S fics last time that that was okay.

[thisbluespirit]

They are! I held out the first time round, but not this time, as you can see. :-)

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Hope you have fun with that!

[thisbluespirit]

Thank you! :-)

[pitry.livejournal.com]

This has the potential for loltastic results. And fantastic, too, depends on where you take it. Huzzah! (besides, you can probably write ficlets for this?)

[thisbluespirit]

It does, doesn't it? I'm really pleased with it - last time there seemed to be an awful lot of AU tropes on it, which isn't quite so much my thing for writing.

And, yes, the minimum is 500 words - plus I can icons instead, or a vidlet, a picspam, an essay, a set of recs or anything. It'll mostly be fic with me, though, but it's nice. And it's open till Oct 31st. (With an amnesty till the end of Dec.)

(You could get one? *looks hopeful*)

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. That sounds very convenient! And veyr pressure free, hurrah!

Getting one... hmm. I recently dropped out of a HP fest, realised I don't have the time/ motivation to write for it. BUT. Flexible deadlines and the possibility of ficlets... although I'd have to think about fandom motivation. *goes to have a look anyway*

[thisbluespirit]

:-)

You could do a couple of recs sets, too, if you don't manage enough ficlets - you only need five for a bingo!

(Sorry. I wasn't supposed to be signing up either... :lol:)

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Lol. I just signed up.

You are totally to blame, you know that :P Ah, well. I shall use this as an excuse to write Dark Knight/ Man of Steel crossovers. I've finally watched MoS and I feel a desperate need to throw DK world logic into that mess.

See? That's my idea of fixits. Other people write pairings or happy endings and stuff. I want to make everything more bleak and unfriendly. I'm doing fandom so wrong :(

[thisbluespirit]

\o/ (or: I'm sorry! /o\)

I want to make everything more bleak and unfriendly. I'm doing fandom so wrong :(

Oh, I don't think you're the only one who thrives on angst. Besides, I'm doing fandom wrong - aren't fandoms supposed to be things other people have heard of? So, probably we're all doing fandom wrong in our own ways.

What happens if your card comes up all butterflies and rainbows? ;-)

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Well, see, that's the thing: for people who like angst, I'm not angsty enough. I definitely write some fun feel good fics! Just... in my own way.

And eh, people have heard of your fandoms! Just... three of them, give or take a bonsai giraffe. And DW. Don't forget that you're definitely in DW fandom.

BUT NONE OF IT MATTERS I HAVE 'POOR COMMUNICATION SKILLS' ON MY CARD ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ (and it wasn't even the trope I asked for, lol)

[thisbluespirit]

:lol: Well, I like your way. You carry on doing Fandom Wrong all you want. ♥

I'm sort of a DW fandom fraud at the moment, so it doesn't really count.

I'm very amused - I've never seen anyone so happy to have poor communication skills! ;-p

[dimity-blue.livejournal.com]

That looks like a great bingo card! I hope you have fun with it. :oD

[thisbluespirit]

Thank you! It looked like fun earlier in the year when everyone else was doing it, but I think they've really improved on the selection of tropes this time - I do love my card!

:-)