I'm gonna write a story.
It's about two girls that are attractive and want to kiss. To help the reader feel this attraction, I'm gonna code them in such a way that everyone will instantly recognize not only what kind of people they are, but all growth they will undergo. They will be otherwise completely shallow and too inauthentic to parse as human begins, but their status as women who are into other women will be undeniable.
Not fleshy, complicated, lens-driven persons to study.
Not representations of human condition.
Pure signifiers.
Signifiers marinated in tropes so widespread that nobody will even think twice to question it. Common means good. How else would it become common? Common is familiar, familiar is relatable. If I can relate to the heroine's struggle - that's art. That's love, baby. I don't even need to describe these girls. Everyone already knows one is confident, taller and groks as older and the other a shut in with fringe-glasses look whose hands never touched another. Secretly skilled? She'll blush when her name is said aloud, if I'm feeling adventurous.
They'll have their escapades in a place that's familiar to one but not the other. Is that a metaphor for human connections? Maybe. But it doesn't have to be - there will be monsters too! Visual representations of psychosexual repressions so on the nose that the wiki will write itself. The world must feel familiar too. My actors are in a weird, fantastical, alien world that I will spend pages and pages undermining by comparing it to other media. No surprises.
It will be called 'pleasantly uncanny'. Recognizable, yet different. Like a street, but with a sidewalk.
A story about The Other? It doesn't need to feel foreign. We're all human after all! We understand each other perfectly. Reasonable people share goals and ambitions. There's no tension to meeting a new person, no grind in love. Why should there be any in my horror-fantasy world? At no point will I leave the reader wondering. They won't dream, they won't imagine. Ambiguity is the enemy. Subtlety is emotional manipulation, implication - cowardice. Just flip pages in anticipation of the obvious. The only unknown: which page the romance will be consumed on. Void of characterization, void of themes, void of anything that could detract from the prize. Tiny and suffocating world, featureless. Empty, except for two girls who can't wait to lock eyes. No presence of anything but. I may call it yuri of absence.
It won't be a heartfelt story, but it WILL remind you of heartfelt things. It's going to be sincere-flavored. It will seem brave and new, despite at best treading water. The tone - respectful, but light. Breezy. One reviewer will call it 'plucky' and it will enter common parlance.
I'll put Lovecraftian on the back cover, to entice readers. I does feature uncaring, scary world that the characters can't comprehend and a scary monster after all, no?
"The real horror is that there's nothing alien about The Other? I'm foreign??"
idk what you mean, touch grass
