excerpts from Susana Tosca and Elizabeth Evans (2022),
open access @ https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/article/855325/summary
loosely strung by some idle reflections
Fan fiction writers make schemata come alive, performing them not just by telling but by showing in a process fraught with combinatorial creativity.
Tropes Are Tools, which means they a) must be acknowledged and not avoided, and b) do nothing if the work isn't shown. Of course, by definition of the trope, we've already seen what it accomplishes in isolation. Whence novelty?
[...] even though all the examined texts agree on the inner trait “Devoted to Kondō” as a basic trait of this character, some explore it in connection with “self-sacrificing,” leading to heroic stories of trying to save the Shinsengumi and provide glory for Kondō, while others prefer to connect it to a penchant for “living aesthetically” and being “capable of great tenderness,” leading to tales of homosexual love.
Aha! I am accustomed to driving a scene via the pairing of two characters - implicitly, by finding some pair of their traits which are similar or contrasting. But I enjoy the idea of pairing a character with a character-like feature of the world, e.g. the forces of their favorite warlord.
However, what if we understood power as the ability to freely imagine? Maybe specially when these imaginings can go against the dominant discourses of any given time. If we truly care about reception and the ways in which texts become intertwined with people ́s lives, this second perspective becomes as important as the first.
I mean, this just makes me feel better about writing as a mere hobbyist, that is, for myself. And I needed that.