An Author Trope of mine

[breakinglight11]

I got sucked into wasting some time on TV Tropes, and some of the most interesting ones to me are those about the workings of the Author-- their particular styles, beliefs, preferences, even kinks --emerging in their work. Some of them were creepy and weird, some of them we just about themes they liked exploring. Which made me think about what I like to tackle a lot. I could name a lot of general things, like guilt and redemption, but there's one thing much more specific than that which springs to mind. I'm sure there are others, but this one occurs strongly to me right now.

I have written or at least conceived of several protagonist who are strongly affected by their paralyzing fear of confessing their feelings to the person they love. And it's not simply for fear of rejection; there's a level of denial in there, believing that they are unworthy of that person and therefore should not presume. Most importantly, there's the conviction that this person is it, the one, and once they receive the rejection they're fairly sure is coming then they've not only humiliated themselves, they're no longer able to even hold out hope anymore. Cassander is my first example of this, whose entire arc is overcoming this. I am also working on Sundan, whose arc is conversely how he allows this to destroy himself and everyone around him. There's a small bit of this in Gabriel, but it's part of his generally issue with feeling less than worthy and isn't the defining aspect of it. There may be others elsewhere in my writing, but those probably exemplify it most strongly.

Comments

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

I am willing to bet, without even looking at the trope page in question, that one of the protagonists from the Mistborn series is on the list of qualifying tropes ;)

I have to admit... I kind of hate this trope. I'm not familiar with how you use it in your writing, but in other places, I've seen it lead to what I like to call the "Othello problem," i.e. the only source of conflict could be resolved if the characters would just TALK to each other.

And I find that very very frustrating >.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

I think that's overly reductive. It takes for granted that the problem is that characters are making incorrect assumptions, which isn't always the case. For example, in one of my pieces above, the problem isn't that Sundan doesn't know whether or not Juliana loves him-- the problem is that she doesn't love him, and he can't stand it. No amount of talking was going to fix that problem for him.

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. As I said, I don't know enough about these characters to know how you use them.

[eva schiffer (from livejournal.com)]

In a play that kind of "love destroys" arc can work really well. I'm not a big fan of it as a general trope since it tends to make me think the characters are being self absorbed idiots (you really can't think of any other person on earth who could make you happy? you either haven't met a lot of people or you have no imagination). Anyhow, that's beside the point, what I actually wanted to say was, I'm very leery of it in LARPs. It tends to lead to a hyper focus of one character on another character (assuming both in the pair are PCs) which can stunt the obsessed character's other plots and relationships. If you end up casting someone who's not super into the angsting, that can go very wrong.