Cliché meme

[selenak]

Waking up to find b5_revisited has started with the Midnight at the Firing Line discussion was good. It's still one of my favourite season - and show - opening episodes ever and nothing short of amazing in what it sets up for the next five years. Though admittedly that's with the benefit of hindsight - newbies of course have no idea how much pay off for all that's set up here will come...

Like others on my flist, penknife's great fanfiction cliché poll has made me check out my own oeuvre for clichés I've done or intend to do. It's fun!



Genderswap: Sort of, in the same category as "bodyswap", twice. Once in the fifth of "Five Things Which Never Happened To Warren", BTVS - thing 5 picks up The Killer in Me from season 7 and gives it a different ending - and once in "Heroes", in Illusions where Candice gets hired to impersonate Nathan. (The story was written pre season 2, obviously.) I didn't write the classic version of genderswap yet - i.e. canon character A, male, is still character A but female. Though there is a meta post somewhere about in which fandoms it would work and where it wouldn't. I remember stating I'd love to read someone pulling it off for Blake's 7, and alara_r pointing out that a female Avon, instead of being universally adored, would be hated and reviled. Depressingly, I think she's right.

bodywap: see genderswap. Also, one DW/B7 crossover in which the Master ends up in Avon's body.

Huddling together for warmth: Joss kindly did that for me canonically, in Astonishing X-Men when he gave the scenario to Hank McCoy and Abigail Brand. I simply included it in "First Impressions", my Hank pov story chartering his reactions to Brand through AXM.

Undercover in a gay bar! Haven't written it. As andrastewhite says, this sounds like a good idea for a 70s era Alias story featuring Jack Bristow and Arvin Sloane.

Pretending to be married!: no, haven't written it, do not plan to, but who knows what the future brings...

Secretly a virgin! I have no idea what the appeal is supposed to be, unless we're talking crackfic. I do remember Luminosity made a great Highlander vid, "Not a Virgin Anymore", which among other things satirized the then popular fanfic cliché of Duncan never having had gay sex before meeting Methos. Right.

Amnesia: Yes, in my Highlander story Once out of Nature. It was a great way to confront my two main characters with a "what if?" but also to point out that this can be only ever temporary and a real new start is to accept the past instead of altering it.

Cross-dressing: Heroes again if Candice in Illusion counts. (She was rather fond of Nathan's ties.) Also DS9 in a missing scene story set during the episode where Quark does this in canon. I feel there should be an extra category, "stripping", because then I could list B5 as well.

Forced to share a bed!: *eyes oeuvre* No, I don't think so.

Aliens make them do it!: No, but if no one else writes the "Humans make them do it!" story about Londo and G'Kar, I suppose I will have to, sooner or later. It probably will be Talia, out of sheer self defense because she's forced to pick up all that UST every damn time she's presented during season 1 and early s2 negotiations.

Wingfic: I don't get this one, haven't written it, never will.

Mpreg: You know, someone should really write a Rygel pov during Peacekeeper Wars when this happened in Farscape canon...

Mistakenly assumed to be gay!: I don't know about mistaken, but I had Londo's biographer come to certain conclusions based entirely on canonical incidences in one of my earliest B5 fics. *veg* But then, a canon that has its characters make "married" jokes about a couple from the third episode onwards really makes it easy.

Let's play truth or dare!: Babylon 5 again, in my very first story featuring, whom else, Londo and G'Kar. I also did this while roleplaying in theatrical_muse some years back, for Connor (of AtS), where it turned into one of the most important rps I ever did in that community.

Mary Sue fic: In my head, sure. (You don't want to know about Mariam Suleika, Ali's sister in Lawrence of Arabia, when I was twelve.) Thankfully, I never wrote it down. I did write an interview with poor overworked Mary Sue in my Highlander days, which was great fun to do and also was the first fandom meta/crackfic I ever did.

Aphrodisiacs!: No.

Curtainfic: I'm not sure whether it counts as such, but my favourite among my BTVS stories, City Girls, is basically about Buffy and Dawn having that every day life in Rome post show. There is a Lamia who provides some external plot, but mostly it's about the sisters. Curtains don't show up, but ice cream does.

Hurt/Comfort: Naturally! In most fandoms I've written in.

Apocalypse fic:My BSG stuff, I suppose, and two Heroes stories.

Someone has a baby! Not in the sense of giving someone a child they didn't have in canon, but I did write about Darla and Connor more than once.

Telepathic soulbonding: For a pairing, it's not a good idea in B5 where you have an incident that's canonically referred to as a mind rape. I've written about telepaths, male and female, more than once (B5 and X-Men, mainly), but none of these are the type for the whole "soulmate" idea, which I don't like anyway even without telepathy. However, I did use telepathic soulbonding in an unromantic sense, in my Babylon 5 story White Lies which is about the four (female) Centauri telepaths serving the Emperor who show up in precisely one episode, Coming of Shadows, and who I felt deserved some background (and an explanation why they're not around anymore in the Cartagia days). Including an exploration of the canon given on them, which is that they were raised together and are permanently linked, with no break.

Werewolves mate for life!I've never written Harry Potter fic, nor do I intend to, and I think that's the fandom which spawned this particular cliché. Which sounds about as appealing as "soul mates", which is to say, not at all.