Old Fanfic Tropes
When you’ve been reading fanfic as long as I have (as in, before that hive of scum and villany that is fanfiction.net), you’ve seen some shit.
I write this not to shit on those days – because I wrote these fics, I read these fics, I. LOVED. THESE. FICS. Every generation thinks they invented the wheel or whatever, but man, I just want to reminisce with you all for awhile, so sit down and listen.
Here are some old tropes I remember:
1. High School Musical! Performance: Not that Disney TV shit – Naw kid, we’re going to drag out Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and maybe if they’re heathens it’s Beauty and The Beast. Then there are those artsy wankers who dust off their LP of Chess: The Musical. Are the characters putting on a show to save the theater or little Timmy from the well? No. The reasons they are going through this hell are unimportant – the important part is forcing your OTP into roles that will make them discover their ~*~*~FEELINGS~*~*~ for one another. Your OTP isn’t hetero? No problem. Introducing Harry Potter as Cossette, Draco Malfoy as Marius, and you damn well skippy better believe that Sirius is Jean Valjean and Snape as Javert. Because why not shove in some additional UST while you’re at it?
2. Ice Skating!AU: This is a special AU that seems to occur only in Winter Olympic Years. Two people who hate the fuck out of each other are now pairs skaters fighting. for. the. gold. Lots of lifts, intense music, touching, and eventually love.
Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to ever be any Summer Olympic equivalent – even though most of the athletes are way less covered. Ice dancing / skating is easy, I get it, you can describe passionate dancing –
but picture this – synchronized diving!AU. Your favs in tight speedos, learning to be ~*~*~ONE~*~*~ with each other as they fall off a diving platform. Or shit, make male rhythmic gymnastics a thing. Or, you know, watch some Olympic wrestling. So much just left there on the table to rot as we wait for winter.
3. Strawberry Kisses by Jack Off Jill: it was a thing, I can’t even really explain it, but your fanfic fandom was ~*~*~NOT~*~*~ complete until someone wrote a songfic involving self-harm referencing Strawberry Kisses by Jack Off Jill.
Back in the day there’s no YouTube for you to look up the artist and actually listen to it – naw, if you’re incredibly lucky, the web page might autoplay a midi on loop for you to enjoy while you read. Ahh the joys of listening to your computer basically play a recorder. You’re pretty much left to guess what the song actually sounds like unless you go out, find the album, and actually listen to it –Which I finally did as I wrote this – turns out, song’s not Strawberry Kisses but Strawberry Gashes. Strawberry Kisses seems to involve a preteen girl and lots of old-school CGI that probably looked state of the art back in the day. I’ve been mandela’d.
4. Mpreg fics AKA the precursor to all this Alpha/Omega Dom/Sub stuff that is au currant or whatever. No one bothered to explain the biology – no world-building, no societal castes. Just two pretty boys makin the sex (or infamously ugly boys) and accidentally getting pregnant. Swear to god no one knew men could get pregnant until that ONE boy did, and then suddenly everyone else remembered that ~*~*~oH YeAAaHHh~*~*~ that’s a thing that happens sometimes. Insert angst, handwave delivery, et voila cute baby and your OTP playing happy families.
5. The Say Anything AU AKA Let Me Explain My Feelings To You In A Song; Not One That I Wrote, But One That I Will Play You A Recording Of Now: Your OTPs are going through a rough time. One of them is inevitably bad at communication. They will sit their love down in a room, and say “Please listen to this song, it explains how I feel” – this may or may not be literal here. Cue the author’s favorite song, with the lyrics written in italics, and the lover immediately understands, they kiss, they maybe sex, and end scene.
Now, again, you’re running into the Strawberry Kisses / Gashes problem here, where unless the audience knows the song, they’ve got no clue what is going on. So generally, you’re running into your typical angsty songs of the last ten years.
Which is fine, when your fandom is set in present times. But Kira Nerys rocking out to Elton John on Deep Space Nine? Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Elton John, I’ve seen him in concert with a series of Windows 98 screensavers behind him and ate it right up – but Candle In The Wind is no Beethoven’s Fifth my dudes.
So there you have it, a short, terribly incomplete, history of fanfic tropes pre 2010s. Thank you.