Y’know what I find absolutely fascinating about fanfiction? The trope trends that pertain to individual fandoms in each fanfic community.
I marvel at this every time I poke my head into a fanfiction archive somewhere, after finishing a series or a movie when I’m not quite ready to let it go but I’m not quite willing to dive in and participate. There’s always certain kinds of stories that are intensely popular in a self-contained fandom that are enormously rare in others.
There are, of course, some tropes that exist in virtually every fandom. You will never not find a Harry Potter AU or a coffee shop fic if a fandom has existed for longer than a couple months. The bigger the fandom, the more of them you’ll see. This is an Absolute Given. But others are less universal.
Some are self-contained types of AU’s that simply can’t work in another fandom, due to the nature of the original content’s story…but despite dozens of other potential tropes, one is just seized by the fandom as a fan favorite (literally). Take, for example, the plethora of chimera!fic in Fullmetal Alchemist (or at least, back for the 2003 anime there was a plethora of it. Maybe it’s changed since then, it’s been a while since I was in the fandom). It’s not really a concept that works in other fandoms, because the idea of chimeras is so strongly rooted in the source material’s lore, ‘magic’/science system, and concepts. But despite there also being dozens of other things you could run with in this universe too, this was a fandom-trope that was super popular.
But there are other things that I continue to be surprised at to this day. I watched a movie the other day and decided to poke my head into the fandom community and just scroll through AO3 without any filters. Every single page had at least one vampire AU, but that’s not something I see a lot in other fandoms. Why vampire AU’s? I don’t know, but something about it appeals for that fandom, clearly!
Sick!fics are super popular in several of the fandoms I’ve hung around in, but in others they’re all but impossible to find. In some fandoms whump or hurt/comfort is overwhelmingly the majority, and in others the bulk of what you can find is fluff so sticky sweet you’ll get a toothache. I’ve seen dozens of niche, oddballs sorts of premises or AU settings when browsing fanfic archives that seem to exist in only one fandom, but in that fandom they have an incredible amount of power.
It’s just fascinating to me, to see how trends fall based on what is presented in the source material, and the kinds of people that are drawn to that material. Things that are enormously popular to the point of being almost commonplace in one fandom might be a breath of fresh air in another. And clearly, no idea is every really ‘old’ or ‘done to death’ or ‘unoriginal.’ It’s all about the context of where you’re writing it, and about perspective.
And I think that’s kind of cool.
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Brinens and Things 