- grumpy jerk and actual ray of sunshine are BFFs
- mutual unrequited pining
- character A falls fast and hard for character B
- character A slowly falls in love with character B over the course of several years, realization hits them that they’ve been in love with B for a long time hits them like a truck
- cool badass is actually a giant fucking nerd
- The Power of Friendship ™
- flat “what” reactions
- sweet adorable characters with horrible tragic pasts
- villains-turned-heroes becoming the Weird Uncle
- characters that aren’t actually related having a parent-child relationship
- characters that aren’t actually siblings having a sibling-like bond
- “I can’t stand this person but I would die for them”
you will take these tropes from my cold dead hands.
Fuck yes
how the hell do you write mutual unrequited pining
Time is different for the seven of you than it has been for anyone else who ever lived. During your one-hundred year journey, you don’t age thanks to whatever forces keep putting you back together at the beginning of each year. Your minds stay sharp. You learn skills and languages and new proficiencies. You become remarkably capable adventurers during your voyage on the ███████████. But it’s not just your minds that develop, across this ageless century – something less quantifiable develops too.
Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives, and with each moment we spend with those people. But too often we neglect that part of ourselves in favor of others. And by the time we realize just how important that is, we find ourselves with fewer folks around to practice with. But the seven of you have something that nobody else ever had: time. All the time in the world. Time enough to grow indescribably close. Time enough to learn how to care for each other, how to allow yourselves to be cared for. And in the case of █████ and ███, time enough to fall deeply and truly in love.
█████ felt it first. During a particularly challenging year, ███ caught him crying. And she softly and sincerely consoled him, and just for a moment, the professional wall between them came down. And something showed through.
███ wasn’t far behind. Her moment of realization was a bit more innocuous. During that cycle with the robots, █████ helped repair the small frame of a vessel housing a particularly rambunctious spirit, and it kept shocking him, and laughing. And ███ laughed too, and she knew.
This new love, it wasn’t their focus during the journey. █████ worked tirelessly to understand each world you traveled to, to understand the ██████ and figure out a way to defeat it. ███ grew furiously in arcane power, studying the mystical secrets of the planes, hoping to master whatever spell would break your team out of their desperate retreat. But there were moments between those studies, meals shared in secret, just the two of them under the guise of their work, sightseeing trips for two across these doomed worlds. And that love grew, and it grew, until it reached the point that all great loves grow toward: the point of…inevitability.
Looking back, this recital is where that love that █████ and ███ cultivated quietly and cautiously over the last half century truly bloomed. There was romance in every measure, and longing in every note. And after the performance, they take each other’s hands high in the air, and they swoop down for this over-the-top bow, just laughing at the drama of it all. And the audience cheers. And █████ and ███ laugh, and they don’t let each other’s hands go. And then they stop laughing, and they don’t let each other’s hands go. And they keep not letting go.
And ███ says, “█████, do you wanna go talk somewhere for a while?”
And █████ says, “Yeah.”#tl;dr you write mutual unrequited pining the same way you write regular unrequited pining except both parties are affected #the slowest and most agonising of burns
no see now i’m just even more confused. isn’t that just mutual pining? i love mutual pining. it’s my favorite. but how can pining be both mutual and unrequited at the same time??? ‘unrequited’ is when they don’t like you back.
are we applying it to a situation where they do but you just don’t know? because i guess that’s…you could stretch it to mean that, but i feel like the word loses a lot of its utility thereby. it’s possible to pine after someone who does like you back even when you know it, obviously, because people can’t always have what they want for e.g. practical reasons. but I feel like that’s the exceptional situation? and the default assumed scenario for pining is that it is believed by the piner to be unreciprocated.
my theories for how you get mutual unrequited pining included:
1) ‘like one another in incompatible ways’ (i.e. I desperately want to adopt this person as my big brother and he wants to get married?),
2) some sort of alternating cycle of taking turns being the one interested (which is generally a comedy trope but could also make fantastic angst), and
3) some kind of amnesia and/or time travel hijinks, which is where i thought the above example was going.
4) mistaken and/or assumed and/or secret identity shenanigans. like. Spiderman and Superman have edged on on this.
But even having brainstormed all of these I was like, is it any of these? Is it all these? Bit odd to bundle all of that together into one trope…I mean, are they really overused?
OH okay, i understand where the sticking point was now. i read the “unrequited” part of that phrase in the sense that both characters’ feelings are not actualised either because they can’t recognise/acknowledge their own feelings or because they’re unaware that they’re reciprocated, but also i’m operating at surface-brain level because fatigue and therefore not doing a great job of parsing much of anything, so ┐(´～`；)┌
the particular scenarios you list seem like good interpretations to me, and also very good content overall
(when i want to redact stuff i just google ‘unicode black square’ and copy/paste the full block character until my need is sated)
Tropes that are totally overused and I love them to death
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