Fandom Snowflake Challenge #9

[axael]

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 17th

❄ Challenge #9 on snowflake_challenge.

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Favorite Trope(s)

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works.

So. My absolutely hands-down favorite is the one I wrote up last year that I called "Where You Go, I Go." Also known as loyalty kink, lol. I wanted to do something a bit different this year, and I immediately came up with one I absolutely love.

Mutual Pining

I just adore it when two idiots just fuckin' love each other so much and for whatever reason they aren't or can't be together. But oh how they want to be. They're drawn together. There's that little buzz beneath their skin when they are in the room with one another, a hyperawareness that lights them both up from the inside.

The stories that use mutual pining all seem to be about finding one another, or overcoming whatever is keeping the two apart. It's very different, I think, that the basic meetcute to falling in love to getting together type of romance arc. They don't have to fall in love, they're already in love, which changes the dynamic (and also, not gonna lie, leaves a LOT open for the many shades of 'where you go, I go.' Ahem.) so that the getting together is much more about choice and revelation. It's a shift in a previous relationship to a new relationship, rather than starting right out with the characters as romantic interests.

I think part of why I enjoy it is that when they're pining, they already know so much about each other. You get the illustration of all the ways these characters fit together, on the page, to the point where it's clear why romance. One character will do something and the other will react, and you get to roll around in the yearning and the affection, and a good writer really will pull out all the stops and make you feel it in your chest. So delicious. Contrasting this to most romances, where the 'falling in love' plots do not often sufficiently explain themselves to my aromantic satisfaction (lol).

Another facet is that there is that unique element of something new and exciting that you and this person who you've gotten to know and already like outside of a romantic context get to do together. It's like coming home, in my mind, which always reminds me of my favorite lines from a fic: "He loves like something you live in." The romance is an edifice that has stood before and will stand after. There's no falling in love or falling out of love. It just exists, waiting to be inhabited.

I've been contemplating, though, that I don't...honestly think I've read/watch/etc. any really good books/tv/movies with this kind of mutual pining? At least not that I recall. Though this is something I've only started to recognize specifically as something I enjoy in the past decade or so. I mean, there's the 'will-they-won't-they' suff, but that's really not the same thing, imho. So...heck yeah, if anyone has any recs for mutual pining out in the wild of original fiction? I'd love to read it. And, of course, as always, hit me up with any fic whatsoever. I do have endless MDZS Wangxian fics that hit the spot, and I have been nibbling my way through Codywan stuff, I just love this trope so much.

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