1. Adam Bolander

    Adam Bolander Senior Member

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    Guilty Pleasures?

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by Adam Bolander, Nov 15, 2020.

    Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to reading or writing? Tropes or cliches that you know really aren't good, but you enjoy them so much that you use them anyway?

    For me, I love "Dark Lord" villains when they're done right. Too many authors use them as faceless boogeymen who never actually appear in the story. Whenever something bad happens, the heroes raise their fists to the sky and curse the name of the Dark Lord Not-Appearing-In-This-Book, but their lack of physical presence in the story leads to the reader never forming any sort of connection with them, good or bad.

    But when they're written effectively, a Dark Lord villain has a certain feeling that I absolutely love. They're not a person, not even a character really. They're a force of nature. Even if you don't meet them, you can feel them. They're like a mass of dark storm clouds hovering just over the horizon. You might faintly hear the thunder, see the occasional flash of lightning, but the fear and anticipation comes from knowing that this enormous, unstoppable thing is heading straight for you, and there's nothing you can do about it. All you can do is run, hide, and hope it passes over you without causing too much destruction.
     
  2. Earp

    Earp Contributor Contributor

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    Nothing comes to mind with reading or writing, but I do love the Tremors movies and the Ernest (Jim Varney) films.
     
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  3. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Nope. Must be nice to those that do though. :)
     
  4. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    This probably isn't what you had in mind, and I hadn't thought of it as such, but I guess this is a guilty pleasure: I write graphic erotica scenes into my stories knowing that I'll just have to remove them later. They just come so naturally, and they're fun to write. In the end though, entire pages get reduced to "They made love in the glow of the television," or something like that. It's ridiculous, but apparently it's part of my process. Some of those scenes are good though. Maybe I could publish some anthologies on Kindle under a pseudonym or something. Who knows? Maybe they won't be a complete waste.
     
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  5. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    I started reading Damnation Game, and Barker manages to squeeze little erotic snippets in just for some extra flavor. And that just in the first 14 pages. :)
     
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  6. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    Love it when things are morally grey.

    Also enjoy it when powerful entities use everything in their arsenal. All their troops, all their technology/magic.
     
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  7. IasminDragon

    IasminDragon Member

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    Someday we may return to a world where sex is written of as openly as anything else in fiction, and we can throw out all these modern puritanical taboos.. :)
     
  8. Friedrich Kugelschreiber

    Friedrich Kugelschreiber marshmallow Contributor

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    when did we have that?
     
  9. IasminDragon

    IasminDragon Member

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    At least as far back as Ancient Rome haha.
     
  10. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    The ancient Greeks were all about insouciantly saucy sauce plates. ;) I think this one is called the "Demetrius Gets Spit-Roasted" pattern. Very popular. ;)

    [​IMG]
     
  11. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Lost Colony trope has seen better days, but it remains a perennial favorite of mine. Give me Pern (minus McCaffrey's penchant for saccharine preciousness and tweeness) or Darkover (minus Bradley's pathological fetish for sexual repression) and I'm a happy boy. :whistle::-D
     
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  12. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Gather 'round young'uns, for a history lesson... :wotwot:

    Once upon a time there was this thing called the 60's,which contained a Sexual Revolution. Sex was actually cool, and all over movies and lots of other things. Of course this has happened many many times throughout the past, it's an ongoing cycleperiods of Free Love followed for a few decades by periods of Victorian-style repression, mostly because of all the diseases and issues free love causes. Through the 70's and 80's sex in movies and stories became gratuitous and very overdone, and then it disappeared. However, meanwhile a thing called the Internets appeared and it had something called Pron, which is supposedly taboo and illegal and all that, but it's actually the secret second mainstream, making at least as much money every year as Hollywood.

    Wait around another decade or so and you might catch the next sexual revolution—it just keeps on revolvin'.
     
  13. IasminDragon

    IasminDragon Member

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    Nah, the 60s were nothing compared to Apuleius.;)
     
  14. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    I was just pointing to the most recent example. Apuleius seems to be an ancient philosopher I was unfamiliar with, and all I've found so far are accusations of using magic—do I need to dig deeper?
     
  15. dbesim

    dbesim Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor

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    I sometimes read mills and boon :supergrin:
     
  16. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Sounds more like something one would drink... :supercool:
     
  17. Rzero

    Rzero Reluctant voice of his generation Contributor

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    My reading guilty pleasure is books from movies and TV. I've read fifty-four Star Wars books and I'm two books into the Firefly series right now. It's pretty good so far.
     
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  18. Le Panda Du Mal

    Le Panda Du Mal Contributor Contributor

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    I'm pretty shameless about what I like, but the closest I have to guilty pleasures are terrible 80's action movies (e.g. Death Wish 3) and cheesy new age music like Enya. In reading, maybe excerpts from Warhammer 40K novels (I've never played the game nor read any of the books in full, but I find the lore interesting).
     
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