My narrative kink is okay, yours is kinda...well, okay.

Narrative Kinks:
- An awesome villain- Oh so much can be salvaged with an awesome villain. I prefer mine suave and debonair with a flair of cultural refinement while they are pillaging and torturing and killing off beloved main characters. Xanatos from Gargoyles was a splendid example of this. I have to fast-forward through the villain sections of the Fifth Element. I know what they were trying to do, it just wasn't my thing.

- Classic myths- Throw in some classic myths, any mythology, any creature, and I'm pretty happy. Mermaids, gryphons, Egyptian dynasty... all of this is awesome. I'm less thrilled by extreme "modern" interpretations of this. Why does your vampire sparkle and eat Bambie? Really? You just wanted your vampires to be special? *yawn* You're using these preexisting constructs for a reason. If it makes sense to a cohesive understanding of your world, awesome... if not, don't bother. Let your hero wear a strand of garlic.

- Bad Ass Heroines: Excellent when they are armed with weapon and wit, scraping by and getting exploded at haphazard intervals. Less awesome when they have severe emotional issues and an intense and ill-founded desire to hump some sort of nebulous adversary/ally, especially something that has possessed them recently. You loved the vampire that trapped your mind? The demon that lived in your soul? The werewolf that chewed off your arm? Not much in the way of female empowerment.

Back on the Shelf!
-Lack of continuity- I don't care what is going on, alt universe, new characters, etc. I don't even care what medium- if you want me to care, the continuity better be tighter than a drum or I will spend days fretting and eventually disregarding new material. I've lost some of my favorite authors to this disease (ie: Mercedes Lackey, who I still read, just not as excitedly as I once did).

-Bad to Good- I absolutely DETEST characters who are written to portray some sort of internal struggle between evil and good. They go back and forth, they make speeches, they do vile things, and everyone else runs around the worlds in question trying to make excuses, or being surprised by these character's "slips." I love tragic characters- make a character repent on their death bed. I'm all for that! Listening to them whine for 200+ pages... nah. I loathed Faith's character in Buffy from the first episode for this very reason. It is very hard to do well and not come across heavy-handed. There are exceptions, but they are so few and far between I can feel a twitch start in my eye when this particular character comes lumbering out, soliloquy in mouth.

Gargoyles did nearly all its villains superbly -- not just Xanatos (who really is possibly the best all-around old-school villain ever), but also Demona and Macbeth, who were also extremely well developed and characterized.

OOOH great thread discussion

I have a few narrative kinks:

- when people from our time travel to another world (GGK Fionavar Tapestry is a good example)

- Psionics (yes another Julian May convert)

- Learning new stuff via the story but not "as you know Bob" info dumps

- SNARK, I love love love the snark (Harry Dresden etc)

- Humour different to but including snark, I like characters who can make mistakes and laug at themselves. David Eddings Belgariad is a great mix of snark and humour, as is Lois McMaster Bujold

- Alternate History - when done well and believably - Judith Tarr and Turtledove did a great realistic historic roman story, very gritty

- Fairytale princesses who kick ASS! - Patricia Wredes Talking to Dragons serie is fab

Have you encountered Mark Anthony? (Beyond the Pale etc.) It's not only a very good example of "our characters to another world", it's got back-and-forth and lots of stuff set in Colorado. (You know you have lived in an area when somebody references "the cat food plant" and you know exactly where the action's at...)

The Craft being respected and represented.

Gay make heroic characters, with life partners and families. WE EXIST!

A handicapped person who kicks ass. Barbara Gordon was awesome for this. I understand why they are changing her back to Batgirl, but I liked seeing someone in a chair in a comic.

Tiresome stuff-
Too many side kicks becoming super powers. I loved Willow and Tara, but everyone in that show became a super hero except Xander. And in the comics, he is all Nick Fury Commander of the Slayers now.

Re inventing the wheel EVERY time. Since Anne Rice wrote The Vampire Lestat, and created a wonderful tapestry and history and origin of what vampires were and where they came from...too many authors have tried to do it themselves. I like Harris' Sookie books cause '...like, whoa! Vampires are real!' and then we get on with the dang story.

*I* personally don't like heavy duty, might as well be porn, sex scenes. I am not a prude, but a certain vampire mystery author decided to write pure slug porn...and people still eat it up. And the brilliant universe and characters she created have just gone to waste.

Jargon relating to music or dance. Have a character doing a jete and I am instantly interested.

Any book where I feel like I am learning even if it is pure fiction. Mira Grant and Michael Crighton are my favorite authors for that.

Books set in places I have lived. Much easier now that I live in Seattle but the one book I have read that mentioned my hometown I loved even though I thought it was horrible because nobody has ever heard of Bemidji.

A new narrative kink for me is a book that very quietly challenges social norms. I have a book where the lead character is poly and it isn't a big deal in that world. The same goes double if the character is GLBT and it is just generally accepted as ok. I understand sometimes you have to make a point of mentioning it on a soapbox in today's world but if it just goes quietly unnoticed because society thinks it is ok that is a huge win in my world.

One of my favorite shows rebooted their continuity two seasons ago, and while they made the usual assortment of flashy surface changes, they didn't consider all the ramifications of those changes. The fact that at least two of the characters involved didn't tear down heaven and earth looking for a way back to the original timeline was incredibly disappointing to me.

What show was this? My first thought is FRINGE, but they didn't reboot continuity two seasons ago....did they?

Consistency is a big one. It grates on me when the author doesn't seem to have thought things through.

Intelligent characters. I like it when the characters think things through. Villains shouldn't do things just because they're evil, and the heroes shouldn't win just because the villains are stupid.

I'm fond of redos of story lines with more logical characters. "Um Gandalf, why don't we have one of the giant eagles carry us to Mordor, or at least part way?" The drama shouldn't have to rely on the characters being stupid.

I'm also fond of more villainous versions of heroic characters. I like seeing evil manipulative Dumbledore in action.

Let's see.

Alienation. I am a sucker for books that deal with this as a theme. The character becoming non-alienated or less alienated is optional.

Messing with gender and gender roles somehow. Or at least having space for the idea that there are options other than a dichotomy.

Inter-cultural conflict and tension, especially if it doesn't get to the point of open war.

I can think of a couple series that combine these that in the abstract I can admit are bad or not that good. But somehow I keep re-reading them.

I need dialogue. Or even a good internal monologue. Pages and pages of no quotation marks or italicized thought-text make me twitch. If a book starts out this way the description had better be good and interesting, or I'll probably be putting it down sooner rather than later.

A self-referentially humorous, not taking itself too seriously comment now and then? Another thing I am a sucker for. (I am not sure I can explain this very well.)

I'm kind of tired of Creative Sterility. It's weird that that comes up frequently enough to need a name.

Also ... I like these settings but every time I come across a setting where the scientifically advanced technocratic egalitarian inhabitants have experienced some kind of disaster that kills their tech level and ended up with what David Weber calls a neo-barbarian culture, with highly stratified classes and noblemen and something that looks a lot like feudalism ... I wonder why. Other than "because the author thought it'd be cool." It's a bit hard to suspend my disbelief on this one even though I want to.

Creative Sterility? I can think of two totally opposite things this could describe, and am curious to know which you mean! O:>

Some things that wear thin fast for me:
Too much irony, so much that it gets in the way of getting into the story, because of needing to be so cool.
Series that go on and on until I forget why I ever liked these people (NO, you are no where near this phenomenon).
Lazy world-building, you know it when you see it.

What makes me skim and few pages and then grab everything on the shelf?
The quality of writing, first of all.
I want to hear an interesting voice.
Often humor, though this is a delicate balance (see irony above).
I also need a sense of earnestness, a sense that this story mattered to the author, and can matter to me.

I'm a sucker for steampunk, for urban fantasy, for that possibly incongruous mixing of elements, but I like straight-up sci-fi and high fantasy too.
If the writing holds me, that trumps genre.
I adore books where I learn something, or that do sufficiently skillful world building that it feels as if I did (like a certain undersea kingdom, for example).
I like alternate histories, time travel, you name it, but I don't much like them as something-for-nothing solutions - if you change the universe, there is likely to be a cost.

Definitely the rather mundane shift from uneasy strangers through long friendship to lovers (even if that's only in fanfic). If I tell you that the fandoms I've fanned the hardest were Scarecrow and Mrs. King, The X-files, Stargate, Doctor Who (Primarily Ten, because of the relationship with Rose) and Castle, I think that pretty much nails it.

Then again, my lovely admiral and I were friends for years before we even thought about dating, were hanging out constantly for six months before we admitted we were dating, and took nearly two more years to actually get married, it's kind of a personal thing for me.

As much as I like the slow burn, however, it pisses me off when the writers start making the characters stupid to avoid breaking formula. To quote Stana Katic, "Just grab her and kiss her and go make babies already!"

Stargate did this to the stupidith degree, and the X-files pushed it about two seasons too long, and then sort of imploded under the weight of Chris Carter's ego and David Duchovny's departure right around the time they stopped being stupid about the relationship. People cite S & MK as an example of "they got together and it killed the show", but that's just bull. What killed the show was not them getting together (they were in a relationship and adorable for the entire third season) but the fact that right around the time they did the wedding episode, Kate Jackson was diagnosed with freakin' breast cancer and couldn't film anywhere near as much as she had been, so they rewrote her to essentially a supporting role, rather than the center she had been. THAT killed the show.

Babylon V did it right (along with so many other things) with John and Delenn.

I'm okay with it taking 3, 4 even 5 years for a couple to finally make the leap. It's just when it gets to, oh, 7 or 10 years and they're still dingling around with it that you just want to slap someone and say, "Dude, relationships can be every bit as interesting as unresolved sexual tension!"

Then again, the best fanfic comes out of shows with great characters and flawed storylines. When good writers get motivated to fix things... can that be a narrative kink all itself? Because when I think about my long stories, the ones where I get going and then churn out 250,000 words in a couple months, it's because the show left something hanging that shouldn't have been left, and I feel absolutely compelled to write what should have happened next were the show not bound to its storytelling formula for television.

If you're going to do an alternate universe, I expect you to think it all the way through. Yes, all the way through. One of my favorite shows rebooted their continuity two seasons ago, and while they made the usual assortment of flashy surface changes, they didn't consider all the ramifications of those changes.

YES, thank you for this! I've seen far too many stories where the writer changed something you'd expect to have huge consequences, only for the characters to turn out more or less the same, make the same decisions, end up with the same people, ... It annoys me so much, especially if the initial premise looked interesting, but the story failed to deliver.

As for my narrative kinks, let's see.

- Left-handed people: admittedly a very minor one, but being one myself, I get annoyed at the lack of lefties in fiction, so left-handed characters tend to draw my immediate attention and my own writing will almost certainly feature one at some point.

- Cats and cat lovers: Yeah, I'm a cat person xD

- Nice people: People who are just genuinely nice. Not to say that they're angels who never do anything wrong or never hurt anyone and solved world hunger when they were ten, but people who genuinely mean the best and try their best not to hurt people. Not to say that they always succeed, but as long as they honestly try, I'm happy.

(Incidentally, one of my favorite characters managed to gain that status before he even got backstory by combining the three above points. I'm a bit shallow that way.)

- What constitutes a moral being: I'm particularly interested in this one when it involves robots, clones, monsters, toasters given intelligence, ... I love stories that toy with that idea, and I'm of the firm belief that it's not limited to humans, and being human alone is not enough to earn the title. (It does make it hard to use the word 'humane' when writing something like that.)

- The idea of family and how it's formed: I adore seeing loving families in fiction, and am always very interested in seeing families where the members aren't related by blood (or even part of the same species). On the flip side, one of my biggest fanfic peeves is writers making a family who's shown to be caring in canon neglectful and/or abusive for the sake of cheap angst and without any explanation.

- Antagonists who aren't villains: and/or villains who are doing what they do out of necessity, and where you're never entirely sure if the protagonists defeating them was the right thing to do. In general, I just love it when things aren't portrayed as black and white.

- Mythology: What dinosaurs were to some kids was what mythology was to me. I was practically absorbing books on various world mythologies ever since I turned 8, and it's never let go of me. Though I'm always wary about stories involving mythology, since often the portrayal of some mythological figures has me ranting against everyone who's unfortunate enough to be nearby.

I'm fairly sure I'm forgetting a couple of things, but I believe those are my biggest kinks. Though if a story is interesting and well-written, I'll probably read it no matter what.

- Antagonists who aren't villains: and/or villains who are doing what they do out of necessity, and where you're never entirely sure if the protagonists defeating them was the right thing to do. In general, I just love it when things aren't portrayed as black and white.

Yes this. It's not one of my strong narrative kinks normally, but I like it, and when it is done very right it is a thing of BEAUTY. One series I adored had a black and white evil-is-evil villain...until, mid-series, we get smacked with his motivation, and you're left thinking, "That's...really not the best...way to...but...augh!" and over the course of the rest of the story I ended up with all my assumptions about him upended. He was still doing it wrong, but....

I love to read about cities, particularly fictional ones, especially when a character gets to wander around and explore them. That or books that really give you the feel of a city, like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Stories that play with gender.

Stories that have a quiet, less obvious sort of magic.

There are likely more that I'm forgetting right now, but there's a start.

Families. Especially chosen families. Stories about established relationships, long-term relationships, married couples (or more than couples). Poly families.

Queer characters. Stories about queer people that aren't about coming out or facing bigotry. Queer protagonists who save the world, or at least their small corner of it. (Though if a story that heads into stereotype-ville, I'm outta here.)

Heroic women. Badass women. Especially ones who don't have tragic backstories or hidden depths of softness just waiting for the right man (ick) or for something to bring out their maternal instincts. Women who have made the conscious decision not to have kids and don't change their minds the first time they hold a baby. (Or for that matter, a couple that makes the conscious choice to have a child, rather than it being assumed that that's just what everyone does once they're married.) Women who don't feel the need to be nice all the time. Alpha female/beta male pairings.

The ocean. Sailing, and specially the Age of Sail. Pirates. Sea creatures.

Deadpan snarkers and characters with a dry sense of humor.

Non-Christian characters. Jewish, Wiccan, Muslim, Atheist ... I want to see people who have a different worldview from what is considered culturally "normal" in the U.S.

Cats. Also dogs, but especially cats. (If the cat is a tortoiseshell or a Siamese, or the dog is a Sheltie or a Pit Bull, so much the better.) Animals that are characters in their own right, but are still animals.

Smart people. Competent people. They don't have to be good at everything; nobody is. But nothing annoys me more than a "protagonist" who succeeds by luck or because everybody else is even less competent or sheer authorial fiat.

I'm sure there are more.

YES to the "Heroic women ..." Gender bassackwardness around children just kills me. I am so internally opposed to the idea that a relationship and life is made "complete" with children and will otherwise be unsatisfying, especially because of "maternal instincts" that make the character seem like I-will-have-a-baby-or-die-trying that I just can't finish the book. Female characters, especially, are prone to this "incompleteness" in ways that male characters aren't, or if they are, they're probably concerned with getting an heir rather than having a child.

Ask any small child what kind of story he or she likes, and you'll get a much clearer, more honest picture of what they want out of a story than you will from most adults.

And yes, those stay with you (me). Case in point: as soon as I realised that stories could change, the wolf always won. Each of the three little pigs had to be eaten in a different way. The woodcutter made a great pudding after Little Red Riding Hood & her Gran.

And I still, nearly always, have a soft spot for the bad guy.


(Feed didn't need A Scientist because Feed Was Science; when it's all-pervasive, it doesn't need to be condensed into an individual character. IMO, of course.)

Witty banter.

Situations where multiple plotlines carefully stack up dominoes and then collide them all in a great huge flurry of slapstick.

A whooooole bunch of comedy tropes.

A quick description of a character that makes you feel like you've met that person before.

Dramatic inevitability that's followed through on. Real consequences when shit looks like it's fucking dire.

1. Changes in sentence structure, certain synonyms instead of others, and cadence that show the influence of a character's native language when speaking another. Ex: Joanna Bourne's book "The Spymaster's Lady" was AWESOME for the way the native French-speakers actually still sounded French (without stupid "Ze octopoos iz a crehtoor who wheel seize eetz prey..." spelling horribleness) when they spoke English. You always knew the origins of a speaker and what language they were using before she even specified literally.

2. Feminist characters, male or female, and emphasis on gender-equality and women being strong in ways that are not stereotypically female. I'm okay with that last sometimes, but when every part of a female character's strength is tied in with her being maternally protective, or "hormonal," or asserting her femininity (whatever THAT means), I'm done. Also, the women-are-healers, men-are-warriors schtick is a huge turnoff.

3. Role-bending. If Little Red turns out to be the wolf, awesome. If Little Red is actually a wolf-hunter, awesome. If Little Red is dating the wolf, awesome. If Little Red is best friends with the wolf, awesome. If Little Red is helpless and going to be devoured by the wolf, boring.

4. Books set in places I've been, or live nearby. Part of my love for Marla Mason, Toby, and others is that they run around San Francisco, Oakland, etc.

5. Obscure creatures/beasties/monsters/fae from myth, legend, and folklore. Even creatures like manticores or gryphons getting some page-time excite me, simply because they're not done to death.

Because five is a prime number, and a lucky number, and just wonderful in it's own way, I'll stop there ;).

Re #2: You know, the thing that gets me about a lot of writers who write women (badly) is that they feel they have to justify the reasons a woman is good or strong at something. Really, it's quite simple: Pick your traits. Your character, male or female, is good at those things. Sometimes you don't need to have a Deep Reason, or the reason can be as simple as "wow, cool."

The writers I've seen who've done this badly have, for example, a man with a good trained voice. Period. And the woman has a good trained voice, because she had to try five times as hard as the man, and she got into singing because of her mother who loved music, etc. etc. Dude. Seriously.

I don't like the phrase "strong female character" because the reviewers who use it would never think to use it in reference to a male. So many of my friends are "strong women" in whatever ways and, quite honestly, I'd really get annoyed at someone who told me that I'd "managed to come up with a strong female character" as though I had to invent one out of whole cloth.

I think my biggest one would have to be empowered teenagers. I like stories about rebellion. Not merely, talking back to one's parents, though that has plenty of charm all its own, but a bunch of young people rallying around a cause that the old guard doesn't want them to support out of fear, obsolescence, or both. Something about it just strikes me deep down.

I'm also a huge fan of alternative sexuality and relationships. Not just sexual orientation, but sexual and social attitudes outside the box of monagamous heteronormative pair-bonding. I love seeing all the different combinations and complexities of the human heart. And I'm all for positive slut portrayal.

Bromance, especially in a setting that openly acknowledges homosexuality. Nothing charms me more than two guys who can say "I love you" to one another without feeling the need to tack "man" on the end of it. Bonus points is one of 'em is gay, and the gay one wouldn't fuck the straight one in a million years.

My very favourite thing to read is riffs on fairy tales or other well known stories. (I love Looking Glass Wars, and I love Tales Of The Five Hundred Kingdoms.) I hate bad adaptations - like, say, the movie of The Neverending Story - things that are trying and failing to be the same. But things that are intentionally playing with the story, I love to pieces. (500 Kingdoms is the best thing ever. ENTIRE UNIVERSE OF FAIRY TALE RIFFS I LOVE YOU. I just wish it wasn't so heteronormative, but I suppose you can't have everything.)

I also really really love things that do interesting things with gods, and deal with the fact that gods aren't human. Trickster's Choice/Trickster's Queen, for example, is awesome with that. Aly's interactions with Kyprioth are a thing of joy and beauty, and Tamora Pierce doesn't shy away from his inhumanity. Other non-human - I want to say super-human, but that has different connotations than I want - beings are also terribly interesting. And non-human sapients, generally. Dragons, gryphons, unicorns, cats, whatever. Brains that work very differently are COOL. (I adore the hyenas in the Tortall universe. The portrayal is so cool, and so much more nuanced than, say, the Lion King's cackling evil. The portrayal of rats falls down, though. I *like* rats, damnit. They're sweet.)

I like tricksters and spies and thieves who are (reasonably) moral and awesome. (Looking at you, George Cooper. And you, Karvonen Aurelico.) And moral greys, generally.

Fantasy is my thing. Virtually everything I read is straight fantasy. I'm in this for the escapism, and I don't really get that from scifi or, I dunno, what are genres, mystery novels. I love worlds of magic. Different magic systems are also awesome! The magic in the Circle universe is neat.

One of the things I really really hate is when the author reveals some important thing to the reader, but not to the protags, so they carry on doing things that are really STUPID if you know what the reader does, and it's just REALLY FRUSTRATING and argh.

My narrative kinks...I'm sure I'll forget some here, but:

1. REAL people, so real I forget they are a character while I'm in their head. This means they have to make sense, even if only their own sense, with their setting and history. This strongly includes the Believable Other (other species/races/etc.), as in Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance. Also, I do still have to like them, at least more than I dislike them. If they're completely believable as the kind of person I don't want in a six-mile radius around me, I probably don't want to spend several hundred pages in their head, either.

2. The protagonist who had a rough/difficult childhood (doesn't have to be severe, and if it's severe it must be done WELL) but has risen above it and become so much more. This one, as far as being done right, also needs to be reasonable in how, and how fast, they rise above it. The abused battered orphan who suddenly displays both extreme maturity and cool magic is NOT what I want to be reading, for example. You can get away with a kid with huge power as their ticket out of that, as long as it doesn't also make them perfect. Many of Lackey's protagonists are good examples of both the good and bad of this particular one.... Michelle Sagara's Cast In... series is a strong example of the good, IMO.

3. For settings with magic or equivalent - power has a cost, and even great power doesn't answer *everything*. It's not just all happy bunny unicorn summoning: there's something either directly or indirectly counterbalancing it. To example from your books, more fae blood making you more vulnerable to iron.

4. Oh, and shapeshifters. Well-done shapeshifters ROCK MY WORLD. And well-done can mean a lot of things, as long as they are consistent to their own rules and setting. The Cait Sidhe, the Selkies from your books? Yes. The Changer from Lindskold's Changer? OMG *adore* that character.

5. Oh, and cats. (With #4, I love me some Cait Sidhe, btw.) Assuming the cats are, y'know, either acting like normal cats or have a reason not to, and are treated overall well. If you just dump cats in one chapter and the protagonist hates them, or they're just there to be slaughtered by the bad guys and no one even minds, not so much.

And kind of an anti-kink: I can't stand books/series that are a litany of things going wrong with no triumphs, successes, or signs of the same in the offing, or ones where a major story arc ends as a complete loss. "Hey look, I've told you about the end of the world!" - not my story kink. Or if it ends in a major horror. I'm not talking here "one of the protagonists dies" type things, I'm talking "we won, but we find out at the very end we were fighting for the wrong side" or "the world just ended" or "all the protagonists are slaughtered AND their cause fails AND the author didn't convince me it needed to first." It is, for the record, hard to convince me that all the protagonists being slaughtered and their cause failing is a good ending without making me want to stop reading the books when I realize it. :P

I have read a book (I'll let it remain nameless) where I cannot remember most of the middle of the book. I can remember the general arc, vaguely, and the end, and how badly I hate it, but I have blocked out most of the details. I will never read it again. I will not read its sequels. (I also won't read anything by the author, but that's because this has happened to a lesser degree on another of their books AND I've since learned about their politics and am opposed...there is a time to stop reading someone.)

When you mentioned narrative kinks being instilled at a young age, I vividly flashed to a scene earlier this week where my 4 y/o daughter, playing alone, developed a highly dramatic love triangle between three plastic dogs. I can't wait to see what idea's she comes up with when she's older.

But to answer the question you posed, I think the BIGGEST thing that gives me JOY in a narrative or TV series, is when there is a strong sense of continuity. That hint of foreshadowing that begins in book/episode one, and then five books later you realize how FUNDAMENTALLY IMPORTANT that glimpse was.

I'm also a big fan of logical character psychology. If character A has a certain personality, I want her to act like that, or else be given a REASON for a drastic change in behavior. It makes me crazy when TV shows decide "Oh, this actor isn't going to be on next season, so let's make all these drastic horrible changes to the character so people won't miss him."
Honestly, one of the biggest reasons I prefer novels to even a GOOD TV series is I don't have to sit there and go, "Ah, and THIS episode was CLEARLY written as a result of ratings."
I wish TV writers would let the story flow, and have more faith in the audience to hang onto it.

My #1 love is also fairy tales, particularly ones that reference source material. I am so enamored of "original" fairy tales (inasmuch as they exist) that I was fairly shocked when I polled this spring's cast of Iolanthe on their favorite fairy tales and almost all of them cited Disney versions. Adaptations are nice, as in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which is set in the 1970s and by gum, it works.

I also love versions that go to the dark side. Fairy tales aren't (just) for children. I *love* the Snow White, Blood Red short story collections.

Oddly enough, I have a strong liking for protagonists with dysfunctional-to-abusive familial situations. I say "oddly" because the family I grew up in was and is loving, supportive, and just about everything you could want a family to be. Maybe it's that I want to help, even if they're only fictional characters.

Things I dislike: Characters who are tropes or otherwise stereotypes. Writers who obviously did not do their research. If I can fact-check someone on Wikipedia or the first link on Google, that's just lame. People who write the military in a way that shows that they do not understand the military at all. (See the Starship Troopers movie as a good example. Short version: That military would fall apart in a short period of time into mercenary chaos.)

I love folklore. I love to read it. I love to write it. It hits some sort of resonance with me that just rings for hours. Japanese, Chinese, Irish, English, Scots, Russian, German, American, Native American, Welsh, Inuit, they all make me, if not happy, satisfied. I love seeing what might happen with them in the world we inhabit. I love smart female leads. I love character more than plot, and this is sometimes a problem for me.

I am rather tired of the "woman in a male world fighting to overcome" trope instead of taking it for granted that women are people too, but I loathe and despise the "give up all talent and dreams for the right lover!" schtick. I find that religious text disguised as story gives me hairballs.

I read a fascinating article on "The Armless Maiden", going over a story path that I'd only ever seen once (as many of my "primary sources" were from Andrew Lang, there's some areas I don't know to search.) The article talked about how the various Armless Maiden stories go over the "women's hero's journey"*. The loss of hands or arms (usually by a male authority figure or relative) is the taking away of power. The woman then journeys away from home, meets a power figure who gives her some artificial limb which only works partway, goes through highs and lows and eventually regrows the limb—she had to find her own strength.

The interesting difference between that and the Campbell Hero's Journey is that the Hero returns to his home with the lessons that he's learned, while the Maiden settles in the new place she's found. The article stipulated that's because the traditional woman's path is to adjust to a new culture or location, so the stories reflect that.

Actually, the really interesting part is how pervasive that motif is through cultures. All over the globe, you've got stories of women getting their arms cut off. WTF?

*When describing this article to somebody, she was annoyed that it was the woman's journey. So think of it as an alternate hero's journey, if you like.

Things I do like:
-Horses. Written as horses, not as cars with four legs.
-Huge old houses deep in the countryside, full of paintings and secret tunnels, that have been lived in for hundreds of years.
-Big screwed-up royal families.
-Prophecies. Chosen ones, if well done (don't laugh)
-grand speeches
-challenges
-single combats
-sword duels
-friendships that turn into love
-close siblings
-proud warrior girls
- women who are in traditional women's roles, but can still take down anyone who tries to mess with them or anyone they care about.
-on the same note, traditional 'girly' things not being presented as weak or bad.
-respect between enemies
-poets.
-happy families
-people who fail because of their own flaws
-villains who don't look villainous at first
-a character who doesn't look intimidating, but turns out to be awesome.
-a villain turning back to the good side right before he dies. Redemption.
-heroic sacrifices and last stands
-good descriptions of beauty. Especially in nature.
-well done non-humans that are convincingly non-human.
-magic with rules or laws that can't be bent.
-heroes who stand by their principles, even when it would be more convenient not to.
-villains who are scary and intimidating and clever.
-moments when everything is almost lost--and then the good guys win.

Things I don't like:
-Gratituous sex scenes. I am really, really, not interested in what these characters get up to in bed, especially if it has next to nothing to do with what happens in the rest of the story.
-on that same note, villains who are automatically rapists. And villainesses who are automatically sluts. Women can be evil in ways that AREN'T related to sex!
-random pointless violence that doesn't really contribute to the plot.
-the villain randomly killing off some nameless character just to show how evil he is.
-a bad past being used as an excuse for bad behavior.
-characters who are complete idiots.
-female characters who's life revolves around their boyfriend or lack thereof.
-animals who are treated like machines.
-religious characters who are shown being evil and stupid
-evil priests
-authors who shove their beliefs down the readers throat