Which themes repeat themself in your stories?

We all have themes that repeat themselves in all, or at least most of our stories. Which are the recurring themes between your stories and do you think recurring those themes are good or bad?

My recurring themes that I can think of at the moment:

• The Lady: An benevolent female supernatural being who have adoped an area and goes Mama Bear if you atempt to harm the people who is living there.
  • The land guarded by the Lady.
• The Finn : An Archetypical Boisterous Bruiser from Finland or an equavilent.
• Scandinavia: I'm Swedish after all...
• Germany: Or rather all Germanic countries. I have not forgotten the historicall awesomess of the Germanic countries. Or the evils of the Nazis... Don't let a few messed up decades make you forget about a culture's milennias of awesomness... The Germany-equavilent are allways on the good side and shows off the possitive sides of Germany.
  • Germanic culture and mythology: My main interest. That and language...
  • Putting on the Reich : Sure, I don't like the Nazis, but they sure had cool clothes and tech, so my good Germans look like them despite being a lot nicer.
• The British Isles: Another standard area.
• Fantasy : The magic is allways very real...
• Optimistic worlds: Sure, things might be dark and depressing at times, but on the whole are my worlds on the optimistic side.
• Folklore : Another favourite subject. It is usually Scandinavian or British.
• Stupid shoutouts...
• Wolves.
  • Werewolves.

edited 30th Mar '16 3:27:09 AM by TheBorderPrince

• One character is always The Alcoholic (usually the main one, in the case of Argyros most of the cast was this at one point in their lives).
• It's often set in either Melbourne or Central Victoria.
• The cast is usually small.
• It's often a Black Comedy, but not always.
• There'll usually be a strong platonic or familial relationship thrown in.
• Often they're an Author Tract. Usually about skepticism/atheism, sometimes about Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male.
• I can't write a story without at least one subtle Dylan Moran reference.

edited 30th Mar '16 5:20:40 AM by trashconverters

Depend. If you exclusively mean recurring tropes or themes across different works, you are implicitly excluding observations of the same sorts of patterns across a longer work; likewise, ideas or personality types that keep coming up are a bit different from narrative leitmotifs or underlying themes per se.

I could go into full-on Jungian self-analysis mode here on all of the above, if anyone here is curious. I'm very into subtext, and I think I know myself fairly well. I also like to, uh, talk a lot about my work/myself... >~>;

edited 30th Mar '16 9:24:32 AM by JHM

I notice that a lot of the time my main characters (in a lone writing) or character I'm using (in a roleplay) have names beginning with "C". Both with hard and soft pronunciations.

Very often it will focus on two characters (with the "C" being the viewpoint, but with at least one exception). Interestingly my main project moves away from this a bit because both characters are on opposing sides, so don't spend a lot of time together.

He, she, or they (I've written very few female M Cs before) are usually pulled into a conflict with no immediately identifiable solution. For a long portion of my main project, Caleb is just trying to get his friends away from the interdementional fighting and people turning into mutants and losing their mind.

Possibly because of my background, I'm more compelled by characters trying to avoid a loss than aquire a gain, and so usually write about those people. This is not necessarily selfish, they could want to keep someone else from getting hurt more so gem hen themselves.

This is more of a rule than a theme; but Heroic Sacrifice deaths will be very rare, only done when it really fits the story. More often, heroes will die more because they got unlucky than because they chose to. That doesn't mean they never take risks for the greater good that end up killing them, but I almost always find those moments more effective when they face the possibility of death than the certainty of it (maybe because Hope Is Scary).

One of the big ones that I carry between stories is that you are as much a person as your brain is healthy. When one of my reoccuring themes is people losing their intelligence through strange means, this comes up often.

In fact, in a story I'm writing civilization's days are numbered because a cloud of cosmic radiation is approaching earth and will devolve everyone into mindless apes, thus giving humanity 3 weeks until derp. I like to explore what people do when they are "freed from consequence", and in the case of this story people do drugs, eat as much cake as one possibly can, strip off their clothes and run into the woods, mount people in broad daylight, and binge on unfinished video games.

I think you mean motifs instead of themes, but I'll tackle both.

Themes: "cunning prevails", "sex is the solution", "evil is cool", "beauty is not good", "disadvantages can be advantageous", and "advantages can be disadvantageous". Those are pretty surface-level, tho. It'd take some time to find ones I didn't intend to put in.

Motifs: Setting: single-biome worlds, the cosmic "tree" of worlds in the cosmic "ocean" of ether, and the trickster's road (a network of portals connecting all the worlds of the cosmos). Maybe, I'm not sure if these count as motifs in the strictest sense.

Characters: agender intersex people, feminine trans-men, masculine trans-women, neglectful parents, abusive children, and black people.

Props: extremely dangerous objects that seem harmless, utterly innocuous objects that seem deadly, and objects that are deadly to some characters but harmless to others.

edited 2nd Apr '16 11:25:29 AM by nekomoon14

Let's see...

Dark Is Not Evil, AntiHeros, and themes involving HeelFaceTurns and redemption arcs. Even the occasional "good guy" character will at least have had a traumatic event or two in their past. My villains are almost always KnightTemplars or WellIntentionedExtremists.

War Is Hell, (unless you're a Blood Knight or Combat Sadomasochist), and my worlds have often gone through some nasty shit, but things usually turn out alright in the end. And despite all the grimdark darkness of doom, there's always a lot of humor as well.

My worlds are far from perfect, but they usually have a bit less bigotry and such than real life. Gender Is No Object and similar tropes are often in effect.

Magic is science, and science is good.

There's a lot of non-human characters, some of whom are surprisingly benevolent and "human" EldritchAbominations. There's also a lot of ActionGirls, and some slightly creepy, often Ambiguously Human Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette characters. There might be a bit of Author Appeal involved here.

After the End: Post-post-apocalyptic settings are my usual explanation as to why things are done differently.

Amazons: My female characters usually tend to have sizeable muscles and be of combative professions.

Bishies: Men on the other hand tend to more feminine in behavior and appearence, however usually having the same professions as the aforementioned women.

Dark/Unpleasent/Cynical Topics And Visuals: A mixture of jadedness and a fascination with the darker side of humanity has lead me to vastly preffering this over more whimsical affair.

Naivety Confronting Reality: An idealistic character having to face the worst aspects of humanity, a test to see if they make or break in the face of true malice

Anti-Nihilism VS Nihilism: Based off my own mental conflict. Individuals adamant about continuing to help in the face of pointless suffering and existance VS those that choose to embrace it as a justification for their malice.

Sci-fi: I cant seem to do Fantasy justice, and if I wanted Modern/Slice Of Life, Id just go outside.

High-Functioning Villain Protagonists: If a villain is a focal point of the story, they exhibit more restraint and honor than the common thug in order to make them more sympathetic.

Gay/Bisexual Men: Most of my male characters have varying levels of sausage craving.

Sexualized Characters/Impossible or Improbable Physiques: Be they men or women, their figures tend to be portrayed as idealized, often chiseled affairs with sizeable yet not excessive sexual characteristics, through this is usually justified through a mixture of physically active careers, genetic engineering and/or advanced plastic surgery.

Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Some of my characters are jaded (or just mentally flexible) and tend to underreact to bizarre or horrific sights.

Religion and violence. That includes both religious violence AND violent religion.

Where do I even begin...oh, yeah, by actually talking and not waste time.

> Unlikely Heroes

> Ragtag Bunch of Misfits

> Existential Themes, Concepts, and Philosophy

> Concepts and Philosophy of Human Nature, More Than Meets The Eye, Character Exploration

> Emotional Torque

> Denser and Wackier / Darker and Edgier / Lighter and Softer . In the same goddamn series. Somehow. Hell, I even mix these up!

> Heroic Self Deprecation

> Concepts of Growth, Change, Evolution

> Internal Consistency / Magic A is Magic A / Functional Magic

> Animesque

> Reality Ensues / Deconstruction / Unbuilt Trope

> Complexity Addiction

> Symbolism, Subtle Details, Foreshadowing , All things Chekov blessed us wirh

> Fridge Logic Abuse

> And ofcourse, writing terribly!

Also, most major characters; good, bad, in between, or N/A tend to be "outsiders". Loners, drifters, social ritualists, the like.

• Insanity and mental disorder.
• Possession and Mind Manipulation (as a metaphor for losing control, and also simply to induce fear).
• Emotional turbulence (and strong expression of emotions in general).
• In a similar vein, depression.
• If I can get away with it, "Freaky Friday" Flip, Gender Bender, Baleful Polymorph and other total bodily transformations.
• Cerberus Syndrome a little too often.
• Deconstruction of nihilism and other philosophies that imply that 'there's no point' (mostly because it's something I'm personally sensitive about). The Anti-Nihilist will sometimes get a pass, but not typically.
• Sarcasm.
• Elements of fantasy and whimsy (usually unexplained, at least for a while).
• Earn Your Happy Ending in non-comedic works.
• The Power of Friendship (and more rarely, The Power of Love).
• A whole pack of Papa Wolves.
• Star Wars style setpieces (stunning settings, flashy fights, etc).
• Hope and optimism.
• The assertion that Black-and-White Morality is a lot more real than it's made out to be.

This is what I can think of off the top of my head.

edited 4th Apr '16 2:46:27 PM by TooManyIdeas

Well for any series I write there's a pattern:

• the main character most of time is a sexuality that's not really straight
• usually a outcast
• transforms into something (there are exceptions)
• there is a romantic subplot
• the cast is somewhat diverse
• usually a world of badass
• Christian/religious humor, references, and symbols

• Dork Knight: While I know that a Lovable Rogue, Jerkass with a Heart of Gold or a Byronic Hero can be handled really well by a skilled writer, I find it a bit weird that so many male love interests end up in these tropes. I prefer my guys to be adorkable instead.
• Duo Tropes: I seem to be very fond of these. Sensitive Guy and Manly Man, Red Oni, Blue Oni and Tomboy and Girly Girl all appear in my works.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Not so much by our modern standards, but my Official Couples will be this to the people around them in their 19th century Ruritania setting.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The love interests are both based on real-life celebrities. But for the moment, I won't reveal more details than that.
• Plucky Girl: Both of my protagonists fall into this cathegory. One of them also is a Spirited Young Lady.
• War Is Hell: Even if most of the war scenes happen off screen, this will be the viewpoint of my main characters.

edited 30th Jun '16 4:47:33 AM by Furienna

For my story, there seems to be a theme of "Who you are and what you think matters more than what you do.", in other words, a good person who does wrong things for good, or at least decent reasons will almost always be better than an amoral person who brings the greater good merely as a side effect of their efforts of benefiting themselves.

Not that the selfish person is evil, for another theme of mine is "Evil is an illusion. Good is not.". Summon me if you gain any Enlightenment Superpowers after meditating on this.

In my series:

• Friendship and teamwork trumping over power/hax: The villains have extremely potent powers on the offensive and defensive sides, but due to the good guys' teamwork and such, they manage to overcome said powers by finding the enemy's weaknesses.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Dark/Void/Destruction/etc are neither good nor evil, it's the mentality of the person who uses them. A good number of guys with bad-looking powers are good.
• Magic Versus Science: Always liked this, really. And depending on the story they'd either get along with minor differences... or not...

I don't have much finished, but I've noticed in my planning, that there are a few things that keep cropping up across different series.

• Most of my protagonists will be an Unlucky Everydude of some sort, no matter the setting.
• The Unchosen One and Screw Destiny. I personally refuse to believe that anyone's fate is pre-determined, and I like to think it comes through in my stories.
• Black Comedy Burst. I mostly write comedies, and every now and then, I write a joke where I have to ask myself "Maybe my protagonist swimming past someone with a pair of Cement Shoes is a bit dark...but it IS funny..."
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown delivered to the hero by the villain. I really like to sell the idea of the hero being an underdog, and it gives me a chance to paint my hero as the Determinator if they get back up after surviving the beating, ready for another round, despite having had the shit beaten out of him.
• References to classic rock. An iron man from the future named Ozzy! A woman named Ruby Tuesday! Someone living on Electric Avenue! The capital of a small country being literally named "Paradise City" (no word on what the grass and girls look like yet)!
• Superhero Origin in tales that aren't really superhero stories. Whenever I introduce an actual superhero, they're not given an origin.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Preventing this is a great motivation for the heroes as they go into that Grand Finale.
• Names that are either Shout Outs or puns (Justin Time, Caesar Salad, Jack Flash, ect)

Let's see here.

Grey-and-Grey Morality. My main characters are usually criminals or otherwise morally ambiguous people, and the antagonists are "evil" solely because they're opposing the main characters, and sometimes they even include a Hero Antagonist or two.

Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. Even in settings where magic is widely known to exist, there's always something that kind of doesn't fit in and remains a mystery.

Random Shout-Out s that sometimes turn out to be plot-important. For example, in my main science fiction work, there's a scene where a few of the main characters are looking through their starship's "window", and they see a Reaper in the distance, which promptly disappears by going FTL. The resident Physical God claims that it is probably a being from the dark space outside our galaxy, and that there are various other threats lurking there. One of those, a crystalline being that dates back to before the birth of the universe, shows up later on to be the Bigger Bad of the story.

Shown Their Work. I do my freaking research, and it shows. Especially regarding things I'm proficient at, such as marine biology.

Our Monsters Are Different. I tend to alter mythological creatures quite a bit, while still staying true to the original being. Dragons? They have a bone exoskeleton instead of scales, dozens of eyes like an insect, and the "fire" they breathe is actually their digestive fluid, which is more closer to magma than acid. Mermaids? They drown humans to reproduce, by the means of laying their eggs inside them and turning them into hatcheries for their young. They even do this to the people they genuinely fall in love with, and think of it as exactly like human marriage. Centaurs? They have shark-like teeth, invented firearms long before humans, and they hunt large animals such as elephants for sustenance. And so on.

Big Badass Battle Sequence. I always have at least two per work. I'm getting better and better with writing combat, and I love experimenting and thinking out strategic and tactical scenarios.

edited 8th Jul '16 2:15:24 PM by ArilouLaLeeLay

Let's see...

• Powered Armor / Humongous Mecha: All of my works-in-progress feature one or the other, for no reason than Author Appeal. And if somehow a setting does not have them, I'll find a way to shoehorn them into the story.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Despite being quite the cynical pessimist myself, I honestly hate hate hate it, and tend to avoid works that feature GRIMDARK as their main shtick. It's only natural that I'd end up writing more idealistic stuff...
• Cerebus Rollercoaster / Mood Whiplash: ...though that does not mean that it's all fluff, either. I often suddenly inject darkness in a initially light story, only for it to go back to lightheartedness after it's all said and done.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat / You Fight Like a Cow: Everybody trades banter in my stories, and shit just got real if they don't.
• Mundane Fantastic: It's always a bit funny, for example, to see somebody summoning a beast from the deepest reaches of hell, and it being shrugged of as "just another day at university". Extra points if the crazy new-agers support the things that we would consider normal.

edited 11th Apr '16 11:04:57 AM by handlere

I'll be the first to admit that I'm an optimist (for good or ill), but I'll go ahead and double down on what you've already said: a lot of my stuff also features Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!. Things can and will get dark and heavy, but there's always a light at the end of the tunnel — which is typically one made by the heroes. As heroes would. With that said...

• Earn Your Happy Ending: The good guys are constantly pushed to the breaking point, faced with overwhelmingly awful odds, and generally forced to suffer on the way to the proverbial endgame. But once they pass it, they come out stronger and happier as a result. At least that's what I'd like to think.
• Bittersweet Ending: In theory, I'll end stories with the above. In practice, I'll probably end up with this (to varying degrees).
• Large Ham: Frequently, and sometimes there are multiple hams in one story.
• Camp: Of the Toku variety. Color-coordinated characters, fanciful superpowers, catch phrases galore...it's all in full supply.
• Power: The crux of each story's world revolves around powers, and its influence on said world — what its users can do, how those powers can be used, and so on.
• Fighting Game Tropes: If you can name a character archetype from the genre, chances are there's a version of it in one of my stories.
• Foil: Some are more obvious than others, but there are lines that help contrast one character from the next — whether they're enemies or allies.
• Hope Bringer: Typically what the leading man/lady will evolve into. Sometimes that's a good thing, and other times...not so good.
• Darkest Hour: Like I said, happy endings have to be earned. Or, you know, at least something to strive for.

That's a good enough list for now — well, for a given definition of good. I don't know, I feel like I should've worked in more Kamen Rider references.

Some trends in my stories are:

• Being who you want to be, and not what everyone tells you to be.

• Breaking stereotypes and social stygma

• Nothing is predetermined, you make your own destiny

• A character with a preference for shotguns is common in some of my works-probably because I have a fondness for them myself.

• Grey-and-Grey Morality is almost universal in my stories.

Well, let's see:

• Blue hair stoic girls that usually die in a sunny day or a night full of stars from a wound on the heart. Usually serve as The Lost Lenore.
• A character that comes up with fairly reasonable explanation why he is that way...That turns out to be false.
• Red fire meaning uncontrolled hate, blue fire meaning controlled, but deep hate.
• Two mentor figures. One is calm and collected(can be the blue girl above) and the other is cynical and violent. The cynical survives the story.
• Body Horror, usually involving things growing out of people's faces.
• Metal armors. With animal masks.
• When pregnancy is mentioned anywhere, it comes before or after something nasty is mentioned.
• Knives.
• Villains leaving...something after they are defeated.. A post-mortem trap. A baby. A letter.

edited 27th Apr '16 6:14:47 AM by VengeanceIsMine

Stoic Everyman heroes, interspecies romance, and subversions of Cool People Rebel Against Authority.

Well, I suppose Deconstructed Trope and Subverted Trope are recurring in my works, but as for actual things...

Anyone Can Die - I work hard to make sure this is a thing. My only real rule is that the death of leads has to be either fulfill their arc in some fashion, or occur after such happens.

Author Appeal - The reason Nice Hat and Everythings Better With Dinosaurs are so frequent in my works.

Author Avatar - Somewhat interestingly, my VILLAINS tend to be rather like this a lot of the time.

Black-and-Gray Morality - There's light and dark shades of grey, with The Sociopath and the Card-Carrying Villain occupying the black. Basically, I contest the "everyone's a hero in their own mind" mindset. Some people are just plain awful, and don't have any illusions of helping anyone else. Others even acknowledge their evilness and desire to hurt people.

Genre Savvy - The story is so much more interesting when this is the case.

Humans Are Morons - Frequently deconstructed or subverted. My Big Bad often ends up being an intelligent, sociopathic Misanthrope Supreme with this belief. Can also be considered downplayed at times.

Humans Are Special - Downplayed. Most of my protagonists are humans, but the non-human characters are equally unique and special.

Public Domain Character - I just love these. Most notably specifically, my fantasy novel has the ENTIRE Alices Adventures In Wonderland cast (somewhere between classic and Mc Gee in style)

Take That! - I do a lot of these, combined with Deadpan Snarker (ie - when the Wonderland cast shows up - "This is the stupidest tea party I've ever seen" "Clearly, you aren't caught up on contemporary politics."

Well-Intentioned Extremist - A lot. Often on the hero's side, interestingly. Most of my minor villains are this too, but not the big bads. Usually.

World of Ham and World of Snark - Most of my worlds are both of these, at the same time.

• The Anti-Nihilist
• First Law of Tragicomedies: One began as a story of wacky, time-travelling high jinks, and ended as a cosmic horror story. One began as an SF coming-of-age story and ended as a deconstruction of the Messianic Archetype. But even the darkest moments can be enhanced with Bathos!
• Gender-Blender Name: Dana, Greer, Cande...
• God is Flawed: She's a washed up burlesque singer. It's complicated.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality
• Order Versus Chaos
• Starfish Aliens
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: It ain't all heavy. Sometimes I just stick stuff in cos I like it.