Wake up scared, wake up strange.

Challenge #14

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) What makes it particularly appealing for you? What do you like in fanworks featuring that trope? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Every time this question comes around, I talk about bad rats.

If you've known me for a long time, you know I love bad rats. You know I love them lot. I love when their intensity is celebrated. I love when I can hear the way I talk echoed back. I love when their being a bad rat is an inherent aspect of their character and not simply something borne out of their current set of circumstances - that this is who they are, and will always be. I love when their point of view is presented as something very different without it being framed as wrong or incorrect - simply as something different. I love seeing their struggles with communication because there's an understanding communication is always possible even when it seems insurmountable.

I love when they're deeply sensible and wildly emotional at the same time.

I love when their nature is wrapped up in metaphor, when they're psychic or a vampire or an angel or an android or have what's a genuinely nifty if inconvenient set of superpowers. I love when they're magnificently ordinary humans with too many wires inside their brains and through their hearts with all of those wires twisted up tight. I love when the canon lets me peer around the corner and catch a glimpse of myself. I love when they begin navigating the world around them and making friends without any innate understanding or intuition, "conscious intelligence [their] only guide," and gradually move to a more nuanced understanding through deliberate struggle - and their work is celebrated and praised not because they're becoming 'more human' or 'more normal' but because this is something they want to get better at doing. I love when this work is mutual.

Not worse. Not better, either. Another way of being.

I love when the bad rats come to terms with the gulf in between themselves and the rest of the world, and still reach out to bridge that gap. Because while the gap will always be there, it can be crossed.

I love the moment when someone says, My hands are shoddy and my tools are faulty and I don't understand what you're asking of me and I'm still going to offer you the best I have to give.