Here’s what I’m thinking about today which is that soulmate aus are interesting because they’re usually based around a concept that should make it Very Easy to identify and be with the person you are destined for but because of the rules of fiction dictating that Very Easy Tasks make for boring narratives, the best soulmate fics have to complicate their premise. Someone’s rejected their soulmate before every meeting them or someone sees color for the first time but assumes the other person didn’t. Or that they don’t want to see colors. Or that if they lie about being their soulmate because who would want to be bound to them.
It’s this fascinating structure that makes explicit what many romance stories are implicitally based on—there is a Moment that is the End where all parties know This Is Love and the relationship will now enter the phase that we don’t want to read about because all the tension is gone. We want the tension of them getting together and the surety that they got it right. Soulmate aus inherently promise the second part—you can’t get more definitive than the universe being like “THIS IS THE PERSON YOU ARE MEANT FOR. THEIR NAME IS TATTOOED ON YOUR BUTT, YOU’RE WELCOME.” But that surety means that authors have to work all the harder in the tension building section.
It’s like all romance of the “getting together” variety is a rubber band pulled back until just before it’s breaking point and then release, and getting together is the snap. (Your overwhelming emotions about love are the resulting welt against your skin.) Soulmate aus have are like trying to get the same snap from a piece of floss, which is still doable in the capable hands of someone thinking very hard about how they’re going to do this with the material they have at hand.
Basically what I’m saying is “thing that moves like a distorted gif, but in meatspace” works much better than “thing with tons of tentacles” as a visual representation of cosmic horror, IMHO.
Nowadays, sure, but human depictions of cosmic ineffability are always informed by time and place. In the early days of deep-sea exploration, “thing with tons of tentacles” was the very pinnacle of “holy shit what is that”; it’s just that the symbol has aged in a way that the substance has not.
CEPHALOPODS IN 1918: horrors from the unknowable depths of blackness only made only the more horrific by animate motions suggesting a flicker of intelligence within their shapeless, fleshy coils
What makes this funny is that in the actual novel once the creature learned how to speak he was actually very articulate and could indeed talk circles around Victor. He wasn’t just physically stronger, he was smarter.
Could This Two-Year-Old Be Smarter Than A College Dropout?
jinlinli 