Shipfic Tropes: 'Getting Together' VS 'Established Relationship'

[g_uava]

'Getting Together' plots involve characters changing the relationship between them.

'Established Relationship' plots are driven by the relationship between characters changing them.

The difference is kind of mindblowing 🤯💥

Comments

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's nice to see someone laying out distinctions like this.

🤗

[g_uava]

Got to thinking about it when I considered why some plots are better for when a romance is just getting started and others are richer for exploring the nuances of being in a relationship 🤔 Thanks for dropping by! 💓

Re: 🤗

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, yeah. When a relationship is new, the challenges will be about fitting yourselves together. In an established relationship, it's often changes in the environment or lifestyle that cause new friction.

One thing that my partner and I agreed on very early is that we don't want to keep re-having the same fight over and over. We might argue for 4 hours at a time, but by the end of it, we've usually identified at least one actionable step toward improvement. So the fights we have now are not the same as we had in the beginning. In literature, that's the difference between static and dynamic characters, whether they grow over time.