Basically, what aspects in stories give you a thrill when you come across them. I pretty much jumbled together a collection of these to make the story truly fascinating for me ... curious about you all.
I, personally, love a sheep in wolf's clothing. The fellow you mistake for evil, or violent, perhaps because he has to keep up a pretense or be killed for it, when in reality he is a kind and generous fellow - perhaps this comes from my Noir inclinations. After all, wrong place, wrong time, wrong person...
Mistaken identities in general.
Exploring underwater or exploring caves.
Tornadoes, surviving them, escaping them, simply watching them.
Alchemy, bizarre occult contraptions, mansions with rooms marked with astrological signs and weird crystal apparatus that will trap starlight -- but only if such contraptions and studies are done by the malevolent. Places run by kind professors just don't do it for me!
Beautiful and literally inhuman women - such as animated life-sized dolls, homunculus, etc.
Tragedy in general. Basically, when the writer really lets rip and allows the bad stuff to have its affect.
Siblings who are close and look out for each other, bicker and cause each other trouble.
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50,582 / 50,000
Nov 9, 2007 - 14 49
Aw...pirates...and physcopaths o.o
When I mean crazy, I mean crazy, extreme things people do to stay alive.
55,228 / 50,000
Nov 9, 2007 - 18 20
i like your list, laraqua!
for me...
characters who change, for the better typically.
tough guy characters who care enough about someone else to cry. there's something beautiful about that.
rough and tumble battle scenes.
the hero getting overpowered and defeated by the bad guy. i ususally like him to ultimately come back and succeed, but it's always exciting when they get defeated at some point near the end. makes the good conclusion more exciting.
characters stuck between a rock and a hard place
a girl and a guy who are simply good friends, without anything romantic about it
yeah, that's all i can think of for now. thanks for bringing this up! it's got me thinking about some elements i need in my story. #'s 2, 3, 4 specifically.
//thoughts//
the_irish_one
50,257 / 50,000
Nov 9, 2007 - 20 36
Slack, no-hoper characters who find within them the courage and selflessness to achieve tremendous things. No magic required, just the theme of redemption.
-- Laura
1,392 / 50,000
Nov 10, 2007 - 18 00
I have a friend who totally gets off on vilians who have the ability to be redeemed. She loves to hope that the villian can be turned around and made good.
I like the bad guy/good guy. The good guy with an edge. Hugh Jackman's character of Wolverine being a good example.
I also like the random guy who turns out to have just the right qualities to save the day. He's not special in lots of ways, he just happens to have the ONE thing that works. Dick Francis did it with race jockeys. He played on their ability to ride with injuries and/or to be stubborn and used it to created jockies turned PIs who would get too stubborn to give up a case even when hurt or in some cases too stubborn to die even when shot.
21,155 / 50,000
Nov 11, 2007 - 21 42
A "band of brothers." Sorry, I don't have another word for that. A bomber crew, squadron of fighter pilots, ship's officers, etc., who are very different and have been thrown together under difficult circumstances and are on their own journeys but are definitely in this together.
Characters who usually run away, or run to someone else, when they have a problem, having to face it on their own.
Flying machines, whether they actually exist or not.
History mysteries. The Franklin expedition, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail :-)
Characters having to travel in historical situations and facing realistic difficulties, weird as it sounds.
0 / 50,000
Nov 12, 2007 - 00 58
Antagonists/honourable rivals becoming friends with the hero, preferably through having to work together either against a greater enemy or merely to survive under adverse circumstances.
Strange and improbable legends being told within the story and turning out to contain a grain of truth.
The characters having to explore ruins, old temples, graves, secret passages or other interesting buildings.
Ghosts.
102,480 / 50,000
Nov 12, 2007 - 02 47
Wulfila,you would like my story if you read it XD
50,444 / 50,000
Nov 15, 2007 - 09 32
I like murders!
Yes. I like tradgedy striking. Not where it's soppy and crying in the aftermath, but something sudden, shocking, and completely evil.
I also like killing off, and having the authors of books kill of, my favorite characters and/or the MC. It's different, since nobody ever seems to be willing to kill off their MC's, and I think that it would be really cool. It causes your audience to eitehr hate or love you, or both.
So.. yeah. I like sudden deaths and murders.
0 / 50,000
Nov 15, 2007 - 11 10
The road towards the unexpected.
56,008 / 50,000
Nov 17, 2007 - 14 00
Divided loyalties. A lot of the fiction I write seems to focus on this subject because it's just fascinating to me, how people decide what's really important to them. It seems like in fiction, people choose love over duty a lot, but I enjoy very much reading about the opposite decision. Fulfilling one's duty can benefit many people, or so MC may believe, while love has a more limited influence on the world at large (well, depending...).
0 / 50,000
Nov 17, 2007 - 14 02
A ditzy, shallow, bouncy character who no one takes seriously yet spouts good advice when you least expect it.
Good guys that hate being good and are constantly looking for ways to switch sides. And vice versa with bad guys.
0 / 50,000
Nov 23, 2007 - 15 56
My 50K book is about a man who has an alter ego. They're one and the same person, but, while the one is active the other remains oblivious. Just occasionally the more dynamic one enters the other's psyche, although the other is totally unaware of it. These are the very rare 'overlapping' periods. The rest of the time we have two very different characters, doing very different things. The quiet, simple one works as a clerk in a financial office; the dynamic, outgoing one has an incredibly interesting life.
I just loved developing opposite characters out of the same body. It was quite unplanned, but now it all hangs together beautifully and it's made a viable book. Thanks to Nano (although I'm not submitting it as I started it in October).
50,514 / 50,000
Nov 24, 2007 - 20 36
Games of cat and mouse between intelligent characters.
Intricate schemes.
Characters that get on with it and do their job. Characters that, when involved in some minor argument or love triangle, behave sensibly and work things out. If there's still niggling irritations or disharmony - fine, so long as they don't all flail uselessly.
Bittersweet endings.
When the villain ends up in prison or handed over to the police, without getting conveniently killed in the climax.
Revolutionaries, particularly ones that fall short somehow or don't achieve all their goals.
50,006 / 50,000
Nov 25, 2007 - 14 21
Crime/Villains-I like criminals or villains or anti-heroes to be the main characters.
Neurology-<3
Secret identities being revealed-I just love this idea, no clue why.
People not knowing who the hero actually is- I really, really love stories like this. Where the hero is undercover and no one knows who they are and then it is revealed to them and they're all like, "woah".
Hehe, I'm not very descriptive today.
43,353 / 50,000
Ene 3, 2008 - 18 54
Don't know quite why, but I always get a kick out of a GG (Good Guy/Gal) getting in a tight spot and standing up to the BG (Bad Guy) with incredible sangfroid/bravery/calmness. Then there's someone having a secret identity, with close calls until it's finally revealed--I especially like it when the reader may or may not know for half the book. (Had an alien MC wandering around on earth for 30K or so before humans were called humans and it was explicitly stated that she had wings.) I get a huge kick out of making my favorite BGs turn into GGs, and I love having a totally new take on everything. Riddle-type mysteries, mysteries about people and their pasts--and for some reason, my MCs usually get knocked out cold or something like that before the end. Well, that's all, folks!
0 / 50,000
Mar 19, 2008 - 16 14
I love a good baddie, one that really gives you shivers. I also love a world with flying ships. I love newcomers, people totally confused and unused to the world they're traveling in. I love people who could be on either side, a snake in the grass. I love theives and pirates and murderers.
50,652 / 50,000
Mar 24, 2008 - 09 44
I Love heists and break ins of all kinds :D It kinda explains how my novel is currently turning out . . .
That's the main one not already mentioned, but I like criminals of all kinds. They can be either good or evil, but I like a twist thrown in there that reveals them to be different than you might originally believe.
50,118 / 50,000
Abr 2, 2008 - 15 08
I like secret societies- mobs or revolutionaries or what have you. A favorite example of this would be Stevenson's "The suicide club."
Characters being given mysterious directions that maybe they don't know why they should do it, or they don't know who's giving the directions. When it all turns out to be part of some huge, intricate scheme, it's even better.
Insanity in general- if a few of your characters are crazy or going crazy, instant bonus points for the story.
50,472 / 50,000
Abr 23, 2008 - 19 06
I love post-apocolyptic societies. Especially recent post-apocolypse- ie, characters who were alive before and after the Big A.
I like when characters get along, especially when you know that in the end they are going to be friends/lovers, whatever. I hate it when the author makes them fight and quarrel with each other for no good reason, other than to make it seem unlikely that they will get together in the end, when you know that they will!!.
I love when many threads of the story come together for one great ending. The best example I can think of is "A prayer for Owen Meany". It's not an adventure story, but one of my favorites.
Food. I love reading about what people are eating in the different locales they travel to.
:) Jen
0 / 50,000
Mayo 3, 2008 - 04 59
Beautiful and literally inhuman women - such as animated life-sized dolls, homunculus, etc.
This sounds like a PS2 game called Haunting Ground. Seriously, everything you said here is in that game. If you haven't already played it I suggest you check it out.
As for the stuff I like... well, I like betrayal but only if the person who did the betraying did it for a good reason is all misunderstood (poor dear) and I've recently taken a liking to childhood friends ending up in romantic relationships. It just seems sweet.
0 / 50,000
Jun 23, 2008 - 12 55
The idea of the hero realizing that the bad guy actually has a good point in his intentions, or something. Like, the hero is given the impression from his orders that the bad guy is pure evil and wants to destroy humanity, only to come to a point where he truly sees why the antagonist is doing what he's doing, and suddenly finding it very, very hard to be all, "YOU MUST BE DESTROYED" towards him.
Oh and if anyone's seen the Aeon Flux series, then they'll back me up on the idea of bad guy/good guy being enemies, but totally in love with each other. Not in the Mr. and Mrs. Smith sense where they discover later on, but in the fact that they KNOW the other is the enemy, basically from the start, and it's a continued relationship throughout the entire story, however long it is.
Also, and this is kind of along the same lines as the first one but: moral ambiguity between sides. Like, as a reader, you can see both sides of the ordeal and realize no one is TRULY a bad guy, it's all just a matter of which you agree more with that you decide who to side with. Or something like that, lol.
23,175 / 50,000
Jun 26, 2008 - 09 18
I like surprises. Probable surprises, that is. Not sudden ones that make no sense, but ones that have been subtly hinted out even while the author led you the other way. I like thinking we know who the bad guy is only to find out in the end that that baddie really wasn't that bad, but the actual baddie, whom we've known all along... well...
I like it when things aren't black and white. I like it when you can at least understand why everyone does what they do and you can't just point to a character and call them evil.
I like explosions. Good fight scenes. A protagonist that everyone wants dead and who, in realizing this, really doesn't want to have to go through with the plot.
I like awkward people who you know like each other but can't get over their insecurities to actual admit it to one another.
I also like it when the male and female protagonists don't hook up. Maybe they really -do- hate each other.
Also: Wulfila? Awesome name. Awesome guy, too.