BlackHeart Biohazards

Thinking about tropes, and comfort, and self care, and squicks and triggers and blocking this morning, and how different they are for everyone.

What’s comforting to one person, might be a squick or trigger to someone else, and vice versa.

Since we’ve been talking about our feelings on tropes today already, we’re going to share some of our squicks and some of our comfort tropes.

Squicks and triggers (things Sinister system has trouble reading to various degrees)

• “baby fever”/characters talking about how much they want babies
• Motherhood
• Pregnancy (cis fem especially)
• breeding kink between humans
• Nuclear family portrayed positively
• self/reader insert as a parent
• parents disciplining children in any positive context
• characters with a strong, positive relationship to the christian god portrayed in an unambiguous context
• adventurous characters settling down into heterosexual lifescript relationships. (ex. supers who get married, retire and have babies and jobs)
• vanilla sex between married het couples
• gender nonconforming female characters getting feminine makeovers
• gender nonconforming characters changing to preforming their assigned gender at birth being portrayed positively
• abusive or noncon shipcest

Comfort tropes (things Sinister system finds comforting or relatable to read about to various degrees)

• villainous or evil characters being portrayed as genuinely capable of loving without being ‘reformed’.
• characters shown coping poorly with mental illness
• characters being supportive of other characters coping poorly with mental illness
• characters who repeatedly hurt one another but forgive each other and love each other
• characters who are typically ‘unlovable’ being shown love
• queer families, poly families, nonstandard family relationships
• adventurous characters maintaining a loving relationship while they still continue their unusual lifestyle
• characters being allowed to grow from their mistakes
• characters who are loved despite the hurt they’ve caused in the past
• characters who continually struggle with unhealthy habits, cycles, and relationships
• shipcest portrayed in a positive and loving light