Real Domestic OTP Scenarios

Real Domestic OTP Scenarios

Okay, as I’ve embraced being a Fandom Old Person ™, I’m tired of seeing all the cute, domestic OTP scenarios written by people who probably haven’t lived with a significant other before, except for maybe a romantic weekend where all the “sleepy good morning kisses” and “dancing in their underwear at midnight” happen. I want to see them after a few years like:

A sleepy good morning kiss that ends up with a palm in the face and a muttered, “brush your damn teeth first.”

A sleepy good morning kiss that ends up with a palm in the face and a muttered, “I will push you off the fucking bed if you don’t let me sleep.”

Watching scary movies on the couch and one of them falls asleep, head tilted back, mouth open, snoring loud enough to wake the neighbors.

“You unclog the toilet.” “No you unclog the toilet!” “Don’t you love me anymore?” “Only if you unclog the toilet.”

“Are those my jeans?” *shrug* “Does it matter anymore?”

Stealing a kiss while one is making dinner and getting smacked in the ear with the spatula.

Person A: “Can you pass me the oregano?” Person B: “I need payment first.” *puckers lips* Person A: *holds out a dollar*

Getting snowed in an arguing for an hour about whether to make the hot chocolate with milk or water until one of them just dumps the packet over the other’s head.

After having long, languid sex with strawberries and whipped cream, both of them laying in the wreckage of the bed, sheets, towels. Both: “that was such a bad idea. We’ll never get this all cleaned up.”

Holding hands after a date, wandering through the romantic twilight, so in love, and one says, “shit, it’s getting late and we haven’t gone grocery shopping yet.”

Person A coming up behind Person B, wrapping their arms around their waist, gently kissing the back of their neck and murmuring, “you’ve got more gray hair back here.”

Renewing their wedding vows 10, 20, 30 years later and still crying like they did when they were young and youthfully in love and said “I do” for the first time.

Favourite narrative tropes:

“That was ONE time!”

“Due to an administrative error”, or any major plot point which is caused almost entirely by bureaucratic fuckups

“Contrary to popular belief” appended to something that’s either really obvious or completely subjective

A character makes an assertion, then cut to the narrator contradicting it (‘“Everything’s fine!” Everything was not fine.’)

First-person narrators who call a specific character by a series of increasingly convoluted nicknames

Unusual narrative euphemisms. I still hold that describing around a curse word is almost always funnier than just using the word.

Establishing character moments which subvert your expectations right from the get-go. The best example is in the Brooklyn Nine Nine pilot, where Jake’s fooling around at the crime scene before revealing that he’s already solved the case.

Montages. Just montages of any kind, for any reason, anytime. I actually think they work better in text form because you can do so many creative things with them.

Side characters with a level of fourth-wall awareness / quasi-supernatural ability which is never quite certain, like the janitor in Scrubs.

Double meanings in narration that take a while to make themselves clear.

Really, really specific similes.

The final, brilliant word on passive voice.

“She was killed [by zombies.]” <—- passive

“Zombies killed [by zombies] her.” <—- active

Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library. 

After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies. 

People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose. 

The Strength of a Symmetrical Plot

One of my favorite studies of Harry Potter is that of the ring composition found both in the individual novels and overall composition. To me, that very composition is what makes Harry Potter such a satisfying story. In my view, it’s a large part of the reason Harry Potter is destined to become a classic. 

And it’s an integral part of the series many people are completely unaware of. 

So what is ring composition? 

It’s a well-worn, beautiful, and (frankly) very satisfying way of structuring a story. John Granger, known online as The Hogwarts Professor, has written extensively on it.

Ring Composition is also known as “chiastic structure.” Basically, it’s when writing is structured symmetrically, mirroring itself: ABBA or ABCBA. 

Poems can be structured this way. Sentences can be structured this way. (Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.) Stories of any length and of any form can be structured this way.

In a novel, the basic structure depends on three key scenes: the catalyst, the crux, and the closing. 

The catalyst sets the story into the motion. 

The crux is the moment when everything changes. (It is not the climax). 

The closing, is both the result of the crux and a return to the catalyst. 

In Harry Potter, you might recognise this structure: 

Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and doesn’t die. 

Voldemort attempts to come back to power

Voldemort comes back to power.

Harry learns what it will take to remove Voldemort from power.

Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and dies.

But all stories should have this structure. A book’s ending should always reference its beginning. It should always be the result of some major turning point along the way. Otherwise, it simply wouldn’t be a very good story.

What’s most satisfying about chiastic structure is not the basic ABA structure, but the mirroring that happens in between these three major story points. 

To illustrate what a more complicated ABCDEFGFEDCBA structure looks like, (but not as complicated as Harry Potter’s, which you can see here and here) Susan Raab has put together a fantastic visual of ring composition in Beauty and the Beast (1991), a movie which most agree is almost perfectly structured. 

source: x

What’s so wonderful about ring composition in this story is that it so clearly illustrates how that one crucial decision of Beast changes everything in the world of the story. Everything from the first half of the story comes back in the second half, effected by Beast’s decision. This gives every plot point more weight because it ties them all to the larger story arc. What’s more, because it’s so self-referential, everything feels tidy and complete. Because everything has some level of importance, the world feels more fully realized and fleshed out. No small detail is left unexplored.    

How great would Beauty and the Beast be if Gaston hadn’t proposed to Belle in the opening, but was introduced later on as a hunter who simply wanted to kill a big monster? Or if, after the magnificent opening song, the townspeople had nothing to do with the rest of the movie? Or if Maurice’s invention had never been mentioned again after he left the castle? 

Humans are nostalgic beings. We love returning to old things. We don’t want the things we love to be forgotten. 

This is true of readers, too. 

We love seeing story elements return to us. We love to know that no matter how the story is progressing, those events that occurred as we were falling in love with it are still as important to the story itself as they are to us. There is something inside us all that delights in seeing Harry leave Privet Dr. the same way he got there–in the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike. There’s a power to it that would make any other exit from Privet Dr. lesser. 

On a less poetic note, readers don’t like to feel as though they’ve wasted their time reading about something, investing in something, that doesn’t feel very important to the story. If Gaston proposed to Belle in Act 1 and did nothing in Act 3, readers might ask “Why was he even in the movie then? Why couldn’t we have spent more time talking about x instead?” Many people do ask similar questions of plot points and characters that are important in one half of a movie or book, but don’t feature in the rest of it. 

Now, ring composition is odiously difficult to write, but even if you can’t make your story a perfect mirror of itself, don’t let story elements leave quietly. Let things echo where you can–small moments, big moments, decisions, characters, places, jokes. 

It’s the simplest way of building a story structure that will satisfy its readers.

If there’s no place for something to echo, if an element drops out of the story half-way through, or appears in the last act, and you simply can’t see any other way around it, you may want to ask yourself if it’s truly important enough to earn its place in your story. 

Further reading:

If you’d like to learn more about ring theory, I’d recommend listening to the Mugglenet Academia episode on it: x

You can also read more about symmetry in HP here: x

And more about ring structure in Lolita and Star Wars here: x and x

And about why story endings and beginnings should be linked here: x

Two magicians made a blood oath when they were children that they would never harm each other. Now they are mortal enemies and have resorted to inconveniencing and annoying each other, knowing if they harm one another they’ll die.