My fantasy story “Shades of Bruises and Blood” is available now to subscribers of Trollbreath Magazine in Issue 9; it’ll be available to all on the Trollbreath website later on, but if you don’t want to wait, please consider subscribing.
Yesterday I attended a panel at Worldcon about tropes. They talked about how, if you’re going to draw upon tropes (including to subvert them), it helps if you actually have affection for that trope.
“Shades of Bruises and Blood” is my love letter to my favorite trope of all time: the Enemy Mine. Named after the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella by Barry B. Longyear, this trope has stirred something deep within me since childhood. I always loved the episodes of cartoon shows where the good guys and bad guys had to team up for whatever reason. What kind of alliance would they forge? How would the dynamics play out? What about the status quo they’d so surprisingly disrupted? I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my curiosity like this back in those days, but I felt it. As Aristotle once wrote, “A common danger unites even the bitterest of enemies.”
I went on to read Enemy Mine and watch the film adaptation, both of which made me weep. Then came the novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff and the film adaptation The Eagle. Yes, I even watched the movie Hell in the Pacific, which purportedly helped inspire Longyear’s novella.
All that to say, I took my job very seriously when I finally felt ready to tackle this trope. I’ve sort of flirted with it in my other work, but this was the first time I made it so overt. I tried to pour a lot of myself into these characters and their predicament, even though they’re quite different from me at a surface glance. We all carry depths. We all carry the tools to connect, if we choose to wield them.
