Of Undying Loyalty

I was up last night with unspecified pain doing, what else?  Reading fanfics.  I got to thinking about themes in my own and that led me to thinking of themes in my original work.  

I wonder if I am somehow uniquely suited to write a particular theme - why I feel like I can bring out a theme pretty well in fanfiction where the theme is already present in the canon - because it's something that's been showing up in my original works before got into "this or that fandom" or even knew of "this or that fandom's" existence.

I'm not talking about my  "dark" writing.  People seem to know my writing for unflinching descriptions, creepy themes or psudeo-philosophy... 

But one thing I think I'm really good at beyond that stuff...  The theme of Undying Loyalty.  Or, at least, it's a theme I seem to like.  I noticed it some time ago when thinking over and writing some of my attempts at real novels.  I've been editing "Malarkey and Belinda"  for the umpteenth time and the entire plot of that revolves around the loyalty of a gryphon who "imprinted" upon a woman in humble circumstances when he came of the egg.  The short thing I have cast to the winds of Kindle self-publishing, "A World of Rusted Dreams"   www.amazon.com/dp/B00HMGYHTK Is about a pair of young people and their supernatural bond-creatures that, by their very "guardian angel" type natures are utterly loyal.  I've poking around with writing something new about a group of people who work together who've developed undlying bonds of friendship due to basically only having each other to rely on... 

And so I've noticed that I can do pretty well with that in my silly derivative fanworks, too.  I've written quite a bit about Link and his companions in the Legend of Zelda games.  One of my best-received stories is about Scrapper the Robot in Skyward Sword exhibiting a truly-cursed-to-robot-immortality loyalty to Fi/The Master Sword.  I've done a few fics about Navi and her loyalty to Link, more than one spanning over Link's lifetimes.  I have an entire headcanon regarding the nature of Pit's loyalty to Palutena for my Kid Icarus stuff.  (His loyalty to her was only ever broken in one fic in which my co-writer and I made her purposefully slightly off-character for the sake of the plot - and in that, really, REALLY bad things happened).  And I've been contemplating my new stupid-game-obsession I've been doing fanworks for, Fire Emblem: Awakening, and thinking through various ways I want to handle various versions of the tactician, Robin - because, much like Pit, there's a canon undying loyalty-character if there ever was one.  

If you read my derpy fan fiction  and ever see, with these kind of characters, a mention of "imprinting" - that's basically me borrowing a concept from my own "Malarkey and Belinda" original novel (I will pull you out of edit-hell eventually!).  If I portray it as a supernatural or "by the creature's very nature" bond, I'm probably channeling "A World of Rusted Dreams."  Variations on the theme of "loyalty" are just something I've been playing with for years, for decades, really.  

Writers practice autocannibalism.   We borrow from our past selves all the time.