The Watch Mini Awards were sponsored by MXIYXH.

ROMANCE - SECOND PLACE

I'm not sure what writing devices were missing - I included plenty of simile, metaphor, symbolism, allegory, literary irony, and foreshadowing. About the only thing I think might have been missing would be romance tropes - Black Cat/Golden Retriever, Fake Relationship, Enemies to Lovers, Only One Bed, Billionaire Dom/Ingenue Sub, Arranged Marriage, Mafia Romance, Love Triangle, Amnesia, Second Chance, Holiday Romance, Secret Identity, Bad Boy/Nice Girl, Office Romance, Stuck Together, Love Cures Trauma/Mental Illness, The Great Big Misunderstanding. Yadda yadda. I'm allergic to those, just like I'm allergic to most of the romance books that get hyped on BookTok, and they will not be found in my work, unless I decide to parody the trope. 

I admit to using tropes from TV Tropes to help give my plot a little extra oomph. Some of the tropes I play with are Merlin and Nimue, Lover and Beloved, The Sacred Darkness, Conveniently Common Kink, and Our Vampires Are Different. You can see the page created for Ancilla here:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Ancilla

Thing is, I see tropes as toys, not as plots or as entire character personalities. I'm old-fashioned that way.