Hey everyone,
I’ve been stewing over something for a few months now, debating whether to say/write anything about it. Now, since my wife is constantly telling me I should share my thoughts with people besides her and my publisher wants me to be a bit more engaged and visible online, I’ve elected to type up my thoughts. So today, I’m going to talk about (maybe rant) about tropes.
For starters, let’s define tropes—although if you are reading a blog post on a book publisher website, you probably already know, at least based on context and connotation. Well, here is the denotation: “a convention or device that establishes a predictable or stereotypical representation of a character, setting, or scenario in a creative work.”
Tropes give the audience clues and cues to fill in the blanks. For example, if you are consuming medieval (Western) fantasy, you can imagine the garments of the average person without needing to have them described and you can expect someone isn’t going to pull out an automatic firearm to take on the orc horde.
Tropes can create a sense of familiarity with an audience, allow them to fill in some of the blanks, and thematically prepare for the story to unfold without being jarring or requiring authors to be explicit about every detail. It’s nice to be able to say your characters entered the abandoned or haunted village and not have to enumerate every way in which the locale was different to set a scene and waste extra lines establishing a feeling or tone for characters and/or the audience.
They are very useful, yet people don’t like them. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why. I’ll get into where this is coming from, what I think the issues are, and why I think tropes aren’t just a necessary evil but a necessity.
Why the rant?
This all stems from an article I read about a video game I was enjoying a couple of months ago, which another article seemingly piggybacked on more recently. (I want to go on a tangential rant here about questionable entertainment journalism in the modern day and AI journalism but that’s not what this is about.)
The game, Unicorn Overlord, is a tactical RPG in the—you guessed it—fantasy genre. I thoroughly enjoyed the game, but this review said something that bothered me. It called out the game for having a weak story and cast laden with genre tropes. Now, I play games primarily for the gameplay loop, not the story, and I had already played the demo, so this review was not going to change my mind. But it got me thinking about this whole vilification of tropes, so here we are.
Should I not like tropes? Should no one like tropes? Should I not be using them in my writing? What is the real scope of a trope and is it even possible to avoid using them? My editor and others have said there is so little true novel ground left to tread in most genres, and I tend to agree. Most stories are unique, but a coming-of-age, chosen one story in a fantasy setting that starts with a mentor character arriving in a village to start the protagonist on the hero’s journey... Well, they’re a dime a dozen.
That story description is filled with various tropes, but does that mean the story is bad? Is The Hobbit bad? Is A New Hope bad? Is Eye of the World bad? I don’t think so, but maybe the older stuff (though it’s really not that old) gets a pass. What about Eragon then? If we change mediums and shift to an adjacent genre, what about Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood? Do they have any merit for telling their stories how they do, or do the recurring and familiar motifs (the tropes) make them bad?
I think not. I think tropes have real value and utility, which I will touch on. Next, however, I want to talk about why I think people are all too eager to lambaste tropes when they see them.
The Ugh, the Bad, and the Ugly
First, not all tropes are created equal.
Several tropes were flawed in conception or maybe only good the one time, yet either way they were imitated time and again until they gained that trope status, and now, they continued to be used. Two big ones that I’ve seen dozens of times, more in film than in literature, are killing of minority characters first and the whole thing was a dream. Popular movies and shows put these concepts in the limelight. I find each to be a troublesome trope.
Another issue is when a trope becomes a cliché. Tropes are recurring themes or motifs that let an audience feel a sense of familiarity or understand a setting without explicit details. A cliché is a boring, overused theme or motif that simply shows a lack of creativity. This can get tricky in the fantasy genre or any genre. There are only so many character archetypes in these settings. Yet it falls on the writer to make sure that their knightly paragon of justice doesn’t feel like every other.
This leads to the other side of this coin, tropes as a lack of development: worldbuilding, character and plot development. Relying on tropes to tell your story is bad writing, plain and simple, and I think many members of the audience have been burned by this at least once.
Silver Linings
This is where I tell you the good news—I don’t think you need to avoid tropes. Tropes allow us to establish a tone, setting, and the whole genre really. They are the common elements that identify the intangibles of a story as well as the many details writers cannot take the time to document. Trying to write a story or even a character without any tropes is difficult and possibly detrimental. Also, tropes create a baseline expectation. That dime-a-dozen chosen one story I mentioned earlier, well, we all expect the hero to grow in power and save the world. The writer doesn’t need to spell it out for the character that it’s their destiny, but if they do, they can make the scene poignant.
On the other hand, you need those tropes set up to subvert expectations. If a writer is looking for originality points, finding a new way to subvert an old trope is a decent way to score some. (I want to go on a tangential rant here about the seeming fetish with subverting expectations in modern writing, particularly screenwriting, but that’s not what this is about either.)
In closing, tropes aren’t bad. They are quite necessary, in my opinion. Tropes inform the audience, helping to create tone, flesh out environments, and set expectations without writers needing to use so many words. Authors also can use them to inform or inspire their work. Not every comic relief lancer from the same hometown as the main character that’s been with him from day one is the same, but everyone understands the trope. The writer can diverge from the mold as they see fit, and the audience can appreciate the subtle differences (if the writer properly made some).
Finally, there is no subverting expectations unless expectations are made. This can be done directly by making a promise or letting the trope help you with some show-don’t-tell.
So don’t get mad at tropes for bad writing.
Rant over.
Do you like stories with tropes of magical items and unlikely heroes? If you do, we have something for you! Be the first to know when our free story from E. R. Ellis III drops! It'll have all the good tropes without all the clichés.
Comentários