December Days 2018 #8: Tropes Are Tools
Dec. 8th, 2018 11:16 pm[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
Ideas come in all sorts of forms, and their implementations make for an infinite-seeming variation of possible stories working their way across the universe. Except that after a few goes-round, the new starts to look a bit like the things that you've already seen. Sometimes a lot like a thing before, sometimes only a little, but it definitely starts looking like a pattern. And the more media you consume, the more the patterns start to emerge. For some people, this marks the point where they start complaining that there's nothing new in media.
For the most part, though, what it means is that a person has discovered the existence of the trope. Tropes are the building blocks of stories. Every story has tropes in it, whether those tropes are played as intended, attempted to be inverted, subverted, toyed with, or otherwise. Those attempts can go well or poorly. Tropes come into popularity and fade away (or are actively thrown out from storytelling space, depending.)
At their core, tropes are a shorthand way of referring to ideas used in stories. If you have a character who is pure-hearted and blonde, that's a trope (Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold according to TvTropes). Redheads with spirited attitudes? Also a trope. Black-haired, pale-skinned beauties? Trope, as are the green-skinned space babes. Kid heroes being granted swords? Or pulling weapons from places weapons shouldn't be stashed? The storytelling convention that people can just pull things out of nowhere without having to explain it (or even when they do)? That's a trope as well.
Tropes are good as shorthand between people who share an understanding and can thus jump over the explaining part and get straight to the sometimes more interesting (or at least more fractious) discussion about how those chunks of storytelling are being used.
TV Tropes started by trying to classify the ones on television, because serialized programming using tropes played mostly as intended is a very rich corpus to start indexing with (and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the original target before the site exploded and expanded into other media, was full of various plot and storytelling devices). They're not the first, but any stretch of the imagination, but the nature of a wiki and the hypertext system of being able to densely link to other things made out a really effective way of cataloging and cross-referencing works and their associated tropes. It's probably easier to use than a paper copy of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther indices.
Why do tropes get a bad rap? Lots of things that are, have become, or were stereotypes are definitely in the trope department, and the overuse (or inelegant use) of tropes contributes to whether they are currently in use and whether their use is acceptable right now. Blackface used to be a societally accepted trope, and now it's likely to earn more condemnation than kudos. It was codified in the Hays code that people who behaved against the morals of the time be punished before the movie was done. It was standard industry practice that people in gay relationships would end in tragedy, often with only one (or none) of the gay people alive. Women still get killed, assaulted, or harmed so as to give a man enough pain or motivation to engage in the plot. There are plenty of tropes that get used that generally have terrible effects on characters and readers alike. So that's one reason.
Another reason is that there's an argument saying being able to spot a trope takes away some of the enjoyment of a series, because knowing your tropes and being Genre Savvy means that sometimes you can spot how a plot is going to resolve long before it does. The big twist isn't a big twist if you knew it was his sled the whole time. Or you saw the gun on the mantelpiece in the first act. Or even if you were paying attention enough in the first act to recognize the abrupt cut was significant and drew the correct conclusion from it (which is why I haven't actually seen The Sixth Sense past the first few minutes) or understood that the information presented about a new species of character could be combined with the information about the relationship between two characters to conclude the correct relationship between a character of unknown origin and one of known origin (which is how I knew whose Nobody Namine was by the end of the prologue to Kingdom Hearts II, but Squenix did themselves no favors on that mystery by using the Smurfette Principle for their main trio).
There clearly is some merit in the argument that knowing storytelling devices sometimes means that clever isn't. But what that seems to have engendered in response is creators taking into account their audience understands what those tropes mean and incorporating it into their storytelling. For example, The Good Place very much incorporates the structures of television itself to mislead the audience about the true nature of itself. Intricately plotted shows and mysteries, like Welcome to Night Vale, Doctor Who, or Steven Universe, take advantage of the audience's focus on one thing to slide in a small piece of something else that them comes back to the narrative later and, with new context provided by later information, makes more sense than it did initially. Or gets promoted from a background event to a thing of great importance. Creators turn the audience's Genre Savvy against them and make them Wrong Genre Savvy instead. The same tropes that would have been boring if they were played straight have new life. Although there's a certain amount of having to be restrained about it, as too much of the audience being wrong can turn them against your work. (Unless the audience can be convinced they enjoy finding out all the ways they are constantly wrong. That takes skills.)
Ultimately, though, I settle on the same space that TvTropes does in defining tropes as tools, which are generally neither intrinsically good nor bad, but that using them makes them so. I like thinking of characters as collections of tropes so that I can decide which character is most likely to say something full of bravado and which one is most likely to be able to back that character up when their mouth inevitably gets them into trouble. Sometimes it means having to figure out how to work a certain character into the narrative because they have the right trope implementation to achieve a narrative purpose. And sometimes, as we'll see in the next piece, seeing characters as tropes can make it easier to transport them to new settings.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]Ideas come in all sorts of forms, and their implementations make for an infinite-seeming variation of possible stories working their way across the universe. Except that after a few goes-round, the new starts to look a bit like the things that you've already seen. Sometimes a lot like a thing before, sometimes only a little, but it definitely starts looking like a pattern. And the more media you consume, the more the patterns start to emerge. For some people, this marks the point where they start complaining that there's nothing new in media.
For the most part, though, what it means is that a person has discovered the existence of the trope. Tropes are the building blocks of stories. Every story has tropes in it, whether those tropes are played as intended, attempted to be inverted, subverted, toyed with, or otherwise. Those attempts can go well or poorly. Tropes come into popularity and fade away (or are actively thrown out from storytelling space, depending.)
At their core, tropes are a shorthand way of referring to ideas used in stories. If you have a character who is pure-hearted and blonde, that's a trope (Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold according to TvTropes). Redheads with spirited attitudes? Also a trope. Black-haired, pale-skinned beauties? Trope, as are the green-skinned space babes. Kid heroes being granted swords? Or pulling weapons from places weapons shouldn't be stashed? The storytelling convention that people can just pull things out of nowhere without having to explain it (or even when they do)? That's a trope as well.
Tropes are good as shorthand between people who share an understanding and can thus jump over the explaining part and get straight to the sometimes more interesting (or at least more fractious) discussion about how those chunks of storytelling are being used.
TV Tropes started by trying to classify the ones on television, because serialized programming using tropes played mostly as intended is a very rich corpus to start indexing with (and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the original target before the site exploded and expanded into other media, was full of various plot and storytelling devices). They're not the first, but any stretch of the imagination, but the nature of a wiki and the hypertext system of being able to densely link to other things made out a really effective way of cataloging and cross-referencing works and their associated tropes. It's probably easier to use than a paper copy of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther indices.
Why do tropes get a bad rap? Lots of things that are, have become, or were stereotypes are definitely in the trope department, and the overuse (or inelegant use) of tropes contributes to whether they are currently in use and whether their use is acceptable right now. Blackface used to be a societally accepted trope, and now it's likely to earn more condemnation than kudos. It was codified in the Hays code that people who behaved against the morals of the time be punished before the movie was done. It was standard industry practice that people in gay relationships would end in tragedy, often with only one (or none) of the gay people alive. Women still get killed, assaulted, or harmed so as to give a man enough pain or motivation to engage in the plot. There are plenty of tropes that get used that generally have terrible effects on characters and readers alike. So that's one reason.
Another reason is that there's an argument saying being able to spot a trope takes away some of the enjoyment of a series, because knowing your tropes and being Genre Savvy means that sometimes you can spot how a plot is going to resolve long before it does. The big twist isn't a big twist if you knew it was his sled the whole time. Or you saw the gun on the mantelpiece in the first act. Or even if you were paying attention enough in the first act to recognize the abrupt cut was significant and drew the correct conclusion from it (which is why I haven't actually seen The Sixth Sense past the first few minutes) or understood that the information presented about a new species of character could be combined with the information about the relationship between two characters to conclude the correct relationship between a character of unknown origin and one of known origin (which is how I knew whose Nobody Namine was by the end of the prologue to Kingdom Hearts II, but Squenix did themselves no favors on that mystery by using the Smurfette Principle for their main trio).
There clearly is some merit in the argument that knowing storytelling devices sometimes means that clever isn't. But what that seems to have engendered in response is creators taking into account their audience understands what those tropes mean and incorporating it into their storytelling. For example, The Good Place very much incorporates the structures of television itself to mislead the audience about the true nature of itself. Intricately plotted shows and mysteries, like Welcome to Night Vale, Doctor Who, or Steven Universe, take advantage of the audience's focus on one thing to slide in a small piece of something else that them comes back to the narrative later and, with new context provided by later information, makes more sense than it did initially. Or gets promoted from a background event to a thing of great importance. Creators turn the audience's Genre Savvy against them and make them Wrong Genre Savvy instead. The same tropes that would have been boring if they were played straight have new life. Although there's a certain amount of having to be restrained about it, as too much of the audience being wrong can turn them against your work. (Unless the audience can be convinced they enjoy finding out all the ways they are constantly wrong. That takes skills.)
Ultimately, though, I settle on the same space that TvTropes does in defining tropes as tools, which are generally neither intrinsically good nor bad, but that using them makes them so. I like thinking of characters as collections of tropes so that I can decide which character is most likely to say something full of bravado and which one is most likely to be able to back that character up when their mouth inevitably gets them into trouble. Sometimes it means having to figure out how to work a certain character into the narrative because they have the right trope implementation to achieve a narrative purpose. And sometimes, as we'll see in the next piece, seeing characters as tropes can make it easier to transport them to new settings.
