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snowflake_challenge, and this one is geared more toward those of us who like to talk about the building blocks, the character types, and the storytelling pathways that link and underlie any given specific story being told.
There probably aren't as many people using Joseph Campbell as their entry point into talking about tropes and trope language, mostly because they've found the idea of the momomyth entirely reductive, culturally insensitive, and very specific to a certain tradition of storytelling. This is what happens when you attempt to universalize something that really isn't unifiable in any meaningful way.
I've seen bandied around, instead, that there are seven main story times, and that certainly gives us more room to work with if we want to try and reduce all stories down to a limited number of main plot lines. Even then, there are still expansive indexes that try to collate and catalog things according to their similarities. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folklore and fairy tales classifies according to the tropes present in the story, and tries to group like next to like, so that you have "talking animals" all together, and then different talking animals as subtypes. There's also TVTropes, the all-consuming pop-culture wiki, which uses tropes as its primary subject index organization, with specific types of tropes classified under more umbrella tropes and so forth. (Along with pages for works and their tropes, tropes associated with creators, and so forth, because one of the things that happens with hypertext is that you can just build your concordances right alongside the main material, so long as you have space and people willing to do it.)
This isn't to say that there are no similarities between stories as they get told. The yonkoma and the U.S. newspaper comic format are clearly linked to each other, and it's not that hard to discover the ways that the United States and Japan are linked through war, imperialism, and cultural exchange. Tezuka based his work on Disney, and in turn, plenty of U.S.-based artists base their style on one or another manga aritst's style. There are definitely similarities between stories, and you can, if you want to be reductive, simply reduce them down to the collection of tropes that they use in the execution of telling the story. (There's at least one criticism of TVTropes that says it basically does this, and allows people to be reductive about the stories they see, without appreciating the specifics of how the tropes are executed. TVTropes itself uses a trio of statements as the way they push back against that: Tropes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools.)
As people who both consume and create media, transformative fandom and professional creators need a shared langauge to describe what we're seeing, and what parts we liked, and what parts we didn't like, and what parts seem to be a favorite of this author compared to others. As an information professional, I need that kind of language to assist the people asking me for recommendations, or what the title of that work was that they can't actually remember, but they can describe pretty well. I need not only to understand the language of the person talking to me, I need to be able to translate that into a controlled vocabulary so that I can ask machines to find me things that would be similar to what's being asked for, or that might surface that title based on the elements in the controlled vocabulary that I can leverage. Controlled vocabularies are both exact and inexact at the same time, and they can sometimes zero in swiftly on something good or leave someone through vittra warrens without ever getting anywhere close to what they want. Anyone who has tried to navigate the tag system on AO3 knows this well, and has also dealt with the additional problem of folksonomies - everyone agrees on what the core of any given tag means, but they don't agree at all about whether one specific work is part of that core sufficiently to be included as soon as that work moves some amount of distance away from the reference implementation of that tag.
So, tropes, tags, folksonomies, and even taxonomies and classification systems are all going to be messy, to greater and lesser degrees, because they are things created by people as a way of attempting to establish boundaries, and people are going to find all kinds of ways of creating works that straddle boundary lines, or jump back and forth between them, or otherwise refuse to be neatly classified in one space or another. Our favorite tropes are often, more specifically, our favorite implementations of tropes, and we've excluded certain ways that those tropes are also appropriately used in other material that we're not nearly as fond of.
I tend to lean toward comedy over horror, and so the things I like to see in any given work are about how the comedy happens, rather than appreciating the skill at tension-building, releasing, and otherwise managing the amount of suspense and dread in a work. Mostly because I dislike jump scares, and jump scares are one of the more important tropes of the horror genre, even though I'm sure you could point me at a hundred works that are great horror that don't use a single jump scare in them. I also don't like stories where the bad guy unambiguously wins, and sometimes that's also a part of horror stories, as much as it is part of our lives. Somertimes the bad guy wins, sometimes the murderer escapes without consequences, sometimes what was supposed to be a permanent solution is only a temporary one, because there's a sequel hook and the creators intend for it to be a franchise. None of these things are inherently wrong about storytelling, but they're not what I want to have as part of the media I consume. I don't like being scared, so I tend not to look for media that's going to scare me. Do I still run into it? All the time, because the media genres I do frequent often borrow from the genres next door. Science fiction and horror are not so far apart as both of them might want to believe, since they both work with the alien and often reflect the horrors of our own world back at us, but with just enough cover for us to beleive that we're looking in on something else entirely. (I happen to like a skilled execution of this idea, where you're already pretty far in before you realize what someone might have been drawing on in our own world to power the supposedly strange world that I'm reading.)
I feel like some of my favorite tropes might read like one of those "In This Household, We Believe" posters or rundowns. We believe in three-dimensional characters, especially those who are or who are meant to be read as women, and that the Bechdel Test should be considered the floor, rather than the pinnacle. We believe in well-executed satire. We believe that musical numbers should not be shied away from when warranted. We believe that Nice Is Different Than Good, and that the two should not be confused. We Hate Illinois Nazis. (And every other kind of Nazis.) We believe that superhero comics and pornography both use pretty bodies and broad character types to tell their stories, and that both of these things are considered features, rather than drawbacks. We believe that tropes are meant to be manipulated far more than they are meant to be played straight. We believe that Tropes Are Tools.
We believe that Scroobius Pip's list of commandments, both in the version with Posodnus and the one without, are good maxims to live by, even if we will always struggle with the one about not buying Coca-Cola products or Nestlé products, because they own so much of our lives.
We believe that suspension of disbelief is a vital thing, and not to squander it uselessly, because sometimes you really do need the audience to believe that two girls kissing was the reason why the planet-destroying superweapon powered down. We believe that sometimes the girl with all the expectations placed on her gets to have a breakdown about it. We believe that the narrator does not have to be omnipotent, or even reliable, to tell a good story. We believe that all works should not fail the Sexy Lamp test, and especially should not fail the Sexy Lamp test on their supposed protagonist. We believe that there is no wrong perspective to interrogate any text from. (But we also believe that some of those perspectives will need to provide extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims.) We believe in not harshing another person's squee, in not yucking someone else's yum, in the Kink Tomato (YKINMKATO), and that the back button is your friend and will save you from leaving comments that you will later regret. We believe that some fans are here for the power fantasy of being atop powerful dragons that detroy invading spores, that some people are here for the sexual fantasy of not having to admit that they have desires and can instead just be swept along on an irresistible urge from their dragon, and that some of us are here to poke at the political structures of the worldbuilding and make snarky commentary about how gold dragons distributing sexual favors is no basis for building a society, among other flaws that the worldbuilding has and expects you to not notice because you're too busy admiring the dragons and imagining yourself as being one of the people in power who doesn't have to worry about what subsistence life would be like on that planet.
There are so many good stories that I've been exposed to, and so many bad ones, as well, that I have a reasonably good vocabulary to describe what I like and what I don't, and to point out where the boundaries are that someone could suggest a work to expand what I like to include. I've seen enough executions and implementations of tropes, subversions, inversions, playing with, and all the rest, that I can use that same language to describe what I'm seeing and hearing. It doesn't take away from the enjoyment of what I'm reading or seeing, and it gives me a shared vocabulary to talk with other fans, as well, about things, when those fans are there for more than just the pretty people to look at. (And that there's nothing wrong with being three to look at the pretty people.) Ultimately, being as profoundly multi-fannish as I am means that I don't necessarily have "bulletproof" tropes that will guarantee that I enjoy a work without fail, but if you chart what I've watched and enjoyed over time, you can get an idea of the things that I will gravitate toward more and determine some preferences from there. Even then, I can still be persuaded to enjoy a piece of media based on how you describe it to me in terms of the execution of its tropes. Because that execution is what people like about any given piece of media, not the trope itself.
snowflake_challenge, and this one is geared more toward those of us who like to talk about the building blocks, the character types, and the storytelling pathways that link and underlie any given specific story being told.Challenge #9
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
There probably aren't as many people using Joseph Campbell as their entry point into talking about tropes and trope language, mostly because they've found the idea of the momomyth entirely reductive, culturally insensitive, and very specific to a certain tradition of storytelling. This is what happens when you attempt to universalize something that really isn't unifiable in any meaningful way.
I've seen bandied around, instead, that there are seven main story times, and that certainly gives us more room to work with if we want to try and reduce all stories down to a limited number of main plot lines. Even then, there are still expansive indexes that try to collate and catalog things according to their similarities. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folklore and fairy tales classifies according to the tropes present in the story, and tries to group like next to like, so that you have "talking animals" all together, and then different talking animals as subtypes. There's also TVTropes, the all-consuming pop-culture wiki, which uses tropes as its primary subject index organization, with specific types of tropes classified under more umbrella tropes and so forth. (Along with pages for works and their tropes, tropes associated with creators, and so forth, because one of the things that happens with hypertext is that you can just build your concordances right alongside the main material, so long as you have space and people willing to do it.)
This isn't to say that there are no similarities between stories as they get told. The yonkoma and the U.S. newspaper comic format are clearly linked to each other, and it's not that hard to discover the ways that the United States and Japan are linked through war, imperialism, and cultural exchange. Tezuka based his work on Disney, and in turn, plenty of U.S.-based artists base their style on one or another manga aritst's style. There are definitely similarities between stories, and you can, if you want to be reductive, simply reduce them down to the collection of tropes that they use in the execution of telling the story. (There's at least one criticism of TVTropes that says it basically does this, and allows people to be reductive about the stories they see, without appreciating the specifics of how the tropes are executed. TVTropes itself uses a trio of statements as the way they push back against that: Tropes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools.)
As people who both consume and create media, transformative fandom and professional creators need a shared langauge to describe what we're seeing, and what parts we liked, and what parts we didn't like, and what parts seem to be a favorite of this author compared to others. As an information professional, I need that kind of language to assist the people asking me for recommendations, or what the title of that work was that they can't actually remember, but they can describe pretty well. I need not only to understand the language of the person talking to me, I need to be able to translate that into a controlled vocabulary so that I can ask machines to find me things that would be similar to what's being asked for, or that might surface that title based on the elements in the controlled vocabulary that I can leverage. Controlled vocabularies are both exact and inexact at the same time, and they can sometimes zero in swiftly on something good or leave someone through vittra warrens without ever getting anywhere close to what they want. Anyone who has tried to navigate the tag system on AO3 knows this well, and has also dealt with the additional problem of folksonomies - everyone agrees on what the core of any given tag means, but they don't agree at all about whether one specific work is part of that core sufficiently to be included as soon as that work moves some amount of distance away from the reference implementation of that tag.
So, tropes, tags, folksonomies, and even taxonomies and classification systems are all going to be messy, to greater and lesser degrees, because they are things created by people as a way of attempting to establish boundaries, and people are going to find all kinds of ways of creating works that straddle boundary lines, or jump back and forth between them, or otherwise refuse to be neatly classified in one space or another. Our favorite tropes are often, more specifically, our favorite implementations of tropes, and we've excluded certain ways that those tropes are also appropriately used in other material that we're not nearly as fond of.
I tend to lean toward comedy over horror, and so the things I like to see in any given work are about how the comedy happens, rather than appreciating the skill at tension-building, releasing, and otherwise managing the amount of suspense and dread in a work. Mostly because I dislike jump scares, and jump scares are one of the more important tropes of the horror genre, even though I'm sure you could point me at a hundred works that are great horror that don't use a single jump scare in them. I also don't like stories where the bad guy unambiguously wins, and sometimes that's also a part of horror stories, as much as it is part of our lives. Somertimes the bad guy wins, sometimes the murderer escapes without consequences, sometimes what was supposed to be a permanent solution is only a temporary one, because there's a sequel hook and the creators intend for it to be a franchise. None of these things are inherently wrong about storytelling, but they're not what I want to have as part of the media I consume. I don't like being scared, so I tend not to look for media that's going to scare me. Do I still run into it? All the time, because the media genres I do frequent often borrow from the genres next door. Science fiction and horror are not so far apart as both of them might want to believe, since they both work with the alien and often reflect the horrors of our own world back at us, but with just enough cover for us to beleive that we're looking in on something else entirely. (I happen to like a skilled execution of this idea, where you're already pretty far in before you realize what someone might have been drawing on in our own world to power the supposedly strange world that I'm reading.)
I feel like some of my favorite tropes might read like one of those "In This Household, We Believe" posters or rundowns. We believe in three-dimensional characters, especially those who are or who are meant to be read as women, and that the Bechdel Test should be considered the floor, rather than the pinnacle. We believe in well-executed satire. We believe that musical numbers should not be shied away from when warranted. We believe that Nice Is Different Than Good, and that the two should not be confused. We Hate Illinois Nazis. (And every other kind of Nazis.) We believe that superhero comics and pornography both use pretty bodies and broad character types to tell their stories, and that both of these things are considered features, rather than drawbacks. We believe that tropes are meant to be manipulated far more than they are meant to be played straight. We believe that Tropes Are Tools.
We believe that Scroobius Pip's list of commandments, both in the version with Posodnus and the one without, are good maxims to live by, even if we will always struggle with the one about not buying Coca-Cola products or Nestlé products, because they own so much of our lives.
We believe that suspension of disbelief is a vital thing, and not to squander it uselessly, because sometimes you really do need the audience to believe that two girls kissing was the reason why the planet-destroying superweapon powered down. We believe that sometimes the girl with all the expectations placed on her gets to have a breakdown about it. We believe that the narrator does not have to be omnipotent, or even reliable, to tell a good story. We believe that all works should not fail the Sexy Lamp test, and especially should not fail the Sexy Lamp test on their supposed protagonist. We believe that there is no wrong perspective to interrogate any text from. (But we also believe that some of those perspectives will need to provide extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims.) We believe in not harshing another person's squee, in not yucking someone else's yum, in the Kink Tomato (YKINMKATO), and that the back button is your friend and will save you from leaving comments that you will later regret. We believe that some fans are here for the power fantasy of being atop powerful dragons that detroy invading spores, that some people are here for the sexual fantasy of not having to admit that they have desires and can instead just be swept along on an irresistible urge from their dragon, and that some of us are here to poke at the political structures of the worldbuilding and make snarky commentary about how gold dragons distributing sexual favors is no basis for building a society, among other flaws that the worldbuilding has and expects you to not notice because you're too busy admiring the dragons and imagining yourself as being one of the people in power who doesn't have to worry about what subsistence life would be like on that planet.
There are so many good stories that I've been exposed to, and so many bad ones, as well, that I have a reasonably good vocabulary to describe what I like and what I don't, and to point out where the boundaries are that someone could suggest a work to expand what I like to include. I've seen enough executions and implementations of tropes, subversions, inversions, playing with, and all the rest, that I can use that same language to describe what I'm seeing and hearing. It doesn't take away from the enjoyment of what I'm reading or seeing, and it gives me a shared vocabulary to talk with other fans, as well, about things, when those fans are there for more than just the pretty people to look at. (And that there's nothing wrong with being three to look at the pretty people.) Ultimately, being as profoundly multi-fannish as I am means that I don't necessarily have "bulletproof" tropes that will guarantee that I enjoy a work without fail, but if you chart what I've watched and enjoyed over time, you can get an idea of the things that I will gravitate toward more and determine some preferences from there. Even then, I can still be persuaded to enjoy a piece of media based on how you describe it to me in terms of the execution of its tropes. Because that execution is what people like about any given piece of media, not the trope itself.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-17 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-17 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-17 09:43 pm (UTC)This was another fun and engaging read! As for specifics, I agree with you on ways to classify stories and tropes; pretending that there's a single way to do so will end up with you trying to stuff stories in your classification (and it'll soon become too ambitious), but some kind of classification (especially a user-generated one) is quite handy to have. Letting users do it does have the problem of folksonomies, as you note, and the readers don't always have the same idea of what tropes a work contains as the authors, but it's a quite good solution (also because it allows new categories to be made).
I did think that tropes were bad for a little while, which was presumably because I confused them with clichés; now I know a lot better, thankfully, and I can appreciate them as building blocks for a story, rather than things to be avoided (however one would manage to do so...).
The "we believe" list is a good way to summarise your position, I find (and good reference to Pern!). I especially like this:
There should be space for differing theories, after all, even if they don't have to get the same attention as more mainstream ones.
Finally, I also care more about the specific execution of an idea than the tropes that went into it; the latter can't tell me much about what it will be like, after all.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-17 10:00 pm (UTC)Tropes can seem to be bad, but TVTropes also helps you get over that idea pretty quickly once you browse a few pages.
Specific execution is important, and so is being able to look at differing theories and give them the importance they get, based on how they present themselves.
Thoughts
Date: 2026-01-17 10:54 pm (UTC)Oh, me me! The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Many Faces of the God. All my books on world mythology. The Aarne-Thompson Index.
Ever see the game Call to Adventure? It is a character-building board game that is like ... Mr. Potatohead with tropes. You start with a character card and stick tropes on it. :D
>> they've found the idea of the momomyth entirely reductive, culturally insensitive, and very specific to a certain tradition of storytelling.<<
I would say rather that the Hero's Journey is an example of a story that appears really often in many variations around the world. But it's not the only heroic story that can be told, and doesn't fit all myths.
>>As people who both consume and create media, transformative fandom and professional creators need a shared langauge to describe what we're seeing, and what parts we liked, and what parts we didn't like, and what parts seem to be a favorite of this author compared to others. <<
I agree.
>> I tend to lean toward comedy over horror, and so the things I like to see in any given work are about how the comedy happens, rather than appreciating the skill at tension-building, releasing, and otherwise managing the amount of suspense and dread in a work. <<
You know, they all deal in surprise? Humor is the unexpected when it's silly. Horror is the unexpected when it's scary. Hurt/comfort in its proper ratchet form is all about tension and release.
>>Mostly because I dislike jump scares, and jump scares are one of the more important tropes of the horror genre, even though I'm sure you could point me at a hundred works that are great horror that don't use a single jump scare in them. <<
Horror has many branches, only some of which rely on jump scares or buckets of blood, and those types rarely interest me. But one of the most disturbing scenes I've ever watched is from Sixth Sense and is quite calm. A boy says, "Come on, I'll show you where my dad keeps his gun," and as he turns away, you see that half his head has been blown away. Unexpected, quiet, but deeply memorable.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-18 09:48 am (UTC)I presume it has to do with the large amount of users, which makes it easy for consensus about categories to emerge (and to provide sub-categories); in any case, it's good to hear that the tags function so well (as I'm not very familiar with AO3).
Tropes can seem to be bad, but TVTropes also helps you get over that idea pretty quickly once you browse a few pages.
Yeah, I've spent more than enough time over there to get rid of that idea (and I really like how extensive it is!).
That's indeed a quite good way of engaging with theories, and one I could probably use a bit more, as I tend to be a bit too of credulous of them.