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Tropes

Started by Demolition Squid, November 20, 2013, 04:05:49 PM

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Demolition Squid

Tropes are something I find fascinating. I love them because browsing tvtropes.org is an easy way to spark off new ideas. You can see the recurring themes and devices used in all forms of media and stories. You can usually also find great examples of these common elements being subverted, inverted or averted, and even if you're not familiar with the examples themselves, there's more often than not enough context that you can imagine how these things played out in those instances.

Knowing your audience and their expectations is really important when you're creating anything, and tropes are an awesome tool for helping point out recurring elements you might have missed. They aren't a substitute for a wide experience of the media you're interested in, of course, but as a supplementary tool they help distil down and make explicit a lot of things that might otherwise not be entirely obvious.

But at the same time, I find it interesting that tropes have become so popular now. These tricks and elements aren't new, but as far as I know there wasn't a real attempt to codify so many of them before now. Writers often worry about coming across as cliche, and it is an old old maxim that there's only 7-8 stories. I wonder if tropes are a symptom of the increasing desire to categorize and pigeonhole everything, attempting to have a label in order to understand every aspect of storytelling not unlike we try to categorize the material world.

And then I started wondering about how this greater push to understand - or at least codify - the tools we use to build narratives in our fiction might have influence on the way we use narratives in the rest of our life. The fact that the news works hard to build a coherent and easy to understand narrative (even - or especially - when the reality is far more complicated) is quite well understood, and everyone tends to have a story about themselves, where they came from, what sort of person they are and where they are going... we use labels of all sorts a lot. I'm wondering if a deeper understanding of how we construct our fiction might help us understand the fictions we build unconsciously as well as those we design intentionally.
Vast and Roaring Nipplebeast from the Dawn of Soho

hooplala

I think it's important to point out that tvtropes.com makes a clear distinction between tropes and cliches.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns." — Bob Dylan?

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman

LMNO

Every day, we get closer to making "Darmok and Jalal, at Tenagra" a reality.

Junkenstein

Part of what interests me about Tropes is the potential for essentially AI fiction. It's already possible to construct a tale from random clicking and a bit of fleshing out. Not a good tale, the point is it's possible. Add a generation or two to procedurally generated content and I can see the potential for a game to be literally unique every play-through. Not just low level Left path/right path but actually completely different stories. With the rise of streaming the first thing to do this well will probably make a killing.

QuoteI'm wondering if a deeper understanding of how we construct our fiction might help us understand the fictions we build unconsciously as well as those we design intentionally.

More on topic, I'm going to guess at a solid "Yes". Fiction has been used to demonstrate a variety of emotions and motivations and this has been used in a school environment to discuss these things in a "safe" environment. I'm guessing this is because it's easier to discuss a fiction account of something rather than an example in reality. There's probably an empathy side to this too. Need to think about that a bit more.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on November 20, 2013, 04:38:01 PM
Every day, we get closer to making "Darmok and Jalal, at Tenagra" a reality.

We could probably start doing this now anyway. There's certainly enough common events both in real life and in literature.

Zimmerman, for example, could be used for a bunch of things.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.