The Concept of Tropes

This is a topic that has been pressing at me for a while, and I am by no means the expert on the concept of tropes, because honestly I’ve only just learned of them over the last year. I would have been perfectly happy to go never knowing about these trope things that lead to further generalize the worlds and characters that people go to make, and just seeing it makes me feel so much like there is not a damn thing in this world that is original, except in the original way in which we combine appropriate tropes.

So to begin, we should first declare what a trope is, as there are actually two very different definitions:

Tropes as we are discussing them are any commonly recurring literary device, motif, cliché, or really anything even remotely connected to a story or the characters in that story.

You can find a lot of these tropes discussed on Tvtropes.org and if you’d like to see a few that are specific to feminist issues then take a look at Feminist Frequencies set of videos detailing some harmful women tropes.

With all of that said I actually don’t have a problem with tropes, and I can recognize many of the harmful issues around a lot of them while many of them I don’t even pay attention to because they are clichés I avoid anyway. My real issue comes with the very concept of a trope. And it is my same issue with the concept of titles and labels on people and things and so on. A trope at it’s very core is literally a label. The same kind of labels we place on people all the time. The same kind of labels that hinder so many people because they don’t think they can be more than that label or they think that they are limited by that label when they aren’t really.

And the worst thing you can do is to force the same system on to fictional works. Fictional work is already bogged down by the concept of the cliché and how everything we do for a fictional work already has to be based in a word system we created to be able to understand our environment. Add on tropes and you can literally generalize every single thing in a fictional work.

Starting with that mentality though, there are recognizable helpful components to having tropes exist.

1. It makes people aware of a pattern that is occurring consistently within multiple works. Both the bad patterns and the good ones.

2. If you never make people aware of the problem then it can never be fixed.

For this very basis, tropes are a good thing. You can point out multiple areas where all these books and shows are showing a damsel in distress or an evil demon seductress. And show that it is still happening today, in an era that many men would want you to believe that women are already equal or even better off than a man.

Being able to point to these things in the same way we label people makes people aware of something that is otherwise entirely subconscious. Believe it or not, despite what many people might want you to believe, the majority of time an author or a writer isn’t purposely going out and writing a bunch of terrible women characters or writing only white characters for their benefit. It’s because of the writer’s subconscious. Because they grew up on stories about men saving women, suddenly when they go to write a story they are pulling from that psyche and the story they go to create is the same thing. It’s the same thing with race, sex and so many other labels in our world.

By making the authors aware that they are doing these things, they will think about it when they go to draw something from their subconscious. And it’s not just authors, but everyone. Some people have an advantage of being able to see these kinds of issues before they use them, but when it comes down to it, every single one of us is misogynistic, racist, sexist, genderist, and a few others I can’t even think of. Why? Because we have GROWN UP in a society that is all of those things. And when you grow up in a society like that, you too are that.

The only way to overcome it? By making yourself aware of those issues, and snuffing them out when they appear. Are you creating a new character for a story? Let me guess, you pictured them as male and white? Well does it really change the character to make them Asian? What about the character would change if they were female?

Chances are, if anything changes about the character based on those simple changes… you are holding a lot of baggage about what a female is and what an Asian woman is specifically. Because, this is the brilliant part, the race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and class of your character doesn’t even matter. In fact there is a word for it: Intersectionality.

The intersectionality of your characters DO NOT MATTER. Your character can be the same person they are no matter what their race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, or etc is. You are simply holding to your own subconscious homophobia (or heterophobia), sexist, racist or genderist natures that have been ingrained in you from a young age.

Don’t worry, it isn’t your fault. It’s what happens with a society like this. What is your fault though, is continuing to hold to those beliefs and systems that were subconscious long after they have become conscious to you, long after you have become aware of them. Once that happens, it is most certainly your fault.

Bringing this back to Tropes, we run into exactly the same issue. All of what I said above could also be said for many tropes that exist (like the Damsel in Distress). These are all things that we have gotten so used to seeing in story-telling that we just naturally fall to them when we don’t know where else to go with the story, or if we need a story to go somewhere in the first place. But if you are aware of these, then you have NO excuse to still be using them. Start thinking outside the box. Do you want an old man character to be something of a mentor for your main character? STOP. Think about a little black girl as your main character’s mentor instead or someone their own age as a mentor.

One of the best ways I’ve seen this occur is with a part in The Fast and the Furious. The US Marshall part that ended up being played by The Rock was originally set to be a very cliché part that would fit Tommy Lee Jones (who has played numerous hard-ass marshalls/agents). But instead this trope was snuffed out with The Rock taking the part instead, and you know what? It made the movie so much more awesome by not following that cliché and trope.

So while tropes are great for being able to recognize this kind of issue, they also cause many problems as well. I’ve frequently seen people just completely write off really well done and interesting characters that stand on their own as a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ or ‘just another damsel in distress’. And it’s entirely possible that some parts of that character do fit that trope, but at the same time the character is also their own person and doesn’t just exist to move forward a plot. It’s because of these tropes we are marginalizing and generalizing a lot of really well done characters. This is especially done with female characters, who are then focused on more so than the writer who had created these characters (because in most cases it is a male writer).

When it all comes down to it, tropes may have a good component of showing people things they might not have been aware of (but usually only if they are open to see it), while also supplying just as many problems. Which is why I’ve given up on the idea of trying to avoid tropes all together and instead I flip them on their side.

Off the top of my head I can name a few tropes that is in my first book ‘The Real Folktale Blues’, but I flipped them around a bit.

Little Red Fighting Hood: This one tends to get a lot of shit because it is ‘updating’ the red riding hood story to be feminist, which isn’t true at all. The original red riding hood story (the one before Grimms) was actually feminist by nature. Regardless, my Red Riding Hood could be considered one of these, she hunts the wolf, has her cloak, is even an adult version. Except she isn’t also a Lady in Red and she doesn’t really take care of herself, in fact she has a lot of other people help her out, her friends.

Fractured Fairy Tale: I absolutely love the series ‘fractured fairy tales’ which I think is where this one came from, but it essentially would twist known fairy tales into something completely different. Generally, if you have a Red Fighting Hood, you probably also have a fractured fairy tale. And this one actually stays pretty similar, because I’ve never had a problem with messing around with past stories that we all know in fact its a common thing we see in ‘Urban Fantasy’ now.

The Fridged Woman: This one is a really terrible motif that often gets used for a male main character to seek vengeance or go after someone because their girlfriend or wife was killed (or even kidnapped to the underworld). As for my fridged character? Well… I make you think they were female through about half the book, then in a snap you discover not only was the fridged character male, but the person trying to avenge this fridged man is gay.

The Big Bad: This is the main villain of a series, the one behind all the problems. And I very much do have one of those, but honestly you kind of have to when handling a series. Without some element to tie all the bad stuff together you don’t have a coherent plot that will function. My big bad also comes with a couple other tropes mixed in that I can’t name specifically. Regardless I have not one, but two and both of them have been both bad and helpful to my main character. So I feel it is at least a little change.

These are the ones I can think of immediately, but I know there are plenty others I’m not thinking of. The point is, there is not a single book, show, movie, or piece of media out there that doesn’t have at least one trope and is more likely to have upwards of five to fifty, especially the longer the piece of media has been going on.

So while it is great to avoid these, also remember that you aren’t going to ever write something or make something that is completely lacking in these, and if you do it will probably quickly become a trope itself. That’s just the way people are designed. We are meant to recognize patterns. So all I can say is keep your eyes open and remember you can make the difference in the world, so stay aware of what you are doing. Don’t just half-ass things.

P. S. Based on my word checker, I apparently made up some of the words in this post. Like turning the noun fridge into a verb fridged, and Genderist, which is the equivalent of a racist but to genders.