Playing With Tropes

Since Tropes Are Tools, it's possible to manipulate, or "play" with them to control an audience's expectations and reactions. The most important thing to keep in mind when using tropes is that They Are Flexible .

There is a common belief that, unless a trope is being manipulated in a specific ways, it must adhere to a rigid, often literal definition. For example, if a character is a Gentleman Thief , he must be a cultured, suave, polite, well-educated aristocrat who is a thief that steals for fun. He cannot be simply high-class or rich, he cannot pretend to be a gentleman, he cannot be a conman or forger, and he absolutely cannot steal for money.

And yet, examples of these other kinds of "gentlemen thieves" -- including a few rare Distaff Counterparts! -- abound in various types of media.

This underscores the fact that this is the source of originality when it comes to using tropes. Two stories can both have Gentleman Thieves, but as long as they are different from each other, and all other Gentleman Thieves, they can still be counted as original stories.

The point is that all tropes have room for variation, both in their presentation and the way they are applied to a story. The only rigidity any trope possesses is that it cannot also be another trope. No matter how similar two tropes appear, or how much they might overlap, they must be completely separate.

Aside from natural variation, however, there are standard ways of playing with tropes. These are listed below, but it may help to understand them if I use examples, so more or less at random I have chosen the Warrior Poet trope. This is defined as a fighter who is also skilled in philosophy and/or art, and who applies it to combat.

So, without further verbiage:

Straight -- a trope is used in a normal fashion
***** During the Gulf War, Suzi, an infantry soldier, keeps a diary of her combat experience. After the war, she publishes it as her memoirs. (Combat influences her writing.)

Exaggerated -- a trope is used in an extreme fashion
***** Suzi publishes a military fantasy super-trilogy of nine volumes inspired by her combat experience.


Downplayed -- a trope is used in a minimalistic fashion
***** Suzi publishes a dry analysis of her combat experience as an article in Stars and Stripes.

Justified -- a reason is given in the story for using the trope
***** Suzi can only cope with the horror of war by writing about it.

Inverted -- a trope is used in a reverse fashion
***** Suzi discovers that the military flash fiction she writes in her diary while off duty accurately predicts what will happen in battle the next day. (Her writing influences combat.)

Subverted -- a trope is set up but does not occur
***** Suzi publishes a novel based on her missions as an elite black-ops agent working behind enemy lines, but she actually spent the war peeling potatoes.

Double Subverted -- a trope is subverted twice so it does occur after all
***** But when Suzi is kidnapped by guerrillas and taken behind enemy lines to be a sex slave, she kills her captors, sabotages an enemy installation, and collects valuable intelligence as she escapes back to her base, resulting in an even better novel.

Played for Laughs -- a trope is played straight but in humorous fashion
***** Suzi loses her diary. It's found by enemy soldiers, who after reading it write fan fiction of her combat exploits, making her into a Distaff Rambo.

Parodied -- a trope is used in a silly fashion
***** Suzi writes dirty combat limericks to get laid.

Averted -- a trope is expected but not used
***** Suzi's diary contains nothing but descriptions of desert flowers and landscapes.

Lampshaded -- a trope is played straight but a character in the story points it out
***** "Hey! I got a copy of Suzi's diary entry of her spy mission as a tavern dancer!"

Invoked -- a genre-savy character in the story tries to make a trope happen
***** The base doctor encourages Suzi to keep a diary, believing it will be therapeutic.

Defied -- a genre-savy character recognizes a trope could occur and tries to prevent it
***** Suzi's roommate encourages her to refuse to keep a diary, since she believes the whole idea of therapeutic writing is nonsense.

Exploited -- a genre-savy character recognizes a trope could occur or is occurring, and takes advantage of it
***** Suzi's commanding officer wants to be a literary agent after the war, and believes her diary would be a bestseller.

Discussed -- a genre-savy character mentions a trope that could occur under present circumstances
***** "You know, it's pretty much inevitable one of us will keep some kind of diary to keep from cracking up."

Conversed -- a genre-savy character mentions likely tropes that have occurred in similar situations
***** "In every war, there's always a few soldiers who can only deal with it by writing diaries."

Zig Zagged -- a trope is used in multiple ways, or subverted more than twice, or is just used in a bad way; covers miscellaneous variations
***** It's later discovered that Suzi's capture and escape was set up by the Illuminati, to make her a hero, and a literary success, so she would become a worthy sacrifice to Moloch, who wants to appoint her as his public relations writer in Hell.

There are other ways to play with tropes -- Deconstruction, Reconstruction, Enforcement, Implication, Playing for Drama, Untwisting, and Gender Invertion -- but the ones listed above are the most common.

Next week, I will list the Omnipresent Tropes found in my writing.