The inescapable force of Fantasy tropes.

Trope: a word, phrase, or image used in a new and different way in order to create an artistic effect

There is a lot of hate against certain tropes in the fantasy genre, and that hate has been hard earned over decades of lazy storytelling and cardboard, bland characters. Some tropes are more common and lazy than others, and some are so rare you wouldn’t recognize them as tropes. For a period in my life I hated tropes as well, until I discovered a wonderful little website called TVtropes. TVtropes (for those of you who don’t know,) is a site dedicated to the obsessive cataloging of any and all tropes, and I do mean all of them. Tvtropes takes anything I was ever proud of dreaming up and takes a big shit on it. If you’re a writer, and you want to realize you’ve never actually had a truly original thought in your life, go read some Tvtropes, it’s quite humbling. I guarantee you’ll feel like shit afterwards. DON’T DESPAIR! Writing comes from life and history. Since we have thousands of years of recorded history, it’s safe to guarantee that by now virtually everything’s been done before. I dropped my hatred of tropes once I realised that true originality is an impossible pursuit. That does not mean that creators shouldn’t find ways to combine the tropes, but tropes in fiction are as unavoidable as air.

I wrote Sins of a Sovereignty in part as a deconstruction of tropes. I’ve said before that the short story version of SoaS was written to attack heroism. As I fleshed out my story I intentionally waged a personal war on every trope which had ever annoyed me. Tropes can also be a useful literary tool. When the reader recognizes a trope, they immediately jump to a set of assumptions about said trope. In the first four chapters of SoaS we are introduced to the main characters, and each is presented as a common fantasy trope. By the end of each chapter, the readers expectations have (hopefully) been subverted.

I built the main characters off some of the most stereotypical fantasy tropes around in a conscious effort to subvert them. The brave veteran warrior, the snarky sorcerer, the evil queen, and finally the silver tongued rogue.

One of my least favorite fantasy tropes is attacked the most heavily, Medieval Stasis. Truth be told, I’m really rather sick of medieval settings. I hide this resentment in the beginning of SoaS, and it’s not until the end I show my true hatred of Medieval Stasis emerges. There are medieval fantasy works I like, mind you, but I enjoy them for character more often than setting.

TIME TO JUSTIFY MY USE OF ELVES AND DWARVES

Let me start by saying I know why people hate them. As a story’s feature they’re boring. We’ve seen them before, and the genre has endless possibilities, so why use them at all?

When I was working on SoaS in the early days I heavily debated just this. I wanted SoaS to be a short book since it’s my first novel, which left me 3 options.

Make everyone human: This posed a problem, since I wanted the plot to be centered on a have-vs-have-nots racial conflict. I could have made the have-nots blue, or given them feathers, but that seemed even more half-assed than using elves and dwarves.

Make a new race: I actually do this repeatedly in SoaS, they just aren’t heavily featured. I addition to elves and dwarves Amernia also has faelings and gilnoids, which serve as an amalgamation of fairy and troll myth. Also in Archipelago are giant praying mantises, troodons, sentient ant hives, and djinn. However, I wanted Amernia to be diverse, and adding four new races properly would have bloated the book by at least 50,000 words. That wasnt an option.

Use cliche races but make them largely irrelevant: Sure, the plot of SoaS deals with a brewing war between human and elfkin, BUT, the racial conflict is largely superficial. The focus in SoaS is not on race, (although many characters are racist,) but instead on technological development and character, Character, CHARACTER. I prioritize character over virtually everything else, and I don’t think SoaS would be a better novel if Calcifer looked like this.