I Know a Trope!

I had a long, slow week–but not a bad one! Hoping to write a bit this weekend, and I hope to draw a specific thing. 

Finishing up Borderkind by Christopher Golden. I finished Dark Winds on Netflix, so we’ll see what the next show is.

I Know a Trope!

In my Structure of Fiction course as an undiegrad, one thing that we learned about early on was the term “infodump.” If you’re unaware, an infodump is when a piece of fiction gives a noticeably lengthy piece of exposition, usually interrupting the pace of the story to give information to the reader (or viewer, I suppose–you can have infodumps in movies and television, too). The stereotypical example is a fantasy or science-fiction novel in which the narrative takes a backseat so that the book can explain some details about how the world works.

I mean, the example that jumps to mind is the first chapter of the first Iron Druid book, in which during the opening fight scene, the protagonist keeps stopping his narration to tell us about his life, how he’s immortal, why he named his store what he did, and show faeries work. If you’re trying to set up an exciting, life-or-death situation, explaining that much information throughout is not a great way to get us invested, especially in first-person narration.

Anyway.

We learned this term in class, but I think my classmates took this idea, this trope, a little too seriously. When we started doing workshops, whenever a story had any sort of exposition whatsoever, a few people would mark it as an infodump in their comments. In the story I submitted, when a character makes a throwaway comment about the weather, and people marked that as an infodump.

Sometimes, when we learn about an idea or concept, we start to see it everywhere. It’s like, when you see that documentary about Helvetica, the font, you start seeing how it really is everywhere. But it’s not always actually Helvetica. Sometimes, it’s another font that looks a lot like it. You just aren’t familiar enough with variants.

Or, you know, seeing puffins and mistaking them for penguins. Yeah, they’re both aquatic fowl that swim, have similar coloration, and live in cold climates. They’re also very different birds (and as a helpful zookeeper once pointed out to a child in front of me, puffins live closer to Santa Claus). 

Now I love TV Tropes, I really do, but a lot of people seem to think that ‘tropes’ are like the points on CinemaSins, things to mark wrong on a piece of fiction, or really easy identifiers for what a story is about. Think about how many (romance) books are marketed now as being “Enemies to Lovers” or “Found Family”. But those aren’t really good indicators of a story’s quality one way or another. If you like those things, okay, fine. I like big fantasy battles–there are a ton of crappy books out there with big fantasy battles!

And it frustrates me because sometimes people will have a vague idea of what a trope is, but not really a deep understanding of it, and just label something that vaguely looks like it as this or that trope, like with the infodump example above. 

I got in a Tumblr argument in which two people were insisting that the Heroes of Olympus character Reyna was a ‘spicy Latina’ stereotype, when… she’s not. Their evidence seemed to be that she was Hispanic, and that she fought people sometimes. But she isn’t highly sexualized, she isn’t outwardly emotional, and she’s especially not temperamental. In fact, her entire character is built around how she doesn’t outwardly show all that she’s feeling, and the negative effects that’s having on her psyche as her world keeps falling apart around her.

It’s another example of someone saying, “Hey, I learned about a trope! Now let me apply it somewhere it looks like it might, vaguely, fit” and what do you know, it doesn’t.

I’ll admit part of the reason I was thinking about all of this was because of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey review, in which she accuses the minority cast members of being “the Black Best Friend” trope–side characters of color who exist only to help the protagonists. Except they don’t in this movie, and in most cases those characters don’t help the main characters at all. I think Wilson has since retracted that statement because it really didn’t make sense.

This is a thing that you see a lot, though! I’ve certainly seen it a lot, as detailed above. People learn a trope and start using it as a label for everything, whether or not it really fits. It’s dumb, because it’s such a reductive criticism. Yeah, there are works out there that do have these problems, or just regurgitate tropes without anything interesting to them. Plenty of those exist! But just naming tropes isn’t criticism or discussion, especially if you prove that you don’t actually know what those terms even mean.

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