Tropes you've always wanted to avert or subvert...

Yeah, the tv genius needs to get deconstructed something fierce. Multiple times over.

Indeed.

And then there us other direction: Know No Nothing No It All. You are smart but not as smart as you think and you may not even know what you are talking about. Would a subversion be that, they characters actually knows what they are saying but they use a language where only those who are familiar with the subject in question could understand?

Vasquez Always Dies is one I want to, and am averting nicely.

I fucking hate Kid Hero tropes, and thus anything associated with it. I mean seriously, why would anyone think hormone filled kiddos can do better than your 25 year olds? I'm gonna make a fiction where those so called kid superheroes try to fight villains and ended up getting their brains blown off the rest of their body (literally) for God's sake.

Maybe even add scenes where adult superheroes try to fix everything the kids destroy (aside from their heads), to rub salt in the wound.

edited 7th Jul '16 5:15:59 AM by legonut031

The Cavalry Arrives Late i want to see a movie where they atleast arrive halfway through the story and actually manage to help too instead of being a Redshirt Army

@legonut031

edited 6th Aug '16 4:45:39 PM by inkoalawetrust

Placing the fate of the world or other people's lives into the hands of unstable fucking teenagers over better-trained adults makes my blood boil.

edited 7th Jul '16 5:41:34 AM by CrystalGlacia

@Gap: Yes, that is one possible Subversion. But there are others.

Curious thing you say that, since one of the things I am trying hard to avert is a very strict Competence Zone, with my cast going from teenagers to elders, and the most competent characters being generally spread between 20 and 50 years old, but younger or older characters still have chances to be useful.

Although I still try to make it make sense for the plot, so there aren't any children taking down conspiracies or ninety years old mortals in action scenes. It also helps that the story I am working on right now takes place over many years, and is neither fully based on action nor politics nor espionage nor personal drama, instead mixing many kinds of plots and subplots.

EDIT: and unlike you, I generally like to include in my stories at least one important character who is a young adult or teenager. Yes, many young people are immature, but there are also many who are capable, even despite their relatively unstable emotions, and I've learned that age and experience often don't make someone less foolish by themselves.

But even then, I generally like to justify it by either working with a more subjective definition of adulthood, or making it so that they are more or less forced to take part in the plot by circumstancies instead of jumping into the first adventure that they find, and later decide or find out that now that they fell down the rabbit hole, they won't or can't just leave and hope things solve themselves.

edited 7th Jul '16 8:17:21 AM by EternaMemoria

I don't hate teen characters doing things other than typical teen activities just because they're teens. If they're in a premodern living situation where adolescence doesn't really exist as a concept and they were forced to grow up faster and earlier than modern teens, that's not a problem. If they're genuinely competent in a particular area for one reason or another, that's not a problem. What pisses me off is when teens are inexplicably placed in positions of power or authority, for no reason other than to play to that YA thing of addressing teenage feelings of irrelevance, when there are older, more experienced individuals readily available.

And what also pisses me off about teens doing dangerous things like fighting monsters or dealing with supernatural masquerades is when writers insist on doing this with modern, first-world teens and pull a bunch of contrivances to let them do their supernatural stuff while still giving them access to their old lives and families for the sake of 'relatability'.

A lot of Urban Fantasy high school anime do this. It's what my friend was inspired by, and I got to spend my last few months of high school listening to her try and work out ways to get my teen characters' parents to 'let their kids go' so they could get recruited by this secret organization to fight monsters and get kidnapped by the organization's enemies and shit.

Which is not to say I have zero teen characters with any kind of stake in any stories. They just come from off-Earth societies that don't resemble our own, so they don't really have that much in common with modern teens, and nobody's life depends on them.

I see. Most of my stories don't really take place in direct paralels to modern first world western Earth society, and even if they did, my kind of plot generally relies on the fact that once you are involved, either you bring your friends and family with you or you leave them, so my few characters with "normal" lives are forced to adapt.

It also helps that I don't really do stories about a team of talented individuals joining together to accomplish a mission (or simply survive), so a character doesn't need to serve a function to be relevant part of the plot, only be able and willing to change it. In stories with set groups and goals a harder age threshold does make more sense.

edited 7th Jul '16 8:18:00 AM by EternaMemoria

Didn't the Kid Hero trope arise because people wanted to make child- and teen-targeted superhero shows, and thus make the protagonists of the age that children and teens would supposedly relate to?

I, just once, want an adult to find a portal to a fantasy world. I remember watching My Neighbor Totoro at 11 or 12, and actually shedding tears because I was going to be an adult soon. At 20, the thought still makes me sad. I hate the portrayal that children are the only ones with the imagination necessary to believe in fantasy, while the adults are straight-laced and unimaginative and "Stop filling your head with those dumb fairy stories." I want a story about twenty-something in their first apartment, or a middle aged suburban soccer mom, or and elderly person in a retirement home discovering the fantasy world they never, for a minute, stopped believing in. Growing up is hard enough, to make us lose our fantasy too

edited 7th Jul '16 10:13:19 AM by Cailleach

My 'big' project right now is about a man from the magical world Aitherion who suddenly becomes an immortal at 48 years old under very strange circumstances, and gets knocked onto Earth. After 3,000 years of living on Earth, never staying in one place for more than 40 years, and thinking he was doomed to a life of endless uprooting and name-changing, his story opens with him finding a way back home.

That also busts the Naïve Newcomer and Audience Surrogate tropes. Our POV character is a dude familiar with Western culture and idioms up to 1989 who needs to be caught up to speed with recent events after 3,000 of being away from home, but who also knows how magic and the different races of Aitherion work.

I would enjoy that.

At the same time, becoming and adult doesn't make you some kind of superhuman compared to before. I really don't see a whole lot of difference between the performance of a teenage superhero and a recently empowered 30-year old one who's been a baker all his life (the later might be safer to be around though. Maybe).

I can think of at least one example: Oz the Great and Powerful has an adult protagonist. Also, Mario Bros is a Portal Fantasy with adult protagonists.

I guess I'm sort of deconstructing magical-world tropes in my latest project? There isn't a portal, it's incredibly hard for the sorcerer to pull the main character through, there's no set Narnia Time scale because time and space are so disconnected between the two worlds, because it's that rare to have someone brought through. Also, in the second chapter, the sorcerer gets annoyed with the main character for calling his world "the real world", because the world he goes to is just as real.

I guess I'm also averting some age tropes by making them 20/21 instead of 17 or so. And I'm not sure if it counts, but it's not really a yaoi genre story, but the two male main characters end up together, so... I guess that's something?

Also it's a fantasy story without any fighting. There's a murder - offstage, to set up the whodunnit plot, but no fight scenes. None of the characters are soldiers or anything.

My "suburban soccer mom as fantasy protagonist" idea is totally happening. I'm going to write this so hard. And I'll do a role reversal where it's the kids don't believe in fantasy

edited 7th Jul '16 9:04:38 PM by Cailleach

Cowboy Cop. I hate this trope. Loose cannon cops are not flawed but sympathetic anti-heroes. They're dangerous maniacs who will break down a door over a bag of weed and shoot the owner's dog while they're at it. I don't sympathize with them just because they "don't play by the book" and "don't take crap from anybody." I want to see the Cowboy Cop go to prison, not get proven right at the end.

edited 30th Jul '16 8:32:27 PM by Lennik

To be fair, a brutal cop can make a sympathetic (but very dark) anti-hero, or at least a Villain Protagonist with relatable motives. The character itself is interesting, but used in a wrong way.

The problem is that too many authors forget the "flawed" part in favor of making a "badass" "hero" who is always right because he is the protagonist, real world ethics, law, morality and logic be damned. It is like a meta case of Tautological Templar-dom mixed with an irrational desire to present violence as the solution to complex problems.

Not all of these tropes are going to be in the same work I'm writing. These are just some ideas I have.

• Corrupt Corporate Executive - I want a corporate executive who actually has some reasonable points in his favor.
• Humans Are Bastards - Maybe it's not just humans who are bastards. Maybe everything's a bastard. Even then, there are always exceptions.
• Third-Act Misunderstanding / Liar Revealed /all related tropes - I think a good way to subvert it (or avert it, I forget the difference), is to have the guy saying "WOULD YOU JUST LISTEN ME FOR ONE SECOND SO I CAN EXPLAIN MYSELF?!"
• A God Am I - I kind of want to create sort of a good guy version of the trope, where the main hero gains a power to copy other people's abilities. As the story goes on he starts to see himself as less of a normal man and see himself as a savior, mostly because that's what he thinks people expect in a hero. This ends up making him a bit angrier that nobody would agree to his strategies, and believes that everybody is wrong, leading him to question his superiors and even his own teammates. One teammate starts to realize that he's growing a messiah complex, and it's because of his power. Eventually, the main hero starts to realize he's treated people harshly, which was what he hated other people doing, and decides to use his powers more responsibly.

edited 26th Sep '16 5:00:35 PM by DokemonStudios

Medieval European Fantasy and Fantasy Gun Control. There are other periods of history that could make for a good fantasy setting, but no one ever seems to use them and instead they go for a vaguely pre-Renaissance era. That's why one story I'm writing now is set during the lead nation's transition to all guns, with a few outliers here and there because transitioning (also, magic hammer)

I like it when a fantasy settings takes place during the tribal ages or what not. It very interesting and a cool I might add.

I wouldn't call this a subversion, but I want to do something different with Personality Powers. Like what if each power has a set of personality traits that go with it, but mages with that power didn't necessarily have the right personality? The best mages are the ones whose personality matches up perfectly with their power and therefore don't have trouble using their power at all. In a perfect world, powers would be given out Hogwarts house style, with everyone matched with the power that fits them the best. But you're stuck with what you're born with. You could be an x mage with a personality that would make the most powerful y mage, but you'll always be stuck as a weak x mage

That's actually a pretty clever way to tie in setting fluff with internal character conflict. You could even throw in some subtle messages about the importance of self-acceptance and whatnot. And it could also be interesting to see what kind of lengths said disadvantaged mages might go to in attempts to change what kind of person they are, in order to become more powerful.

In general, I always try to subvert appearance tropes. Especially ones for physical features you can't control, like height, or hair, eye, or skin color. Because not only does it perpetuate stereotypes, it also makes your story lose realism, in my opinion, because there's no way a bunch of people in a story meant to be realistic just happen to look exactly like their personality.