Tropes you personally don't use

Civilization is a direct cause of mental illness, as well as being overrated for other reasons. We weren't meant to bottle up our rage and frustration and act like nothing is wrong, that's what makes things like Columbine happen.

I quite agree. Killing everyone who disagrees with us is a far healthier approach.

edited 4th Jan '12 1:31:29 PM by Iaculus

No offense, but if you feel that way, neither one of us is going to budge and we have nothing further to discuss.

I feel like there was a reference I missed there...

edited 4th Jan '12 1:37:02 PM by KillerClowns

I was reading Civilisation and It's Discontents earlier.

I actually agree that 'civilization' is worse for our mental health than hunter/gatherer-ish EEA, but I think the other benefits viz. lifespan, supportable population kind of compensate.

And even on the mental health count, malnutrition and the stresses of survival can really do a number on your noggin.

Continuing on, though, why the favouring of death over redemption? I mean, death may remove a problem, but redemption (or, at least, convincing the other person round to your point of view) not only removes the problem, but means you've got some extra help down the line.

EDIT: Come to think of it, even a hunter-gatherer society wouldn't solve Mayan's problem. I mean, you still have to get along with people without spearing them in the face every time you disagree about who's going to get the bigger slice of the wildebeest.

edited 4th Jan '12 1:51:38 PM by Iaculus

Amen.

Re: What bullies deserve:

I wouldn't say everything.

Here's a little personal fantasy I entertained for a while during a time when I was... less than mentally stable that's kind of an expansion of something that actually happened.

The true story is that I was having a really bad day when a few guys, who were normally pretty nice, started making the regular light-hearted locker room jabs. Unfortunately, one of them hit a Berserk Button, so I walked up, grabbed his shoulder, and pinned him to the wall. I just said, "enough," glared at him for a moment, then let him go and left to go sulk somewhere.

The version I occasionally fantasized about involved me breaking the guy's arm in two places, ramming him repeatedly into a locker door until his face was reduced to roughly the consistency of hamburger, throwing him on the ground, and stomping on his head repeatedly, all while laughing. I then turned to his friends, who'd been joining in the insults, with a totally psychotic grin on my face and said something along the lines of "What, no laughing? Since when do you not think hurting people is funny? Because I've got to say, I finally get how hilarious it is! So come on, laugh, guys! Laugh! Why the fuck aren't you laughing?!"

If that second one makes me sound like a total psycho... yeah, I had issues. I Got Better. As it happens, just going through the real story was enough to seriously freak me out for a while. Was it satisfying when it happened? Absolutely. The satisfaction lasted maybe half a second before the My God, What Have I Done? kicked in. Despite the usual content of my work, in the real world I'm actually more along the lines of a Martial Pacifist. I don't believe in any kind of physical force unless there are no other options, and with very few exceptions I find it hard to accept that anyone deserves to die. This is actually part of the reason I write Complete Monster villains: I have a really hard time killing off anyone who hasn't indisputably crossed the Moral Event Horizon without calling What the Hell, Hero?, not because it's hard to put the scene together, but because I'd have to justify it to myself and can't.

edited 4th Jan '12 3:21:52 PM by KyleJacobs

I myself don't like killing people, because, flippantly, every person you kill makes the universe less interesting. Nor do I like second-chances-unto-death a la Dumbledore, though; sometimes, particularly in cases of repeat-offending Complete Monsters, you just need someone to die. Of course, story-wise this is subject to the usual people-I-care-about bias; I consciously struggle to avert What Measure Is a Mook?, because I don't have the same saddened response to mooks dying that I do to a more fleshed-out villain.

Funny - I honestly have more empathy towards mooks of any sort then I do towards more significant villains, and always have.

Yeah, some villains can be redeemed. I actually like to see that happen. In a book I read recently (not saying what it is, not saying who the character is, though people who have read it might guess) a villain gets over himself and starts doing good after Becoming the Mask. The hero almost kills him, but another character talks him out of it, saying it would be pointless and cruel because the former villain has shown he's capable of good. So the hero gives him a second chance. The former villain never gets punished, but I still find it satisfying, because he stopped doing evil. Of course, not all bad guys can redeem themselves like that, but some can.

I have a tendency to only have my main characters kill in extreme cases - if the villain is an otherwise unstoppable Complete Monster, or in self-defense/defense of an innocent. More ambiguous villains tend to get defeated in non-lethal ways or turn good.

It's weird. I'm a Martial Pacifist too. Outside of the dojo, I only believe in fighting in life-or-death situations, and it's best to avoid fights in the first place. I don't like hurting people, or seeing anyone hurt. Yet I like action-adventure. I love to read it, and I love to write it. Repressed tendencies, perhaps?

I have to say that I don't particularly like having villains redeemed, because it tends to be done in a fairly cheesy way.

It can be cheesy and overly sappy, but Tropes Are Not Bad, and in some works it can be done really well.

edited 4th Jan '12 4:50:48 PM by Xandriel

Strange...I was thinking of doing a blog post on that.

-thinks about Darth Vader-

The only time I have anything like a redemption, it turns out that the redeemed was being systematically manipulated, the manipulator using his desire to get the nobles to stop ruining peoples lives in war to get him to contribute to a convoluted plan to bring them all down and set up the manipulator as king. He is not pleased, and ends up banding together with the protagonists to stop him. Similar setups can be used if the villain is some flavor of Well-Intentioned Extremist, or similarly someone who is not actually evil, just opposed to the protagonists. Darth Vader's redemption actually kind of stuck in my craw—he's the guy who killed off the Temple, for Christ's sake, he's been the archetypical puppy-kicking evil guy since IV, and he just decides to do a 180 in the last 15 minutes of the series? Doesn't really work for me.

edited 4th Jan '12 6:07:36 PM by alethiophile

I sense a fundamental misunderstanding about how Combat Pragmatist works and am thus summoned from the depths of the Intarwebs to correct it.

Combat pragmatism is not about the most efficient way to kill your opponents, but the most efficient way to neutralize them as a threat while accomplishing your objectives. At a one-to-one armed combat level, these two things are usually the same.

At any other level, they are pretty much never the same, from unarmed combat at the one-to-one level to armed combat at two or more-to-one or more level. Lethality is but one aspect of understanding conflict, and someone who approaches it in a purely lethality-oriented way will lose to someone with a broader understanding. There are far too many times were direct conflict is simply never desirable to begin with.

edited 4th Jan '12 8:52:20 PM by Night

I'm quoting multiple posts here. I'll assume that everybody knows what they wrote and what they didn't write.

Of course I feel sympathetic toward sympathetic characters. But sympathetic is a completely subjective term, and I tend not to write very sympathetic villains (even my Villain Protagonist characters tend to cross the Moral Event Horizon and die a horribly brutal death).

Remember the original topic of this thread (tropes you don't use)? Refer back to my list. Note how Heel–Face Turn is not found there, meaning that it is indeed a trope that I use. I don't count characters who are redeemed as either villains or antagonists for purposes of this discussion, since they've changed their ways by the end of the story. This argument is more about letting the Big Bad get away.

Ah, yes. The far too many scenarios that are completely uninteresting for an action lover to read or write about. Let's just say there's a good reason that that argument hasn't already been brought up, and leave it at that.

Also, let's end the derail before the mods start to think that I'm trolling. All of my posts beyond the first one have been to clarify — hopefully without coming off like a total Jerkass, but I'm assuming my reputation has probably been damaged in at least some people's minds — my initial statements, but the intensity of the argument and size of the derail are eventually going to attract the attention of the Powers That Be. And when that happens, nobody wins.

On this, at least, we're in agreement. There's no way this is going to end well.

Sounds good. Most of my questions, anyway, were cleared up by the big post.

I daresay there isn't. Proxy war is much like real war to the participants. You are treating conflict as if it exists purely at the personal level. There are many and varied tiers and types beyond man-to-man and to the death, most of which can remain quite violent.

Ask Jason Bourne about how non-direct confrontation isn't action-y at all. And while it's popular in modern combat to fight your battles from the top down wherever possible, there are times where there are more effective and efficient ways to neuter the Big Bad than directly killing him. I grant that the death of the bad guy leader is a traditional thing to do, but it's neither mandatory nor necessarily fulfilling.

After all, he's just a guy giving orders a lot of the time.

This is kind of making me feel guilty about liking action-adventure. I mean, is saying "I want to write about a heroic Action Girl" a bit like saying "I want to swim in a pool with no water in it"?

Uh... no? Why should it be?

I'm just a bit worried about the fact that I like action-adventure even though quite a bit of it goes against my Martial Pacifist principles. Then there's the whole Moral Myopia thing about the action hero beating up a bunch of mooks, but getting mad whenever one of their friends gets hurt.

I guess there are different reasons for getting involved in a fight (defending the helpless or your homeland, for example, or taking down a bad guy who just won't be reasoned with) but I'd hate to see one of my works show up on the Moral Dissonance page and I want to make sure that doesn't happen.

What I'm going for, in short, is Good Is Not Soft. And I want to pull it off successfully.

edited 8th Jan '12 7:53:06 AM by Xandriel

Well, maybe they can try for non-lethal methods and techniques, give their foes fair warning and a chance to back off, and so on. Sure, it'll make their job a lot harder, but all you have to do is compensate with extra badassery. Besides, where would the fun be if they never faced a challenge?

edited 8th Jan '12 9:39:52 AM by Iaculus

Yeah, but they'd still be hurting people, and there's always the chance that something could go wrong. I guess it's still preferable to just shooting them though.

My characters' attitudes tend to be more "avoid killing when possible" than Thou Shalt Not Kill, as stated above (when I mentioned extreme cases, and some villains being defeated in non-lethal ways). I'm just wondering how much fighting should actually happen, as well as whether or not it's an inherently bad thing to like action-adventure.

I'm thinking of going with heroes who always try the peaceful option first, and sometimes succeed (hey, it worked for Tavi in Codex Alera).

Of course, a good way to have a guilt-free action sequence is if the things you're fighting against/trying to survive are non-sentient. I mean, nobody's really going to object if you trash a bunch of remote-controlled oppression droids, or if you're busting your way out of a complex death trap, right?

This is, of course, assuming that you want lots of action in your story. Heroes who are good at avoiding fights are fine, too.