The Hollywood Formula wick check
I just rediscovered that I wrote The Hollywood Formula many years ago, and... well. It certainly isn't thriving, and in hindsight I'm concerned about plagiarism issues. (I don't remember any copy-pasting being involved, but it was based very closely off of an episode of Writing Excuses, using the same examples and probably similar phrasing. I cited my sources though, that fixes everything, right?)
I think there's a solid Script Speak page there still, but I'm not sure I could rebuild it on my own as completely as I think it would need.
Trope drafts
Light is generally a positive thing. It makes plants grow and sustains the ecosystem. Humans rely on it to see, and while they don't exactly photosynthesise they do require sunlight to synthesise vitamin D in their skin. But more than that, it's just nice to look at. Bright sunny skies, gentle candles, eye-catching glitter, radiant crystals, mesmerising spectacle, enchanting visions... wait. Some of those words aren't as good as they sound.
A subtrope of Light Is Not Good, which turns the light into a symbol or representation of addiction - to fame and attention, to material wealth, to hallucinogens, to toxic positivity, or just to one's own self-image. Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul can be just as unnerving when someone does it to themselves. Compare Fantastic Drug, Everything's Better with Sparkles, Pyromaniac - and Macabre Moth Motif, as the source of the idiom "like a moth to a flame".
Truth in Television, to the extent that people have been known to become addicted to suntanning, and seasonal affective disorder often presents as a yearly pattern of manic behaviour when days are long followed by episodes of depression during the months of less light.
- Jakou in Fist of the North Star 2 is addicted to light, to the point where he captures slaves to operate his light-generating machinery, motivated by his fear of martial artists empowered by darkness.
- Blue Sunny Day, by Jonathan Coulton, is about a vampire who misses the sunrise so much he decides to commit Suicide by Sunlight.
- Cultist Simulator threatens the player character with Fascination, which represents letting your obsession with the occult get in the way of trivialities like "remembering to eat and sleep" until you fully dissociate from your senses. It's particularly associated with the esoteric principles of Moth and Lantern, which can require Fascination in order to study them... and it can also be used to stave off its counterpart, Dread, the feeling of existential depression and resignation to the bleakness of mundane life.
- The city of Fallen London is deep underground, and many inhabitants of the Neath find that they are desperate for the simple touch of the sun again - even if it has a good chance of eventually killing them. Because sunlight enforces natural law, which is easy to break in the Neath by accident. Smugglers bring Mirror-Catch Boxes to the surface to fill them with sunbeams and sell at extortionate prices - sometimes cutting it with moonlight, which is safer but less satisfying and has stranger side-effects - and the cult-like New Sequence is trying to build an artificial sun, which must be working because its light has similar effects despite its sickly appearance.UN. THE SUN. THE SUN! THE SUN! THE SUN! THE SUN! THE SUN TH
- The Dreamers of The Secret World are universe-ending eldritch horrors with a motif of The Stars Are Going Out, and their cultists are sometimes discovered when they hint at a desire to emulate their gods on a scale they can manage - whether by peacefully meditating on the image of devouring the sun a single bite at a time, or taking to eating flies and imagining each one as a tiny spark, for practice.
Revolutionary groups, whether heroic or villainous, depicted as good for the community.
Revolutions are hard. Most people are understandably reluctant to risk their lives for a passionate speech and a noble cause unless they're sure it'll actually accomplish something. Someone has to
A rebellion that isn't prepared its own infrastructure ahead of time is likely to end up emulating the same system that it was supposed to overthrow out of simple momentum.
> POSTS (with @amathieu13)
- [1]
: I noticed a while ago that Bomb-Throwing Anarchists has a great description that starts by contextualising the trope in its historical origins... but then you get to the bottom and the only trope it can offer for contrast is Revolutionaries Who Don't Do Anything.- I feel like there's a little conceptual space left over between "indiscriminately violent" and "completely ineffective", but ironically I'm not sure if I can think of enough examples to figure out if they constitute a trope of their own. (I can find a few adjacent tropes - Commune, Velvet Revolution, Actual Pacifist.) Weird, and rather discouraging. Reading the examples of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists and Anarchy Is Chaos for subversions and aversions to see if there are any commonalities.
- [2]: In-between depictions are likely to be captured by one of the Shades of Conflict tropes or Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters.
- [3]: It isn't "in-between" that I feel is missing so much as "different focus". I know how common it is to have the viewpoint characters only show up to the revolution when the violence is about to start (or only learn about the conspiracy when it's on the verge of success, depending on the story), for the sake of tension and spectacle, but I would be incredulous if no one has ever looked for anything compelling in any of the work people were already doing before that - mutual aid, group coordination, public trust and awareness, sousveillance, legal protection, sabotage, refugee smuggling, and all the other kinds of underground infrastructure that ensure people have functional community services whether the status quo gets blown up or put down. (I have also been thinking about Writers Cannot Do Logistics.)
- [4]: I think I get what you're trying to get across. One idea that may work then would be a trope that depicts revolutionary groups as genuinely good for their community. This goes a step farther than Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters (and may exist at the same time as that) since it's not just saying that "depending on what side you're on, you may view revolutionary groups as good or bad", it's a depiction that focuses on how even if perceptions of the group differ, the groups are objectively helping and serving the people by providing the public goods/services traditionally offered by the gov't that the gov't refuses to provide to its populace or doesn't have the means to do so (through the specific actions you pointed out).
- Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters is the trope that's closest to that idea and may actually cover a lot of what you want to discuss. That said, that trope is written from the perspective that these community-serving actions are mostly done for practical reasons and not really altruistic ones; and the focus is on the portrayal of this gang to other gangs, not the contrast of helpful but technically criminal orgs (a revolutionary group often has to break existing law to cause a revolution) and malevolent or indifferent to the suffering of civilians government institutions. So I can see the use for a new trope to cover what you're talking about.
- [5]: Yes exactly! I forgot Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters existed but I've been thinking about this as Friendly Neighbourhood Anarchists in my head because Spider-Man; maybe something like Underground Social Services might be more specific though, depending. Back-Alley Doctor is probably relevant (offhand, Monster, Hotel Artemis, Johnny Mnemonic have organisations that would fit both if I remember right). If I can find enough examples for it, of course.
Examples:
- Leverage: Redemption - After the original Leverage ended, Hardison started putting his hacking skills to work running interference for human rights organisations. Much as he wants to crack open some security systems when the team gets back together for some more heists, after the first job he admits he can't afford to divide his attention between two projects at once - and keeping Sri Lanka's economy stable long enough that refugees can safely evacuate is a higher priority than playing Robin Hood.
Unclear if relevant:
- The Culture, I think, I've never gotten around to actually reading it.
- Periodic jokes in Existential Comics, unsurprisingly.
- Fallen London's Great Hellbound Railway storyline started exploring some of the internal politics of the Revolutionaries. There are three factions in the Tracklayer's Union, all of whom share a goal but :
- The Liberationists, including the high-profile Calendar Council, are the Bomb-Throwing Anarchists committed to "no gods, no masters" whatever the cost.
- The Emancipationists are just looking to establish a free and independent city of their own, but have no specific plans beyond that, even to prevent the tyrants they're fleeing from hurting anyone else.
- The Prehistoricists have starry-eyed visions of fully-automated luxury Neath communism, starting with reanimating mammoths to use as a workforce and a far-off dream of an entire command ecology where every organism has a place and a purpose. (Do we have a trope for techno-utopian futurism?)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail's mediaeval anarcho-syndicalist commune, presented as whiny and cynical as well as obnoxiously literate.
- The New Order Last Days Of Europe has the Divine Mandate of Siberia, a group of unimportant and remote territories who unexpectedly unify into a Christian Socialist government as a surprise mid-game shift in regional politics; it's a genuinely good place to live, especially in this timeline, but fragile, and if anything happens to Alexander Men the union dissolves.
- The Outer Worlds - Adelaide Mc Devitt has occupied the Botanical Gardens and turned it into a commune for deserters from Edgewater albeit one with a distasteful (if not actually immoral) secret. However, once she thinks she has everything to make it truly self-sufficient, she'll take advantage of her necessity to close the door to anyone else trying to escape the dying town, out of spite for their 'company loyalty'.
: Is there a trope behind the idea of an Immortal Animal? I think there's something about a creature that immortality doesn't matter to in the same way as it would to human characters - it isn't a part of history, and humans won't ever learn what its experience is like. It probably isn't capable of angsting about Who Wants to Live Forever?, and may not even understand what it's been blessed/cursed with. Thinking about how Baccano! remembers that the lab rat is still alive and well as part of the theme that stories are far too big for any one character, and Pirates of the Caribbean ensures Undeath Always Ends for everyone except Jack the monkey.When an adaptation or reboot tries to be more grounded and "realistic" (for culturally-relevant definitions of the word) than its inspiration. Stories are generally Like Reality, Unless Noted, and adaptations typically aim to at least be welcoming to an audience who aren't already fans; thus, the number of notes are reduced by bundling them together or throwing them out, and the effect is the setting becomes more like reality. Involves Doing In the Wizard and replacing it with plausible-sounding Technobabble, or providing the rules to explain it in a consistent way. Elements which can't be tempered like this may be explained away through Broad Strokes, All Just a Dream, or Through the Eyes of Madness. This is most prominent when it involves introducing consistent worldbuilding to a setting which didn't previously have any.
Done well, this can give the story verisimilitude and make it feel more grounded and immersive; however, the desire for the Cool of Rule is not universal, and may sabotage the appeal of Escapism or burden the narrative with distracting Info Dumps.
Not necessarily synonymous with Darker and Edgier, closer to the antithesis of Denser and Wackier. Often involved in Adaptation Distillation. Supertrope to Movie Superheroes Wear Black and Not Wearing Tights.
- The Dark Knight Trilogy focuses on Batman's war against organised crime and tones down Batman's supervillains and his own superhuman qualities. Ra'as al-Ghul's immortality is figurative, represented by his legacy and memory, rather than literally resurrecting himself through Lazarus pits; Bane's mask is simply medical equipment, not a chemical boost that lets him fight on Batman's level. The fantastical elements that remain, like the water-vaporising microwave emitter, are technological and justified as products of Wayne Enterprise's research department.
- Batman (Grant Morrison) put a lot of effort into canonising everything in Batman's history as true on some level; this included the most ridiculous parts of the Silver Age, which Batman considers the effects of long-term overexposure to Joker gas and fear toxin and doesn't like to talk about.
- Ultimate Marvel does things like turning Galactus from a stellar-mass humanoid in spandex to an alien Hive Mind (named Gah Lak Tus, to obscure the Canis Latinicus).
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power establishes new rules for the Elemental Magic and ties together an overarching plot where Hordak is the exiled vanguard of an invasion of Fantasy Aliens, while keeping a general tone of light-hearted humour.
Seymour Chatham proposed a model of this interaction, incorporating constructs from previous critics into three distinct levels:
- There is a real author of the story. This is who The Death Of The Author refers to - the person who may have originally created the story, but in completing and publishing it necessarily leaves it to stand on its own. The artist may have meant to draw a dragon, but their intention is negligible if everyone else thinks it looks like a snail.
- Even if the real author is ignored or unknown, however, the text itself contains an implied author, the impression the real author would like to give of themselves and the person the reader imagines the real author to be, filling in the blanks based on the context of their own experience and understanding of the world. This is a necessary step of interpretation, and two people reading the same story may infer very different authors.
- Beneath the implied author, there is the narrator, a character telling the story in-universe, or at least with one foot in it. Depending on the style of the story, the narrator may make themselves more or less obvious, and may or may not be the same as the voice of the real author.
- If the narrator is telling a story, however, there logically must also be a narratee, a character the narrator is talking to. In most cases, this person is silent and deliberately vague, but may be explicitly identified through tropes like Framing Story, Epistolary Novel, or Second-Person Narration.
- The story in a vacuum also suggests an implied reader, the Target Audience, someone whom the real author (and, for that matter, the real reader) imagines would appreciate and understand the story; like the implied author, this is a necessarily subjective interpretation.
- Even if the real author is ignored or unknown, however, the text itself contains an implied author, the impression the real author would like to give of themselves and the person the reader imagines the real author to be, filling in the blanks based on the context of their own experience and understanding of the world. This is a necessary step of interpretation, and two people reading the same story may infer very different authors.
- And finally, on the outside of the text again, there is the real reader, who may not be at all who the real author had in mind.
As originally imagined, this model applied only to literature; it's been argued whether it's meaningful to attempt to extend it to other media (is the view of the camera analogous to a narrator, or an implied author? does the way film is normally shot in first-person or close third-person completely erase the narratee?), and whether assumptions like "direct contact between the author and reader isn't part of the narrative" or "a story has a single implied author" are truly warranted. Regardless, however, it remains influential in structuralist and post-structuralist criticism.
Work pages
He is here forever dead.
Between the 600s and 900s CE, the Khazar Empire was a powerful state on the mouth of the Volga river. Sometime during the 8th century, its ruler the khagan had a dream, which he invited three philosophers to attend his court to interpret - a Moslem dervish, a Jewish rabbi, and a Christian monk - with the promise that he and his people would convert to the religion of whichever of them was most satisfactory. This event, the "Khazar polemic", would shortly be followed by the empire's collapse, and its outcome has since been lost to history - along with very nearly all material traces of the empire itself.
The Khazars are remembered by such things as mysterious keys, poisoned dictionaries, spy reports, tattooed skins, and the oral tradition of wild parrots. Nevertheless, the shortage of primary and even secondary sources has done nothing to reduce the fierce religious and academic debates over what actually happened. In fact, the debate itself is very likely responsible for the loss of material... and the traces that have survived have acquired interesting stories of their own...
The Dictionary of the Khazars is a novel of Postmodern Magical Realism by Milorad Pavić, written in Serbian in 1984 and translated to English in 1988 by Christina Pribićević-Zorić. It takes the form of an in-universe reference book about the Khazar Empire, filling in an obscure period of real-world historiography with the implausible and fantastical. The 'plot' - if it can be called that - involves the time period of the original Khazar polemic, but also the publication of the first Lexicon Cosri in the late 1600s which first attempted to compile Khazar history, and the academic efforts of the 1960s-70s that supposedly produced the modern Dictionary of the Khazars itself. Finally, the novel itself has "male" and "female" versions, which are identical to each other except for seventeen crucial lines, and a later "androgynous edition" which combines them.
Our tropes are jealous and they constantly blank out the tropes of others:
- Ambiguous Situation: The Khazar polemic occurred over a thousand years ago, and no primary sources have survived. What happened there? What did the khagan's dream mean, and which religion did he convert to? Was it even a single event, or is it better understood as a story merging several events of lesser significance into a single legend?
- Book Burning:
- The Lexicon Cosri was compiled of documents found in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sources, and consequently was censured by religious authorities of all three.
- The golden copy was eventually inherited by an anti-intellectual who slowly but deliberately destroyed it by using its pages to skim fat from his soup. Only some of its illustrations were preserved.
- Civilization Destroyer: Soon after the the kaghan's conversion, the Khazar state was destroyed by a Russian prince, leaving very few surviving artefacts of their culture, only mentions in foreign records.
- Interface Screw: Notes suggest that the golden Lexicon Cosri contained an hourglass hidden in the binding, which could be heard while reading the book in silence. A secret meaning of the book would be revealed if the reader turned the book upside down and continued reading from the back whenever the sand ran out.
- On a more ordinary scale, the 1691 Lexicon did not translate names or dates from its Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic sources... but it did still alphabetise them, in Polish.
- The Dictionary attempts to be somewhat more user-friendly, but is still divided into three dictionaries: Red, Green, and Yellow, based on Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew sources, respectively. Entries for the same topic in different dictionaries may contradict each other due to conflicting sources, and footnotes are marked based on which of the three they refer to.
- Lemony Narrator: The narrative voice drifts readily between academic xerotes and florid metaphor.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The original Daubmannus 1691 edition, the Lexicon Cosri, had two special copies printed with gold and silver locks, which were the only two to escape destruction by the Polish Inquisition the next year. The gold copy was printed with a poisonous numbing ink, which would kill the reader on the ninth page, while the silver "auxiliary" copy provided an explanation. However, poisoned ink does not explain why the gold copy was also followed by deaths caused by pestilence and drought.
- Not in Front of the Parrot!: Inverted. Generations of Black Sea parrots imitating each other are believed to be the only record of the now-extinct Khazar language.
- Proud Warrior Race: The Preliminary Notes describe the Khazars as "warlike and nomadic", "driven by a scorching silence" and brought to the Caucasus by "masculine winds, which never bring rain".
- Scrapbook Story: Indirectly - documents attesting to the Khazar polemic have been summarised and cited, rather than quoted. But most of those documents are themselves summaries of records which are now lost, obscuring the accuracy...
- Take That, Audience!: The editor has a rather biting opinion of "light reading".All these shortcomings need not be considered as a major drawback: the reader capable of deciphering the hidden meaning of a book from the order of its entries has long since vanished from the face of the earth, for today's reading audience believes that the matter of imagination lies exclusively within the realm of the writer and does not concern them in the least, especially with regard to a dictionary. This type of reader does not even need an hourglass in the book to remind him when to change his manner of reading: he never changes his manner of reading in any case.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The "Khazar polemic" central to the novel was inspired by the historically unusual mass-conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, which is usually non-proselytising. The Khazar culture that the novel portrays, however, is mostly imaginary.
- Wiki Walk: The reader is actively encouraged to use the Dictionary like any other reference book, reading entries in whatever order catches their interest rather than being bound to a linear narrative (or not even reading the entire thing, any more than one would read an entire encyclopaedia).
