Is being Troperiffic a bad thing?

I tend to start from positive assumptions. Everyone is a decent writer unless proven otherwise. Everyone is working on nice stories unless proven otherwise. Everybody knows what they are doing unless proven otherwise.

And I don't think there are bad places to start a story. In A Country Of Men started with the writer wanting to write about how tasty apricots are and ended with socio-political analysis of a society. Burnt Shadows started from a vision of a woman with bird-shaped burns on her back, and ended with a great literary book. Starting a story from a type of coat might take the writer somewhere deep and interesting, for all you know.

@ AHR That's why you ask them to elaborate. Is the story bad even after that? If it's not,then I don't see the problem.

Why is that a problem? That's just a bare-bones explanation of an idea.

How would you like them to start out then? To me that line about the detective sounds like a pretty reasonable starting point.

edited 24th Jan '12 7:12:44 AM by fillerdude

We do ask them to elaborate, by asking them to avoid tropes. Hence, this whole argument.

There's a difference between "Don't speak in tropes, I can't read your post." and "Don't think in tropes, it will poison your story."

Don't think in tropes, it will poison your story.

Now, that I can sort of agree with.

I find the claim that that is even possible as very dubious, which is why that "you'll inevitably go beyond tropes" point I was raising earlier.

I just hate pointless scaremongering.

EDIT: There's no writing advice that goes "don't think in concrete concepts" or "don't try to work in any recurring patterns into your story". If you see a bad story, and you think it's bad because the author is "thinking in tropes" then stop right there, because that's nonsense, and you are missing the real cause of the low quality of the work. T Vtropes is a new site that simply gave a label to those concrete concepts and recurring patterns, and it's beyond me how that label ended up being identified as the enemy, and as a pitfall to avoid.

From my perspective, telling someone to not think in tropes is like telling someone to watch out for the eldtrich abomination coming down the road as they cross the street. Problem: there's no eldtrich abomination coming down the road. There's no point worrying about imaginary pitfalls, when there are REAL pitfalls to worry about.

edited 24th Jan '12 8:47:08 AM by fanty

This argument has exhausted itself as far as I'm concerned.

I am going to be blunt and state that I find it frightfully presumptuous for us to attach anime jargon to established literary conventions and then behave as though we're the final authority.

That I can agree with.

If you mean "Don't be overly conscious of using tropes", then I'd agree with that too. However if you mean "Don't think in tropes at all", then that is just...

weird.

Shonen is not a genre. I don't know what you think you wrote, but shonen is a demographic, comparable to YA, that does not inform the actual content of the work apart from the level of inclusion of mature themes.

I have no doubt that genre fiction is published more easily, but the thread isn't about whether sticking closely to a pattern is more publishable than not doing so; it's about whether cramming tropes into your work for the sake of the genre is qualitatively better. I'll readily confess to a bias against genre fiction, but the bias comes from genre fiction being trite and often simplistic and offering little valuable to the reader at the end of the day.

edited 24th Jan '12 9:59:08 AM by Gwirion

When I talk about shounen, I talk about Dragon Ball-style/Shounen Jump-style shounen, which is a genre. And at this point, I've basically said all I wanted to say, and anything I would say further on would be simply paraphrasing what I have already said. I've already repeated myself enough to feel a bit tired so... yeah.

The one thing that has bothered me about this is the fact there aren't enough stories written in tropes to prove or disprove this.

I'm also not sure that a causative relationship has been proven. More likely, it's the lack of knowledge, appreciation and skill in the basics of writing and storytelling that's the problem. Have these down, and you'll not have a problem no matter how many tropes you want to put into something — because you know how to make it work.

At worst, I think, it's a distraction from actually learning how to write, but then so are so many other things. I don't think it decreases the number of good stories in the world — rather, it just changes how those who can't tell a story fail at it.

Shounen Jump ran Death Note and To Love Ru, and currently has Harisugawa In Mirror World and Nisekoi running, as well as a sports series whose name escapes me, so no, that's not a good way to specify the genre.

edited 24th Jan '12 3:43:55 PM by burnpsy

Yes, but the reason that those are notable is because they are somewhat out-of-character for that publication. Furthermore, we all know what Fanty is talking about: The classic shounen action series. You could recognise it from miles.

Jump runs quite a few non-combat series on a regular basis, however. The generalization involving Shounen Jump is a prime case of Did Not Do The Research. Those examples came directly off the top of my head.

"Classic" shounen is another term that's simply an example of Did Not Do The Research. Shounen action did not resemble what Dragon Ball is like until people started jumping on the bandwagon when Dragon Ball came out.

edited 24th Jan '12 4:52:40 PM by burnpsy

I'm not sure if shonen action translates well to prose, if I'm honest. Make no mistake, it's the kind of pulp schlock I quite enjoy reading, but I couldn't imagine it working well outside of a visual medium.

Then again, maybe I've jumped to the wrong conclusion about what he's working on. I don't know if he's making a comic book or anything like that.

edited 24th Jan '12 5:03:43 PM by TheGloomer

To contrast some of the anti-trope arguments made in this thread, I have used lists of characters before, though they weren't lists of tropes. To give an example, one story had this character:

• A living suit of armor that was once a junior researcher in a tyrant's laboratories, before rebels threw her into one of her own experimental pits. She was never truly evil, working within the system to protect as many people as possible, and she retains her desire to help others despite both severely decreased intelligence and new murderous impulses.

I could probably have written her up as a:

• Animated Armor Horrifying Hero with Horror Hunger who's still basically The Messiah since Dumb Is Good

but I think I'd have developed her in the same direction either way.

(Granted, I now think that story wasn't all that good, but I think that was a problem of not editing it well enough.)

edited 24th Jan '12 5:39:51 PM by feotakahari

@ Morven Yes, that's exactly what we're talking about. It doesn't matter how many tropes you cram in your story, it all boils down to writing skill.

And to suggest that thinking in tropes encourages bad writing... it's something I just cannot believe. It is certainly possible, but it would just be one of the many things that distract from writing well.

I know I'm really late to this discussion, but here's my take. One must remember that Troperiffic is in fact a trope, and as we all know, Tropes Are Tools and are not good nor bad. I've personally read some works that are Troperiffic (i.e. The Dresden Files) that are fantastic and some (i.e. The Expendables) that aren't. Being Troperiffic is not inherently good or bad - it's about the work itself.

The discussion was less about whether being "troperrific" is inherently good for a work, and more about whether "I'm going to write something troperiffic" is a good attitude when producing a work.

It's obvious that tropes are likely to show up in nearly all works, and that the appearance of tropes is not at all a strike against a work in and of itself. (Maybe the execution of the tropes, or the choice of tropes, but not the very fact that a finished work has tropes in it).

The discussion got too heated and going-in-circle-ish, so we all sort of just let it die. Maybe I'll post again in this thread later, when things will have cooled off.

Building off that, Troperiffic stuff like Star Wars wasn't made with the intent to take as many tropes as possible and throw them at the work, they just ended up using a lot of those elements. Deciding that you're going to put as many tropes as possible into your work from the get-go is definitely not a good way to go about it, as demonstrated by Cliché Storm. Tropes Are Tools, not substance.

edited 1st Feb '12 11:38:59 AM by Firebert

edited 1st Feb '12 11:54:54 AM by fanty

Tropes Are Tools - it's up to you if you use the whole toolbox or just the screwdriver and one screw. Either can work, if you know what you're doing. End of.