Episode 2 - Tropes

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I'm Dave Storhild. And I'm Alexander Wales. And today we're going to be talking about tropes in storytelling and rational fiction. So tropes are the... grammar and vocabulary of storytelling they're the little bits and pieces that you grab from other places to build your story with and they can be big like your whole plot can be just one trope or they can be small like a tiny bit of characterization some examples when a scientist says the hypervective flex disorder is

flaring up again, and someone says, in English, Doc, and then they give it to you in English. That's a trope. It's not a very good one. But it's there, and you can use that in your story. Countdown timers will always stop at the last possible second. That's also very common, and it ratchets up the tension. I don't think that's as bad of one. Right, so troops can be a character archetype.

Tropes can be a cliche in storytelling. Tropes can be a setting. Tropes can be a plot. A trope is just some part of a story that is either seen often enough that it gets its own name and gets its own identifying language, or it's something that... is so useful to storytelling or so common in storytelling that enough authors recognize it.

as an integral part of their process. And enough readers or watchers or viewers or listeners get to understand them and learn about them and recognize them going from one story to another. And a website that most people probably know about is TVTropes.org. It's one of the most addictive websites that I've ever been on. When I first discovered it, I probably spent hours and hours just going from link to link to link, learning about TV shows I'd seen, movies I'd seen, characters.

the tropes they all had in common, what the tropes were themselves. So if anyone listening to this hasn't gone to the website and you've got a free afternoon sometime, feel free to check it out. So the next question is, why are tropes? Why do tropes exist?

Well, for me, the tropes have always been kind of an emergent property of stories, right? Like, they exist because stories have patterns, stories have a grammar, like you said, stories have a... that Hero of a Thousand Faces was a really famous book written, and it identified the...

types of hero stories that are most common in history. Not, you know, tropes aren't a new thing. Tropes are something that were identified back when, you know, Homer was writing The Odyssey. And it's something that, you know... has a place in dialogue about storytelling because we can't do without them like you can't

you can try to avoid every possible trope if you want to. You know, some people think of them like cliches, like you should try to avoid cliches, but the tropes honestly are just, they're labels that we put on things in stories. So some of them might be better than others to avoid if possible, but... They exist because they're just labels that we put on parts of the storytelling process, parts of the story itself.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that you need to understand about tropes is that the audience understands tropes themselves. Sometimes that's subconscious, but tropes are part of audience expectations and how you... Play with them. Yeah, how you play with the audience expectations and how you let the audience know that something's going to happen in the story. So I have a idea of how to divide.

tropes up into two messy overlapping categories. The first is that tropes are memes in the Dawkins sense, not the image macro sense, that they're units of information that people transmit. to each other some tropes are my favorite example of this um it's probably in western media you have the four temperament ensemble which is uh sanguine climatic

choleric, and melancholic. And that's the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They divide it all into these four archetypes. It's Sex and the City. It's Seinfeld. We'll talk about this more in a future episode on characterization, but it's one of the ways that... Western culture often divides up a group of four people. Right. So they're character stereotypes, but they're particular stereotypes of characters that work well as a group together.

They make sure you cover all your bases, so you have the quiet, brainy one, the rash, emotional one, the funny, lighthearted one, and stoic leader type. Things like that. Yep, there's so many ways to divide up characters. There are a lot of... systems out there for it some that have scientific background like you could use the big five I can't remember what they are right now but you could use the big five and divide your characters up

along those axes instead. You could use Myers-Briggs, you could use the Zodiac, but the four temperament ensemble goes back to the Greeks, and it's very common. But if you go to other cultures, you don't see it there. Except to the extent that Western culture has bled out into those other forms. The Japanese have personality blood types.

It says A, B, O, and A, B. They all have their own traits associated with them. And they don't match to the four temperament ensemble because, I mean, they're both pseudoscience, basically. Yeah, this was actually something that really surprised me when I learned about it, which wasn't too long ago, I think only a year or two ago. For those that don't know, sometimes you'll be playing a video game maybe or reading a manga and you'll see the character traits.

listed. They'll be like, you know, hair, blonde, age, whatever, gender, whatever. And one of the things they'll sometimes list is the blood type. And I always thought when I was young that that was just, you know, another statistic that they were putting for the characters just to...

add that extra information in case we ever wondered what their blood type was. But no, in Japanese culture, this is apparently a fairly large thing, at least as large as horoscopes are in Western culture, where people believe that... more or less someone's blood type corresponds to their personality yeah and so if you're a japanese author you might want to divide your characters up along these four personality blood types and

then you go with that because you know that your audience will understand it. Whereas in Western culture, you would have four characters and you'd say, okay, well, we're just going to do the four humors because... Our audience will understand that on some level they'll see these archetypes and it won't necessarily be a conscious understanding that that's what's going on. Most people hear about the... for temperament ensemble and they're like what but they've seen it in so many times that it's

It's a pattern that their brain matches to, and that's gratifying. Right, it fulfills a need, subconsciously or not, in a lot of works that have large character casts to have a wider range of character types, so you don't just have three emotional people running around. around doing everything together, which can be interesting if that's the kind of story that it's about. You can totally have a story about everyone being more or less the same type of character, but it lends itself to less...

wider audiences and also makes it harder sometimes to have interesting interactions between them or limits the interesting interactions they can have. Yeah, and stock characters are also very culture dependent and they're very meme-y in a way. The absent-minded professor, I don't think that's something that comes up naturally out of trying to tell stories. I don't think that you just land on the absent-minded professor or the snooty cheerleader.

But those are cultural things, and your audience gets them, and they're familiar, and it allows you to sketch out a character really quickly because the audience is familiar with them. So that's trope.

Tropes as meanings, yeah. Right, and like you just said, that's a cultural trope that might be different from one culture to another, whereas other ones are emergent of storytelling in general. They're rules, more or less they're rules of how stories...

kind of have to work to maintain suspense and to be entertaining. The one that you mentioned earlier was how timers and bombs and things like that always have to stop at the last few seconds, because otherwise, there's five minutes left on the thing, there's very little tension, and they've stopped the bombs.

great go home have a sandwich everything's done here yeah but another great one is the the planning one i forgot what it was called do you remember the unspoken plan guarantee yes the unspoken plan guarantee which basically says that If someone says in a show or a book or something, I've got an idea or I've got a plan when they're trying to figure out how to accomplish something. And then the camera cuts away or the chapter ends or whatever. And the next chapter or the next scene is them.

doing something or you know enacting a plan what you've basically communicated to the reader is that they've talked this out ahead of time and regardless of what you see or what you hear you know occurring

They've got something in their pocket. They've got an ace in their pocket ready to deal with any eventuality, to turn the tables if something goes wrong, and that they're basically going to... essentially succeed maybe there's going to be a cost that they didn't you know foresee if it's a good enough story maybe it's not everything's going to go according to plan but more or less they've got it in the bag whereas stories where they've got a scene or books where they've got a chapter about them

meticulously planning things out showing positions things like that that's generally speaking going to be a story where when they get there and start doing it, something goes wrong because now the audience has an expectation and there's going to be more suspense created, more conflict created when something goes wrong of the plan that the audience knows about. Yeah, and what you almost never see is...

They spend a chapter talking about what their plan is. And then the next chapter is them executing that plan because that's terrible storytelling. It doesn't have anything to do with culture or memes. That's just if you locked a child. in a room and raise them without stories at all and in their adulthood is very unethical don't do this but in their adulthood you

said, okay, start making stories. I think that that's a rule that they would eventually come up with on their own if they were smart enough. Another example is Chekhov's gun.

show the gun on the mantelpiece in the first act it has to fire in the third act that's part of the law of conservation of detail you would come up with that on your own that's just how you tell a good story irrespective of who your audience is And this can kind of lead to an interesting side effect of overexposure to tropes or overexposure to analyzing stories where sometimes you'll come across fiction that subverts or inverts these tropes, and that's a great way to...

Play with the audience's expectations, and we'll talk more about that later. But it can also lead sometimes to people having an off note when something that they expect to play an important role later or they expect to occur a certain way doesn't, and it kind of leaves them feeling... maybe not necessarily cheated, but as if the story fell a little flatter than it could have. Yeah. But you can definitely, I mean, obviously Chekhov's gun is just a principle.

that you can disobey if you want to, but you need to know why that's a trope. if you want to subvert it or invert it or play with it in some way. You can't just say, oh, you see that gun on the mantle in the first act, what if it didn't fire in the third act like everyone expects? Well, then... what what was the point of it you're just wasting people's time by describing this gun on the mantle right especially in in prose fiction where you have to look at every piece in turn it would be

more acceptable in television where that can just be part of the background right and it's another thing to have the gun show up and then have it just not get fired and have the gun show up and have it play a underserved role right where someone maybe does pick up the gun and tries to fire it and it's not loaded and then they get shot and everyone's like well

They should have probably thought that through a little bit more or like it still satisfies the idea of you introduce something in the story that people are expecting and will remember. and doesn't just pop out of nowhere, because that's part of the reason Chekhov's going to exist as a trope. It's not just an easy way for storytellers to satisfy conflicts and get the plot moving. It's also because if you don't...

follow Chekhov's gun principle of if you're going to have something show up in the third act to save the day, you know, have it show up in the first act at some point, it's also so that you avoid making things seem like they're coming out of nowhere. Like you don't want someone to essentially...

It's not necessarily a deus ex machina to have a gun just show up just as it's needed in the third act, but if you had no idea the gun was there, if there was no mention that the gun was there, none of the characters think about it or see it or anything like that, it can still feel a little bit...

cheaty, which is partly why this came about as a natural result of stories after stories after stories being told, and certain ones were more satisfying than others, and those tended to be the ones that people would emulate in later fiction in one way or another. Yeah. And stories have been around for all of human history and people have been perfecting the art. So if you see a trope, try to think about why it's there before you decide that you're going to do something with it.

I would like to take a moment to talk about tropes not to use. On TV Tropes, they have this page, which is tropes are tools, tropes aren't bad. I, to some extent, disagree with that. I think there are some tropes that exist because of... failures in storytelling right um the idiot ball is is one of those it's character does something uncharacteristically idiotic

in order to move the plot along or in order to move characterization along or create drama or something. That's a bad trope. It only exists because you've, at some point... failed in your storytelling and you just need to get from point a to point b and you don't have a natural way to do that it can work in humor it can work in a farce but

In general, I think that's a bad trope. I think artistic license can tend to fall into that category of bad trope. Not always, because sometimes it's totally fine. You need faster than light travel in order to make your science fiction story. Right. good but a lot of the time rule breaking is is bad or breaking suspension of disbelief um ass pull is a trope where you just

You just pull something out because you needed an ending for your story, and it's by its nature unsatisfying. Right, that's the important thing about...

things like the idiot ball, things like an ass pull or something, is that they tend to pull the person out of the story immediately or have a discordant note. And, you know, you can argue that some tropes that aren't necessarily bad you know can have good uses can have bad uses and that can be true for a lot of them that are controversial or that

kind of are subjective based on the reader. Some readers have no problem with deus ex machina in their story. Some readers will argue over what is a deus ex machina and what isn't or why. I've had that argument many times with many people about

you know certain stories and events that happen in certain stories but things like the idiot ball really are just character acted dumb for no apparent reason an idiot ball isn't just characters not you know not acting smart an idiot ball is a character that otherwise is competent otherwise is intelligent

At other times, at some point, for some reason, just acting like way out of character in terms of how intelligent they are. And it's generally speaking just to move the plot along. So a good example of this, Captain America, Winter Soldier. That's two points in the movie. there is a device used that basically cuts a hole through the concrete in the floor. So Nick Fury is in a truck.

He's driving along. A bunch of bad guys show up, start shooting at him, and he's trapped. He's going to die or get captured or whatever. And he whips this thing out, and the bad guy opens the truck. and he sees a hole in the ground. Nick Fury used the device to cut a hole in the concrete and escape into the sewers below. Okay. So, a very clever use of writing and directing can...

in the moment, make this seem like not a problem. Quick cut to something else, quick end of the chapter, shift the viewer's focus to something else. It doesn't seem like a big deal, right? Whatever, he used the device, he escaped the bad guy, lives on to fight another day. The problem is that...

If you really stop and think about it, Nick Fury was injured. There were about ten bad guys around him. He had just cut this hole in the concrete literally seconds before the bad guy walked up to the truck and opened the door.

There's no reason for the bad guy not to go into the hole after him. Even if you think he's got a gun, he's surrounded by people who have better guns, body armor, he's injured already. There's really no reason for them not to chase him down into the sewers and get him. But...

The bad guy is just like, oh, OK, well, I guess he's gone now because I can't see him anymore. And that's an idiot ball moment because this bad guy otherwise showed tons of planning. Like they were following his vehicle. They cut off the streets. They did everything that should have indicated a competent bad guy. until the moment when the writers of the story basically wanted you to believe that they were just outfoxed by the wily Nick Fury.

And they could have done things to alleviate that. They could have made Nick leave behind a flashbang grenade, so that when the bad guys open the door, they get blinded, and it takes a minute for the effect to clear, and by the time it does, they see the hole, and he's already long gone. And maybe they can still go into the hole after him.

but you know it doesn't matter because by that point you can reasonably justify him getting away from them in that circumstance and it doesn't take a lot like you just have to put the effort in and try otherwise people can spot idiot ball moments fairly easily and

they can kind of ruin a lot of movies that, or books that people would otherwise think were really good. Yeah, and I think a lot of the time, how much you can get away with an idiot ball depends on your execution of it. A lot of these bad tropes, like... You can have someone act less intelligent if you just, like, give the smallest amount of reason for it. Like, they're overwhelmed with emotion or something. You still shouldn't do it, I think.

personally, but you can get away with it a lot more if you execute properly. It's still a bad trope, but to some extent you can fool people. That's not rational fiction, but you can get away with some assholes. If you execute properly. Right. The idea ball isn't about just having characters make poor decisions. It's about not having a plausible reason for those poor decisions.

And it's important to pay attention to how you can make those poor decisions be plausible within the story and how much time and effort you put into that is, I think, the mark between a more rational story versus an irrational story or a non-rational story.

Yeah, and ideally in a rational story, you see that point where you're like, okay, I need to get from point A to point B, and I need a character to do something out of character to do that, and you... You go to point C instead, or you work really hard so that you don't have to have that out of character moment at all. You don't need to justify that out of character moment because the out of character moment doesn't happen. And so rational readers.

understand tropes. I think more, there are rational readers in that analytical mindset and they will be looking for those pieces of storytelling grammar so that if you introduce something, They'll be more on the lookout for that than I think a general audience will. They'll looking for that Chekhov's gun to fire. And so you, because they're. thinking about works analytically you need to understand their expectations and you need to be careful about not just firing off a trope that

will exactly match expectations because that can be kind of boring. Right. So let's talk about rational fiction's tropes specifically. What tropes are more common in rational fiction and what tropes does rational fiction... tend to have more trouble with, I guess? Like, what are the danger tropes in rational fiction that rational authors have to be careful of? Okay, so...

I think we need to distinguish between the rational fiction meme tropes that you see a lot because that's sort of in the culture of rational fiction. Right. The people who are on the rational subreddit a lot or that go to rationalfiction.io or whatever, there are a lot of tropes that show up that are sort of in the community. And I think there are different tropes that are.

there because they come naturally from the analytical or rules-based mindset that we're trying to achieve. Which do you want to tackle first? Yeah, so whether it's part of the culture of what rational fiction so far has been, as opposed to what rational fiction is in its purest state, a lot of rational fiction has been called soapboxy or anvilicious, which is one of my favorite words that's come out of TV Tropes. And it doesn't even have to be that blatant.

the character makes no apology or no effort to think through the consequences of a thought or the alternatives to a belief they just take it as true guaranteed no issue and and valicious is basically when a work is doing that constantly so that

The Sword of Truth series is actually a really good example of this. It starts out where reason and intelligence and all that stuff is lauded and a great virtue and value that the main characters all hold. And by the end of the series, you've got... six-year-old girls um maybe they weren't six at the time like maybe like nine or ten um spending six pages uh vow beating a villain about

Why they were wrong and how their irrationality leads to negative consequences as they were slowly dying. The bad guy was slowly dying. And, you know, like, that kind of thing doesn't really... necessarily not happen but it doesn't really make much sense within the context of the story either and it doesn't make a good reading experience like even if you agree with everything that the person's saying you don't need it thrown in your face

constantly. You don't need every character to make the point every time they can make the point at length. Yeah, you don't need long speeches. I think... A properly done long speech is fine, but if it's about something that you have some specific belief on, try to leave those out. It can be very satisfying to write a long speech where someone talks about one of your cherished beliefs.

And then everyone is like, oh, he's right. He's like being so sane. And I agree with him. That can be therapeutic to write, but I don't think it's a good reading experience generally. And I don't think it's good for.

convincing people right so it's one of the major challenges i would say of rational fiction is when you're writing the villain um if you want them to to be a rational villain you want them to have reasons for their beliefs um don't strawman them don't make it too much of a this is why you're wrong

Focus on the dialogue and narrative. By all means, explore why you might think they're wrong or why the main character might think they're wrong. But show it through their actions. Show it through the consequences of their actions. Show it through the response of other people around them to their actions.

actions don't make it just a speech don't make them a surrogate for the audience that you just want to get this message across to yeah and if you're just pitting good against evil i found i find that really boring because there's no thinking to be done the good person is obviously good the evil person is obviously evil i like my villains to be complex and i like them to have sympathetic reasons for their actions and i like for the

side of good to empathize with them or maybe just disagree on methods i think in rational fiction you see a lot of villain protagonists i love villain protagonists i love anti-heroes i love people who do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons i like that complexity if it's just good against evil there's not anything to think about because they're just they're just acting they're not thinking necessarily or they're just they're just doing

strategy and tactics rather than having any philosophical debate at all. I think Metropolitan Man was actually one of my favorite stories that had a... villain protagonist rational villain protagonist that did such a good job of showing you know even if you don't agree with their actions you understand why they're why they think the way they do why they're taking the actions that they are and you know you can be convinced that

They have a case. You can be convinced that they're not the villain of their story. And not only are they not the villain of their story, but they... could convince many other people that they're in the right, and you don't actually know if they're in the right or not. The story doesn't necessarily walk you through the consequences of their actions to make you think, well, they totally made a mistake, or, well, they were totally justified.

Yeah, and one of the things that I was also trying to do with that story, I don't know to what extent I succeeded, but one of the things I was trying to do is Superman is this big, dumb guy, usually, in his own comics. He's just...

pure good and there's no meditation or contemplation of what good means right and i tried to include as much of that as possible where superman is shown having trouble with that like how do you be good how do you how do you take your ideals and turn them into actions in a way that

works for people and doesn't step on toes which is totally an easy thing to cover right like everyone's figured that out already yeah yeah it's a very human struggle and seeing him who's got so much more power than than any mere human struggle with it was was very well done i think and I think that leads to another trope that rational fiction in general tries to...

avoid and may sometimes fail in avoiding. And there's a lot of discussion that can be had about which rational frictions can do a better job of avoiding them or which ones did a good job of avoiding them. But Mary Sue is probably one of the most well-known tropes.

It's basically a character, a main character usually, that is perfect at everything, can do no wrong, doesn't learn from any mistakes, doesn't make mistakes, that's acknowledged by the narrative. Like maybe they'll do something that isn't great, but the narrative treats it like everything's fine, and all the characters around them treat it like it's fine.

And having a protagonist that could be doing the right things for the right reasons, could be doing the right things for the ambiguously right reasons, but still makes mistakes and still learns. from them is incredibly important, not just in rational fiction, but non-rational fiction, but it's especially hard for rational fiction, I think, because we try so much more to make our main characters rational and make them have good reasons for what they do and make them...

force for thoughtful action. Yeah, and I think one of the things... One of the places that people can go wrong there is by just making the main character the only sane person. or the only rational person, and then they're just waltzing into this world of magic or whatever to try and change everything. And then it goes correctly. I think Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality...

A lot of people were turned off by the beginning of it because it had too many overtones of that. Like, Harry's just going to come in and crush everything in his path, right? Yeah, there were a number of moments where people early on in the story reviews, you'd see people saying, well, I guess he's just going to be right about everything all the time, which is very much not the case later on in the story. Some people could argue about...

whether he's more of a Mary Sue or less of one. I've always taken the position that he's far less of one than I've seen most people portray him as. But early on in the story, it very much does look like he is going to be right about.

pretty much everything that he thinks, just because he wins all the time. And showing that those losses and showing other characters win around him for their own reasons and for their own special knowledge and for their own displays of rationality is pretty important. So what's a way that you've found that's been an effective way of checking against that when you're doing your own rational writing?

So this gets into a larger issue about how to build a narrative, but I tend to do Dan Harmon's story circle method, which. So Joseph Campbell wrote Here With A Thousand Faces, which describes this monomyth in fiction, and it sort of follows this path. And he was...

doing a descriptive approach. Dan Harmon does a prescriptive approach. He says that basically this circle that the hero traverses is core to human understanding of storytelling and core to the human mind and that's why so many stories follow it is because that's how people think um it's not it's not because of culture or anything it's just

If you locked that child in a room and you raised them without stories, they would come up with something like that. And so I always try to build my stories around that circle and then think about the change that the character is supposed to go through. That's how I build my stories now. So if you want to try to avoid someone who's always right or always good at something you...

sort of define the change that they go through over the course of the story. For Glimwarden, each character has their own story circle. They have their own method of changing. They're revolving around different axes. And I think that helps a lot to make sure they're not too good or too perfect because they have flaws that they're going to overcome. And if you're framing the story in.

a story circle or in a series of story circles you have to think be thinking about those flaws you can't just have them stand out as perfectly Right, it's a kind of advanced form of, or a very specific form of planning out the character's arc, their changes that they're going to undertake, and the challenges they're going to face. Yeah, and I think if you go through a character arc, then you can't... Well, you can have a Mary Sue that goes through a character arc.

But it's much more difficult. Yeah, and it's going to tend to be – so yeah, that's another important thing to keep in mind. Making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, generally speaking, should not be purely – combat related or magic related. A Mary Sue can still be a Mary Sue even if they are learning something or if they get beaten a few times in combat. The problem has to be something intellectual or emotional, something that's specific to their character.

Yeah, the way Wild Bo, who wrote Worm, the way that he describes Mary Sue is that it's a narrative black hole that just bends other characters around them. You come in and all of a sudden you're the most popular kid in Hogwarts or whatever. And it's if you have a very strong main character, that can be a little difficult if you're not thinking about, OK, these other.

incidental characters or secondary characters. They have their own private lives that aren't about the main character, probably. I mean, you can break every rule, but... You can have lackeys and stuff like that. That's a thing that actually happens. But if you want to avoid the Mary Sue, you need to be thinking about the inner lives of the other characters that are interacting with your main character. Right.

This is a great example of the way you can play with tropes if you take them to their logical conclusion. So let's say you have a character who walks into a magic school and is suddenly the center of attention. Ideally, for them not to be a Mary Sue, first of all, you'd have to have a good reason for them to be the center of attention. You'd have to have a...

pushback of some kind from some quarters, right? Like whatever they did that made them so popular or made them so worth attention probably pissed someone off. There should be consequences to that. There should be challenges that they have to face now. And whether there's someone that would revel in that attention or make use of it for their own ends or they just try to get away from it and not want to be so popular, like those challenges and that kind of pushback needs to be a result of them.

being the most popular student in the school. If they just are the most popular student in the school and everything goes great for them in that quarter, then it's really rather shallow storytelling. Yeah. And I love... looking at tropes and playing with them. I wrote shadows of the limelight, which is basically a 17th century superhero ish story. People get their powers from how famous they are. And that.

was in large part an attempt to justify a whole lot of different tropes. Like, why do superheroes wear these flashy costumes? Why do they give these long monologuing speeches? Well, in Shadows of Limelight, that's because... they want to become more famous they're doing that for the the audience right it was i just want to say again really fantastic story that did a really good job with all that one of my favorite parts of it was that it justified the letting the villain go kind of trope

where it allows you to have a story where, look, the reason the hero doesn't just kill the villain right away, or even vice versa, the villain doesn't kill the hero right away, is because they know that that's part of their narrative. That's what people know them about. They have this villain, they have this oppositional force, and...

The more those people go out and do things, the more they, by association, get famous and the stronger they grow. Yeah. And that's a way of going a little bit meta with tropes. Because they are paying attention to stories. The heroes and the villains are. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Crabbe and Goyle are two henchmen who have grown up reading stories about henchmen. And they're behaving how...

henchmen behave in the stories they've been groomed yeah they've been groomed to be henchmen their parents were henchmen themselves and were like look this is how you be a good henchman and they kind of in some points let their imagination run away with them a bit in terms of how that how they feel like

they can be the best henchmen they can be, but at the same time, there's an in-story justification for them to be henchmen, and it results, I think, in a really much more complex character than the canon Crab and Growl ever were. Yeah, and so there are a lot of... There are a lot of tropes like there's one superhero speciation, which is basically if you have a team of superheroes, they're not going to have overlapping powers because that's boring for narrative reasons. Right. And so...

Shadows of the Limelight does the meta thing where you don't want to have other people with the same powers on your team because they overshadow you. And, you know, it creates a conflict within teams, so you just don't do it. Right, right. That would be more effective or bring more power or whatever. um you can justify that in story without going meta that it's a matter of people trying to specialize or

That's the nature of the power, that not everyone will have an identical power or something like that. Or you can just not justify it at all. I think superhero speciation is one that people just accept. They just accept a team of... Four people will have earth, fire, water, and wind as their separate powers, and that's totally okay. But yeah, it's good to subvert or...

justify or play with tropes, because people appreciate that a lot, I found. Yeah. Some of the best stories that I've ever read have the tropes, you know, that are very common, that are comfortable. I would say. There's a lot of fiction that I would call genre-comfortable or genre-savvy. Actually, those are two different things. Some of them are genre-comfortable, which are very...

by the numbers in terms of the tropes, but they can still be good stories. And genre savvy are ones where the characters are aware of tropes and aware of things like that, like the Dresden Files, where they'll openly mock villains wearing cowls and... dark robes, even if those villains have a reason to do that, it's still a trope in a world where people have seen

Star Wars and the Emperor is such an iconic figure. But your story doesn't have to subvert tropes to be great. It doesn't have to invert tropes to be clever.

or entertaining but if you know what you're doing with them and you can do them well it can be an added spice to to any story to to play with the tropes instead of just follow them by the numbers yes So we've talked a lot about common language law stories have, which might make it feel like, you know, once you've looked at TV tropes, you're going to think...

oh my god, there's a trope for everything. Literally everything I can think of, there's a trope for it. How can I possibly write something original or write something that isn't done to death and isn't a stereotype? And that's something we can definitely talk about next episode. Yeah, Eliezer Yudkowsky says, just don't do things that have been done before. We will talk about that. Thanks for joining us.