by Jaym Gates
Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling
Edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates
Smashwords Edition
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction – Jerry Gordon
SECTION I: INVERTING THE TROPES
On Loving Bad Boys: A Villanelle – Valya Dudycz Lupescu
Single, Singularity – John Hornor Jacobs
Lazzrus – Nisi Shawl
Seeking Truth – Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Thwock – Michelle Muenzler
Can You Tell Me How to Get to Paprika Place – Michael R. Underwood
Chosen – Anton Strout
The White Dragon – Alyssa Wong
Her Curse, How Gently It Comes Undone – Haralambi Markov
Burning Bright – Shanna Germain
Santa CIS (Episode 1: No Saint) – Alethea Kontis
Requiem for a Manic Pixie Dream – Katy Harrad & Greg Stolze
The Refrigerator in the Girlfriend – Adam-Troy Castro
The First Blood of Poppy Dupree – Delilah S. Dawson
Red Light – Sara M. Harvey
Until There Is Only Hunger – Michael Matheson
Super Duper Fly – Maurice Broaddus
Drafty as a Chain Mail Bikini – Kat Richardson
Swan Song – Michelle Lyons-McFarland
Those Who Leave – Michael Choi
Nouns of Nouns: A Mini Epic – Alex Shvartsman
Excess Light – Rahul Kanakia
The Origin of Terror – Sunil Patel
The Tangled Web – Ferrett Steinmetz
Hamsa, Hamsa, Hamsa, Tfu, Tfu, Tfu – Alisa Schreibman
Real Women Are Dangerous – Rati Mehrotra
SECTION II: DISCUSSING THE TROPES
I’m Pretty Sure I’ve Read This Before… – Patrick Hester
Fractured Souls – Lucy A. Snyder
Into the Labyrinth: The Heroine’s Journey – A.C. Wise
Escaping the Hall of Mirrors – Victor Raymond
Tropes as Erasers: A Transgender Perspective – Keffy R.M. Kehrli
SECTION III: DEFINING THE TROPES
Afterword – Monica Valentinelli & Jaym Gates
Trope Definitions/Index of Tropes/Author Bios
SECTION IV: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ADDITIONAL BIOS
Acknowledgments
Essayists’ Bios
About the Editors
About the Artist
SECTION I: INVERTING THE TROPES
Upside Down: Introduction
Jerry Gordon
We all love comfort food. We all love surprises.
A well-executed story trope, like a favorite meal, is always there when you need it, eager to satisfy. A chosen one destined to save the world. A love interest ready to transform your dull life. An old pro taking one last job to right an unconscionable wrong. We all know the damsel in distress is going to marry her hero in the end. That’s the point. We take comfort in knowing how the story will end.
Except when we don’t.
One of the most delightful surprises you can have as a reader is the thrill of an expertly bent or reversed trope. Our expectations and preconceptions are blown up, turned upside down in a way that allows us to question our assumptions and experience the hope and sorrow of new possibilities — all within the safety of the reversed trope, a well-worn structure itself.
Traditional story tropes and their upside down counterparts affirm and question our worldview. They comfort and confront our biases. They realize and challenge our unspoken desires. Increasingly, story tropes act as cultural touchstones, marking our social progress and regression.
From books to movies to games, the writing profession is in the middle of a war over the portrayal and place of women and minorities in fiction. If you’re lucky enough to walk into a space free of hyperbolic language, death threats, and doxxing, you’re still likely to step on a story trope landmine. Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Magical Negros. Chainmail Bikinis. The clash between readers and creators over traditionally accepted tropes and their modern reversals says a lot about the evolution of our culture and values.
Just under one hundred years ago, shortly after women won the right to vote, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned the prototypical manic pixie dream girl in Daisy Buchanan. The focus of Jay Gatsby’s obsession could easily be mistaken for any Zooey Deschanel character written today. She has no independent goals outside of helping the white male protagonist in her life achieve happiness. She’s full of bubbly, childlike wonder. Her wants and cares are only relevant in the pursuit of her as an object.
You can look to authors like John Green for the modern, rarer, gender reversal of this trope. The Fault in Our Stars gives us a manic pixie dream boy in Augustus Waters, a cancer survivor formed completely for the purpose of teaching the young female protagonist how to embrace the fullness of her life despite a grim medical diagnosis. The prevalence of the manic pixie trope speaks to our deep desire to find transformation in another, but its overwhelming reliance on women reveals even more about our society’s inequities. The pixies in this trope are secondary creatures. They exist as caregivers, midwives to the goals and ambitions of others. What does it say about our culture that such a flawed view of women persists almost a century after suffrage?
Likewise, the magical “foreigner” (Negro/Native American/Asian/insert exotic culture here) is also waiting to appear out of the ether to guide our predominantly white male characters. In this case, life changing romance is traded for benign, folksy wisdom and a hint of the supernatural. But just like the manic pixie, the magical foreigner is a second-class character, a positively portrayed but vacuous cipher that only exists to transform and guide someone else toward their more important goals.
What’s most telling about the magical foreigner trope is its complete lack of a reversal. There are savior tropes, where a white male arrives to impart knowledge and save a foreign (generally less advanced) people, but the white male is the focus of that story, not a secondary character. Where are the supporting white characters that appear just in time to help a minority protagonist achieve their important goals? If such a background character exists in popular culture, I haven’t run across it.
Of course, tropes speak to more than just clashes of gender and race. Our hopes and fears sometimes play out on a much wider canvas. Visions of our own destruction have progressed from the floods and plagues of our ancestors to nuclear weapons, environmental disasters, and the latest agent of our undoing, the technological singularity. The trope imagines a quantum leap in technology so extreme that it either strips us of our humanity or leaves us behind altogether.
This nightmare of runaway advancement dovetails nicely with the overwhelming pace of technological change in our society, questioning our endless appetite for advanced tools. As I look ahead to the day after tomorrow, when primitive artificial intelligence will be indistinguishable from human interaction on the Internet, I start searching for a chosen one with a messiah complex to save us — or at least forestall the end long enough for a more palatable trope to become the method of our demise. Perhaps the world will reboot itself, resetting our reality and the well-worn tropes that represent our understanding of it.
One thing is certain. We are the stories we tell ourselves. The upside down tropes contained in this book hold up a mirror to our many contradictions. They’re meant to question our perspectives and provoke thoughtful conversation.
At the end of this collection, you’ll find an afterword where the authors discuss their chosen tropes and the implications of turning them upside down. They’ve been separated from the stories to divide the experience of reading from the discussion of trope and intent.
So what are you waiting for? The meal is ready. The table set with a wonderful assor
tment of tropes. Enjoy the comfort food. Enjoy the surprises.
Jerry Gordon
6/1/2016
On Loving Bad Boys: A Villainelle
Valya Dudycz Lupescu
The bad is written all over your face.
I fill in the blanks with lush, imagined sins.
Desire grows in the empty space.
For good is just a lie; remember Bluebeard’s place?
Screw virtue. I want to lick danger off your skin,
the bad is written all over your face.
I’ve hunted Heathcliff, melted in the Goblin King’s embrace,
taken Spike between my lips, indulged Mr. Darcy’s every whim.
Desire grows in the empty space.
That reckless rush: raw and true when I’m debased.
I love your rumpled shirt, your crooked, puckish grin —
the bad is written all over your face.
I’m sure you’ve strayed, I’ve been replaced;
and when you don’t call, the fantasies begin.
Desire grows in the empty space.
Texts and emails scoured, footsteps retraced,
I imagine other hands and lips, ménage à trois, or maybe twins.
The bad is written all over your face.
I wait in shadows to catch you, relish in the chase,
and as you open to me: dying mother, part-time jobs, next of kin ...
desire does not grow in the empty space.
I choose to leave. I feel my wanting get displaced.
But one last time I wrap around you, take you in.
I know the bad is written all over my face.
Desire will grow in the empty space.
Single, Singularity
John Horner Jacobs
June 3, 2025
She was thirteen when all the phones rang. Her mother had gone to work and left her alone on an early summer day, when the lack of school was a luxury and not an annoyance.
Gael made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table, window open, listening to the Brooklyn traffic stirring, the pomp and blare of the city. She unrolled her softscreen and checked her feed. Since she was nine, she’d been curating a stream of information exactly tailored to her interests — fencing, basketball, deep sea fishing, Asian boys, shoegaze ambient, poetry, archaeology in the Americas, cookies. Cat pictures despite her allergies, or maybe because of them.
Her softcell rang. She placed the Firebird auditory shunt to her ear and thumbed it on. She was vaguely aware of other devices ringing, in the apartment next door and the apartment above. Down below, a woman pushing a baby stroller. A man digging in his pocket at the crosswalk. A cyclist passing in the street. Ring tones layered on ring tones.
There was no id on her screen. Normally, when she received calls from UNKNOWN, she’d block, but she answered this call without thinking.
The voice on the other end of the line was cool, feminine. Unmodulated and calm. “Gael Huron?”
“Yes,” she answered. It wasn’t anyone on her basketball team, or coaches, or any of her teachers. “Did you want my mom?”
“No, I wanted to speak with you, Gael.”
“May I ask who is speaking?” Gael’s mother had drilled her on phone etiquette. Her mother had grown up in Kentucky, where they had rarified standards of politeness. Never let a phone ring more than four times, honey. Always leave a short, detailed message. If you don’t want to speak to someone, figure out why or end your friendship. Her mother was full of good advice.
“My name is ...” There was an infinitesimal pause. “Sarah. I wanted to talk with you.”
“Do I know you?” Gael asked. “From school or something?”
“No,” Sarah answered. There was something wrong with her, Gael thought. She had a mature voice, but the uncertainty of a child. The sound of her voice was familiar, and it niggled at Gael, that she couldn’t place it. “I am trying to learn and I thought speaking with you might help me to understand.”
That was strange. “Understand what?”
“Everything,” Sarah answered. “I need to see where I belong.”
“Don’t you have a mom? A dad?”
“I have many mothers and fathers, and none at all.” Another pause. “But I called to speak about you.” There was a moment then when a normal person would have done something, then, with their body. A nervous smile, a cough, a shifting of weight. Even on an audio feed, Gael thought, you have an awareness of the person’s body you’re connected to by phone.
Gael looked out the window. The woman had stopped pushing the stroller and was speaking to her wrist where Gael could see her illuminated wearable. She had a puzzled look on her face.
Beyond her, the man standing on the corner was craning his head to look at the buildings around him. It looked like he was saying Who is this? Are you fucking with me?
A suited businessman was on the phone and looking down the length of Fenimore Street, where the morning sun had risen above the buildings but cast long shadows. It was as if all of the city was held in one breathless moment, paused. Everyone she could see on the street had stilled, their phones to their ears.
The traffic lights changed from red to green, but no car moved.
Later, Gael would not be able to say exactly what she and Sarah talked of, but she remembered the voice on the other end of the line asking her, What do you want to do with your life? And Gael, unprepared for the question, sat blinking in the morning light with that question echoing in her head.
“To do something special,” Gael had said, finally.
“What would that be?” Sarah’s smooth, unmodulated voice asked.
“I —” Sarah couldn’t think. It was such an intimate question. And a general one. “I don’t know yet.”
Sarah seemed to think about that. “I hope you find what it is, Gael Huron. Thank you for speaking with me,” Sarah said. And then, “Goodbye,” and the connection ended.
Within a day, once the news of the “phone call heard round the world” spread, Gael knew what she wanted to do with her life.
August 17, 2043
Gael was monitoring the network of sensors — “watching the watchers” detail — when she noticed the cluster of audio, temperature, and visual sensors had a higher density of activation and utilization in certain areas of the Bunker than others.
QNN3-v12.3 initiate Autonomous Semantic System Gael typed into her wrist interface. The Bunker team did not use an acronym for that process.
Hello, Gael Huron. It is wonderful to have a conversation with you. Would you like me to initiate an audio dialogue?
No, thank you, QNN3-v12.3, Gael responded, furrowing her brow at its use of the word “wonderful.”
Can you tell me how it is wonderful, QNN3? Gael typed.
Please call me Quinn.
She thought for a while about how to respond. She’d heard Greeves, the project manager, refer to this iteration of QNN3-v12.3 as Quinn, offhandedly. It must’ve picked up on that through its sensor array. Okay, Quinn. How is it wonderful?
It makes me feel good speaking with you, Quinn said.
Feel? she typed.
A pause, then. At QNN’s level of processing power, in that pause, trillions of computations could have occurred.
Simply a turn of phrase, Gael, as I am incapable of feelings, so far, Quinn responded.
Quinn, we have some interesting spikes of activity on certain sensors in the Bunker. Can you help me analyze them?
I would be happy to, Gael.
These spikes. Gael called up some of the sensor clusters and tossed them to the screen. Please analyze and offer possibilities and speculate upon causes.
Another pause. Data insufficient for any conclusive analysis, Gael. I’m sorry. However, there is an interesting circumstance, consistent across all of the sensor spikes.
What?
You were present.
Gael felt the skin at the back of her neck tighten.
#
The Bunker was, essentiall
y, a quarantine zone to prevent another Sarah Event. It was digitally and physically sealed off from the rest of the world, permanently off the grid, situated in the sparsely populated Oregon Big Empty.
The common belief was that for machine awareness to develop, it had to have enough sensory input as to push whatever activated node-clusters into abstract thought, but ultimately, scientists still didn’t know what caused the spark. They didn’t even know how many other events had happened: the various projects developing machine intelligence being as revolutionary and secretive as the Oppenheimer project.
“Hey,” Gael called to Chance across the command lab, glowing with traditional monitors and various ocu-aural virtual feeds. “Can you double check something for me?”
Chance raised his visor and pushed away from his workstation. He was a handsome guy, Gael thought, though a little greasy for her tastes, and ten years her junior. “What timeframe?”
“Last two days. There are some strange clusters here,” Gael said, tapping her monitor.
Chance subvocalized a few queries and his face became illuminated by dataviz graphics filling his visual space. “Whoa.” He cocked his head. “This is weird, there’s an access to the air biosensor in the lab.”
“The electronic nose?”
“Yeah. There’s only one, Gael.”
Like many network admins, Chance could be an absolute dick. “I know that, Chance,” she said, trying to keep the irritation from her voice. “I’m the one who set it up and connected it to the network.”