by Jaym Gates
When I had finished the sketch, I taped it to the wall where she could see it when she woke the next morning.
SECTION II: DISCUSSING THE TROPES
I’m Pretty Sure I’ve Read This Before …
The orphan kid is the hero… But if anyone has sex, they’re all gonna die…
Patrick Hester
Introduction
Have you ever wondered why some stories sound familiar to you, even though you’ve never read them before? Isn’t it annoying? You’re sitting there thinking, “wait, have I started this book before?” Or, “I don’t remember watching this movie, but it all seems familiar.” Maybe you pick out the plot in the first couple sentences and wonder how you are doing this. Have you manifested your mutant powers at last? Or are you just losing it?
You’re not going crazy. Well, I don’t know that for sure. I mean, I’m not a trained mental health professional, nor do I play one on TV. And, let’s face it — if your mutant powers haven’t shown up by now, you’re gonna need some sort of catalyst — but that’s another essay for another time.
In all likelihood, you’ve started to notice these pesky little metaphorical elements in storytelling we authors use to shortcut our way into your brain and your heart.
Why?
Because they work. Really well, in fact. They speak to us and we identify with them on a very primal level. Almost like a racial memory. If I mention the orphan who learns they have a greater destiny, where did your brain go? A story popped into your head, right? Something you love? Something you hate?
Harry Potter, maybe? How about Annie? More recently, Rey from The Force Awakens? Or Luke Skywalker before her? Spider-Man and Superman? Let’s go back further. Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, heck — Moses. All are orphans with some sort of secret destiny just waiting to be unlocked.
We call this a trope, and the best authors don’t simply use them in their storytelling, they flip them, twist them, and lure us into a false sense of security that we somehow know this story, know this character, and what’s going to happen next — and then they surprise the hell out of us.
Part 1: Recognizing Tropes
The problem with being a writer, aside from the lack of steady income, health insurance, and paid vacation days, plus the extreme introverted tendencies, is how you start to recognize tropes across all media. And can’t turn it off. Not when you’re reading, watching a movie or TV show, nothing. It’s annoying for you and your friends and family alike, so at least it’s a universal pain.
If you’re a prolific reader, you may have experienced something very similar.
Follow along with me for a second. You’re sitting on the comfy couch with the loved one of your choice, about to watch the new great show absolutely everyone is talking about. The commercial lead-in ends, you sit back to enjoy and roughly three to five minutes in, brow furrowed, know who the killer is, who is sleeping with who, and how the whole thing is gonna end. Which you, being you, blurt out in utter exasperation.
The first time this happens, your loved one laughs and says something like, “No way!” Then everything falls into place exactly (or near enough) as you described and they stare at you as if examining an odd bug that just crawled into the room. Now, somewhere around the third or fourth time you do this, the laughing stops. The loved one in question refuses to watch anything with you unless and until you can keep your trap shut without ruining everything.
Sound familiar or am I projecting too much?
While you may not have known this is called a trope, you did recognize something familiar, like a warm blanket you used to have as a child. Why? Because that’s when we are all first exposed to common tropes about heroes and villains, good and bad (of a sort) — in fairy tales.
Think about it. Some of the first stories we’re told as children often setup the tropes of the orphaned child with a destiny, the evil stepmother or crone/witch, and the handsome prince.
The Orphaned Child [1] is often a child born of kings and queens, who is spirited away and raised far from their homes only to return someday to right the wrongs done in their absence and bring balance to the world. The Evil Stepmother/Crone [2] or Witch [3] is more often than not responsible for the death of or displacement of the main character’s mother. She is petty and cruel, interested in power, and is more often than not setup as an obstacle for our hero or heroine to overcome. The Handsome Prince [4] will ride in on the brilliant white stallion to raise our orphaned child up out of the muck, be the romantic ideal, etc.
This is changing these days, as people reinterpret fairy tales for modern audiences, but the roots are still there. The orphan with the destiny — did anyone out there think Snow White? Isn’t it a powerful image, the orphaned child doomed to a life of misery who discovers a destiny far beyond what they could’ve dreamed. Go back even further and you have Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A boy taken from his parents as a baby, raised in obscure poverty only to have a wizard come along and reveal his true identity and destiny once he is “of an age.” Or perhaps I’m talking about Rand Al’Thor and The Wheel of Time series?
To an extent, we as readers and watchers allow the trope to work because we find it familiar and comforting. Remember that old blanket?
But is that a good thing? Should we be comfortable with our stories? Wouldn’t it be better to be uncomfortable? Or surprised? Isn’t that what science fiction does best? Makes us think and feel a little uncomfortable, pushing the bounds of what’s acceptable so we, as the reader, grow?
More on that in a second.
Sometimes a trope becomes part of the culture. If I say “that guy is a red shirt,” [5] you will probably smile because you understand. I don’t have to explain it, don’t have to go any further than those words. The guy is gonna die like all those poor, defenseless Starfleet officers did on all those random planets. You know it and so do I. If we’re watching a horror movie about a bunch of kids going off somewhere for the weekend to camp, drink, smoke pot, and have sex, we know something or someone is going to come along and start killing them. We have tropes, tropes, and more tropes including: Death by Sex [6], Drugs are Bad [7], and Don’t Go into the Woods [8], and they’re all handled in different ways by different storytellers. Knowing sex, drugs, and rock and roll mean certain death can be kind of a buzzkill, but there it is. Which has been more about imposing a certain set of moral certainties on an unsuspecting audience than anything else.
Ever been asked, “What’s the moral of the story?” Fairy tales and parables have been used to impart moral lessons for as long as there have been humans. And they use tropes at their core to connect with us on that primal level.
Joss Whedon handled the Death by Sex trope in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and he took it to the extreme and tossed in the Evil Boyfriend [9] trope for good measure.
I am now going to spoil Buffy the Vampire Slayer for you. If you have not watched this amazing show yet, I give up. You’re never gonna do it, are you? Sigh.
When Buffy and Angel have sex for the first time, it triggers a curse and removes Angel’s soul and returns the vampire/demon Angelus’s control over the body. Thus, having sex both resulted in the death of the “love of her life,” and released the “ultimate evil boyfriend,” who never called her back and then tried to eat and/or kill all her friends, as evil boyfriends are wont to do.
This is a great example of the familiar trope being flipped and taken off in a direction we didn’t really expect. Or at least, I didn’t expect.
And then there’s probably the most popular and overused metaphorical element of all time — The Hero’s Journey [10]. Buffy was on it from the start. But she’s not the only one.
You see, how-to books have been written about it. Workshops are done every year where writers are shown how this particular trope will not only get you published, but will resonate with audiences and get people talking about your stories. Why? Again, it’s foundational. Look at Rey from The Force Awakens. She has a destiny, and when she i
s scooped up and tossed into the galaxy, she only wants to return home and not get involved. When opportunity calls — Han Solo offering her a job, a way off her planet, and a life of her own — she refuses, and again, wants to go home. Ultimately, she accepts her calling and becomes the hero she was destined to become.
This is the quintessential hero’s journey. We see it in stories all the time, which is why we recognize it on some level when we’re reading and watching, and how it has become, through so much use, a trope in its own right. And also why I kinda think it needs to die.
And yes, I totally just spoiled The Force Awakens, too.
Part 2: Become Something Better
Okay, calm down. Just because I say I want the hero’s journey to die, doesn’t mean that it will. Or even that it can. It’s one of those tropes so ingrained in who we are as a species that I don’t think it could ever die. Take nearly any story and you can point to elements of the hero’s journey informing the characters and the narrative.
Joseph Campbell first broke it down in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and it goes something like this:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” (Joseph Campbell)
When I was a kid, there were several things I obsessed over, including but not limited to: comic books and wrestling. Comics are full of tropes, including and building upon the hero’s journey and taking things off in different directions. The hero is almost always called to action, refuses the call, and eventually accepts their destiny. Beyond that, you have a plethora of tropes including: Temporal Paradox [11] involving time travel and shifting timelines ala Cable from the X-Men, who grows up in an alternate universe only to come back and be a contemporary of his own parents; Back from the Dead [12] like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and pretty much everyone else who has ever “died” in comics (and daytime soap operas); Alternate Universe [13] where history took a left instead of a right, Orphan with a Destiny/The Chosen One (Superman, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, again); plus universal themes like revenge plots, mentors, etc. The stories are also episodic and high on drama and romance, elements that resonate with us on every level. Essentially, they’re soap operas for kids. The characters are archetypes, these massive, over-the-top heroes and villains who are constantly saving (or threatening) the world.
Switch to wrestling, specifically the WWF before they became the WWE, and you had the same kinds of archetypes and stories playing out week after week on television screens across the fifty states, Canada, and Mexico (Luchadors!). Larger than life heroes battling sinister villains and you’d think the fate of the whole world rested on the shoulders of whoever wore that shiny gold belt.
Spoiler: It didn’t. But how much fun was it to pretend that it did?
Is it any wonder I imprinted these tropes early on and recognize them so readily today? I bet you do, too, even if you didn’t know it until this very moment.
But I want to get back to the hero’s journey for a second. The best stories, the ones that really, truly make us sit back in stunned silence, turn this trope on its head. Case in point, the books in the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. Epic fantasy has a well-known set of tropes [14] that tend to follow along with the hero’s journey quite well. However, Williams took them and masterfully flipped them on their head — and brought this reader along for the ride.
Not only did the characters not do what I knew they were going to do, they made bad decisions. Very bad. Repeatedly. They went left when I thought for sure they would go right. It was the first time I ever found myself pausing while reading a book to actively yell at the characters. Seoman Snowlock aka Simon Mooncalf, is that hero right out of destiny. Orphaned and working a shit job and looking for a break, he refuses the call only to find he can’t escape his destiny, and then he runs off with elves and has adventures. And he’s in love with the princess, Miriamele. And everything is setup to make you believe they are going to be together and save the land from the big bad evil. And then a series of seriously left turns occurs — I’m actually getting pissed off just writing about this! I am still angry at the decisions these characters made, and it’s been years since I read the books.
Williams brought the characters together in an unconventional way. He made them real, allowing them to make stupid decisions like we would make here in the real world, and in doing so, inverted the tropes and surprised us. Or me.
I wish I could tell you that this was the only time I’ve ever shouted at characters in a book. Sadly, I can’t.
Kate Elliott is also responsible for such an incident. Her Crown of Stars series made me question everything I thought I knew about epic fantasy. She tore it all down and built it back up again, adding in so many rich details and so much political intrigue, my head was spinning. I read these books before George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, by the way. And the trials and tribulations of Alain and Liath had me hooked, exasperated, and, yes, yelling at the characters.
But I kept reading. Because she flipped things on me, and I loved it.
And years later, I had the opportunity to tell each of these authors in person exactly how I reacted to their books, and they were quite pleased about the whole thing. They loved the idea that their words had made me so upset I had to take a moment to yell at fictional characters just to get it out of my system.
That’s powerful writing.
Williams and Elliott — and Martin, of course — took the familiar elements of the hero’s journey, of the epic fantasy tropes we’ve come to know thanks to authors like J.R.R. Tolkien who laid the foundations with The Lord of the Rings, and shifted them just enough to make us uncomfortable. They broke the mold and the cycle. They stood out from the pack, as it were, and all are still writing epics today, and making audiences and readers, new and old, continue to be uncomfortable — and keep reading.
I asked before if that was a good thing or not, and I fall squarely on the side of yes — that is a very good thing. I would rather be challenged and surprised by uncomfortable ideas than fed the same old thing over and over. And when I talk about the death of the hero’s journey, really what I mean is I want to see it evolve and change.
Become something better.
Part 3: Finding the Balance
And just when you think it’s all good, someone comes along and tears up a city full of innocent people to make a point about superheroes.
There’s been a recent debate over the proliferation of movies based on comic book characters. Well, several, actually. But I am specifically thinking of the whole Marvel vs. DC thing. Marvel has been pumping out movie after movie following the hero’s journey quite closely — Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Thor — delivering to audiences archetypal heroes who refuse the call, but end up battling over the top villains while mixing in a few one liners, jokes, and amazing music soundtracks, and it works.
Let’s not talk about the Hulk movies, okay?
To my point about wanting to change things up, DC gave us Man of Steel in 2013. In doing so, they shook the foundations of the tropes we associate with an iconic character like Superman, and the reaction was a mixed bag with fans and critics alike. Criticized for decades for being a “boy scout,” audiences did not appreciate seeing the man of steel killing his enemy and ignoring the innocent people hurt and killed in the wake of his battle. DC and Warner Brothers followed it up with Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which, again, shook things up and delivered a very dark take on the entire DC catalog of A-list heroes that did not resonate well with many audience members.
DC wanted to counterpoint Marvel, which they did in spades. They surprised people. Surprised me. And made a lot of people very uncomfortable. Including me. And they managed to tick off the check boxes I just asked for, and a slew of fans and critics in the process, who walked away sha
king their heads and wondering where their beloved heroes had gone.
The question is — did they go too far? Or are we just so hung up on the trees we can’t see the forest?
I believe the answer is yes — they went too far. It’s all well and fine to push the boundaries and change things up, but if you go so far the reader — or in this case, movie watcher — can’t follow you, you’ve gone too far.
There has to be a balance. And DC, unfortunately, hasn’t found that balance yet.
Let’s return to Game of Thrones.
George R. R. Martin continues to push comfort levels just a little farther with each subsequent book in his Song of Fire and Ice series (and the HBO television show based upon it). Just when you think he can’t possibly surprise or shock you, there’s a red wedding, and you find yourself thinking you should never accept a wedding invitation from Mr. Martin. Nope. Not ever. And people lap it up like milk from a saucer. And in that analogy, people are cats because otherwise that would be kinda weird and creepy.
Anyway.
Mr. Martin finds that balance. He doesn’t go so far that he loses you. And sure, you might have to take a moment (or three, or ten) after reading (or watching) one of those scenes before you can go on, but you do go on.
On the other side of the spectrum, The Force Awakens didn’t seek to be balanced or do anything at all other than to follow the hero’s journey to the letter, yet it worked. Worked damned well. Why?
Rey is the reluctant hero we can identify with. We care about her from the beginning. We cheer when she succeeds, feel the same disappointment she does when she fails. And we get it, leaving home is difficult, but once you do, all the adventures begin.