Are These Tropes Secretly GOOD?
Last week, I was pretty negative; I listed five tropes that I hate seeing or am at least exhausted by. Tropes are typically thought of as a negative thing since they tend to signify a lack of originality and creativity, though sometimes the subversion of tropes can greatly make up for having them in the first place. Today, I’m going to try to be a little more positive than I was last week: I’ll be talking about five tropes that I personally enjoy in stories. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you probably already know what the first one is going to be…
Revenge
There are tons of revenge tropes and I honestly enjoy most of them when they’re done well. Picking a favorite is hard, but I think that my absolute favorite of the revenge tropes is He Who Fights Monsters. In this trope, the individual seeking revenge finds that the path of vengeance has left the vengeful one no better than the target of the revenge. We see this in all sorts of media, and it strikes me every time that it’s done well. Personally, I like it when the vengeful person stops short of becoming the monster, but I also like to see the person become a monster that someone else has to hunt down. I think that this is what is being set up in The Burning by Evan Winter and I am beyond excited to see where Tau’s path leads him because of that. It can go so many ways!
My suggestion for making a good revenge story is pretty simple: just don’t make it all about self-gratification. Revenge is compelling because of the way that it changes the vengeful. It’s compelling because it’s wrong, or at the very least morally grey. Vengeance is not the path of someone who’s pure of heart, it’s the path of someone who is torn up, broken, and usually wrathful. If I get to the end of the revenge story and no lessons have been learned, no positive change has come about, and the consequences of vengeance haven’t been showcased… I’m not going to be all that thrilled.
Dragons
I know, I know. So many people are tired of dragons. They feel tired and overdone. A lot of us are exhausted by them and ready for something new. Here’s the thing: I agree. I am really sick of dragons that are exactly the same as all of the other dragons I’ve read about. It’s not thrilling, exciting, or fresh. These winged, reptilian monstrosities are powerful icons of fantasy that have been done the same way for centuries… and yet I will never grow tired of seeing a fresh, unique take on dragons that brings something new to the table. So yes, the great fire-breathing monsters that must be slain by a worthy night are overdone, but there are ways to breathe new life into them—we’ve even seen it!
I’m going to use Evan Winter’s The Burning as an example, again. Sorry, it’s just got the coolest, most unique take on dragons that I’ve seen in a while, at least that I’ve experienced in recent memory. His dragons are a key part of his magic system and the societies within his world. They’re also absolutely unfathomable; their mass is incredible, but so is their actual structure. Their scales are designed to make it hard to keep track of them or fully understand the space they occupy. Being close to one will cause your flesh to sizzle and burn. The dragons written by Evan Winter gave me a renewed fear and awe for the creatures; they are a great example of how you can do dragons properly, even if people are growing tired of them as a whole. Just have a fresh, unique take on the creatures!
Forbidden Love
This might be the most surprising trope on this list; I’m not a huge romance buff, but that isn’t because I don’t like romance in my stories. I don’t read romance or enjoy romantic plotlines because they’re usually repetitive, dull, and rely heavily on things like jealousy and miscommunication. It’s dully and not all that compelling, so I tend to get tired of seeing them, even in stories that I’m otherwise enjoying. However, one romantic trope does have a chance to interest me, and that’s forbidden love. This is when, for one reason or another, two people who love one another are not permitted to be together. Romeo and Juliet is a great example of a story featuring forbidden love.
Executing this trope well can be a challenge, though. In order for this to feel unique and be a plot thread that’s interesting, you need to achieve two things: make the relationship something the reader/viewer will support and make the reason the two cannot be together believable. If I’m reading a book and I don’t care if a particular couple is together, their love being forbidden will mean absolutely nothing to me. Likewise, if I want them to be together and the reason they can’t seems incredibly stupid and eye-roll worthy, I also won’t care about your romantic plotline. Make me care about your lovers, then make me believe that the thing separating them is a genuine obstacle they may not be able to overcome.
Evil Overlords
Evil Overlords are incredibly overdone, but… I can’t get enough. Building powerful and compelling evils that lord over the forces of darkness or wickedness can still be an excellent storytelling device if done well. I think that when people say they’re tired of evil overlords, what they’re usually tired of isn’t a figurehead over an evil kingdom, but rather a figurehead whose motivations cannot be understood or simply don’t make sense at all. We often have evil overlords who are evil largely just for the sake of being evil. That’s fine for some characters, but when it’s the total motivation of the entire enemy force, it doesn’t feel all that compelling.
Instead, make your evil overlord someone that can be empathized with. Give this entity motivations that are believable. Better yet, give the overlord motivations that those experiencing your story might find themselves almost agreeing with. Maybe the methods of the evil overlord are extreme, but the reasons behind those methods? They might just make sense.
Quests
I honestly don’t think that quests are overdone, yet it feels like they’ve disappeared largely from stories that have been released in recent years. I haven’t seen the likes of quests like those found in The Hobbit for quite a while, and it’s a shame. Quests can make excellent stories, especially short stories, novellas, or standalone novels. In a quest, there’s a simple, singular goal. Things may separate our protagonist from that goal during the journey toward the story’s climax, but the plot of a quest is generally quite easy to summarize in just a single sentence. In Lord of the Rings, the quest is to throw the ring into Mount Doom. A lot more happens beyond that, but there’s always this one, simple quest thread. Other quests might be slaying a dragon, rescuing a princess, delivering a message, or gathering seventeen lizards for a villager who needs them for some reason.
The problem with the quest trope is that while quests themselves are not overdone, some specific quests are overdone. I don’t want another story about someone going out to slay a dragon or save a princess. I want the quest to be fresh or unique, but I miss that fairytale-tier, catchy questline that’s handed to our protagonist. Something simple and straightforward! We can have complexity around that, but giving our protagonist an achievable quest that takes the hero on a journey where many lessons are learned? I still want to see that.
Conclusion
Those are my five favorite tropes! Honestly, I did have a bit of a hard time thinking of the last two. I had to reflect on whether or not I genuinely didn’t like certain tropes or if I was just tired of the way that they’d been done! Evil Overlords in particular feel overdone, but it’s really just the way that they’ve been approached in many works. In fact, I think that even the tropes I hate could theoretically still be used to tell great stories if the correct writer takes a crack at them.
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out this post! I really appreciate it. If you would like to support me, the best way to do so right now is to subscribe to my YouTube channel! Additionally, you can follow me on social media. I’m @TLBainter on most platforms, and I’ll have links to everything at the bottom of this post. Thanks again for your time, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on tropes, both those I love and those I hate!
Until next time, bye!