Trope? What's a trope?

(the genius of Wreck It Ralph 2, see it if you haven't!)

It’s blursday!! Is anyone else having trouble keeping track of what day it is? 

One thing I don’t keep track of much are what the it trope of the year is. Oh, I’m absolutely aware of what they are because a trope doesn’t become it until it reaches the mainstream and is everywhere. But some of you may be scratching your head, what exactly is a trope and am I reading one?

Short answer: yes. A literary trope is a theme, type of character, language etc. that is used over and over so much that it becomes a red flag, a bullseye, a characteristic that tells you immediately what type of book you are reading. 

The chosen one. A marriage of convenience. The Butler did it. Killer aliens. The secret heir. An object of immeasurable power. Vampires.

All of those are tropes that give you clues to what you’ve just picked up. And all of them have been bemoaned at some point.

But when the masses are calling for a trope to die, it doesn’t mean it really truly dies. It only means the market is oversaturated with that specific trope and, like the bunny being fed pancakes at the end of Wreck it Ralph 2…people explode from too much of a good thing. 

So the bunny explodes. There’s pandemonium and screaming as the other books scramble to be the entrée. And the pancakes hang out in the background until people start looking around, craving those fluffy flapjacks covered in syrup again. 

Since I don’t tend to binge on books of the same trope I don’t get sick of any. That’s not to say there aren’t tropes I give a hard no to, there absolutely are. There’s no such thing as everyone will love it. Even if the social’s blowing up with pancakes, not everyone’s going to be eating them and subsequently calling for their annihilation.

But to answer the topic of the week: for me, the pancakes have always been vampire stories. I loved Dracula back in the day, fell hard for the Dark Prince of the Carpathian series, couldn’t get enough of Cat and Bones, and have been searching high and low for my next fanged fix ever since. 

I’ve known vampire books would return someday. And no, I know some of you are saying write what you want to read if you can’t find it, but my brain doesn’t write vampire fic. And I'm very good at waiting. 

How about you? What tropes have you gotten sick of recently?

Die, Trope, Die, Damnit!

Tropes that just won't die, eh? Tropes that need to be shoved through the airlock during an interstellar mission? Tropes that ought to be dunked in lighter fluid then fed to a dragon?

The whole Incest is Best thing. Like, really? REALLY? Even the allusion to it needs to be dropped into an active volcano. Sexual abuse is horrible on any scale, regardless of gender. Rape as character motivation or punishment is so ingrained in spec-fic that it's more shocking to not encounter it. Stories that add Keeping It In The Family as an extra layer of brokenness? Ugh. DNF. Instant wall-banger.

Yeah, yeah, "but it happens" and "history is full of examples." So? Fantasy in the 80s was rife with sibling sex. Hell, there was required reading in school involving that shit. Fast-forward 40 years and low and behold, that damn trope is back. Worming its way into popular SFF, again. More than just that one super famous series that made it to TV or even that other semi-popular book-to-show series. More than that next one you're thinking of too.

~head explodes~

If you want your character(s) to be really fucked up, you don't have to have them fuck their family. FFS.

~wanders off to find brain bleach~

Changing Up the Apocalypse

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Resurrections: What trope/theme did you think (or wished) had "died" only to be recently resurrected?"

I don't often have it in for tropes. After all, they're simply story constructs and are neither good nor bad, any more than paragraphs and sentences are good or bad. Everything entirely depends on the writer and what they do with the trope. As we often talk about, there are no new story ideas - the feeling of freshness comes from the author and their voice. I recently saw a review of one of my books where the reader said I revitalized a tired trope. A nice compliment, but tropes can't get tired - they just get handled in tired ways.

Anyway, since the pandemic and apocalyptic themes are on our minds, I can talk about an apocalyptic trope I've never cared for. That's the one where civilization collapses and the people who rise ascendant are the brutal men. Women automatically become rape-imperiled property and Tough Men with Big Guns battle constantly. We see this all the time and it drives me nuts. As if women are simply perched on an unsteady tech platform that can at any time tip them into a lawless world where they're dragged by the hair into caves.

Spare me. As if they educated, capable, tough women of the modern world can't figure out how not to be helpless.

What's been interesting about the COVID-19 pandemic is that the skills emerging as critical to our lives and well-being aren't prancing around in leather and shooting big guns, but the simple hearth skills like baking and sewing. We've been baking our own bread, sewing masks we can't buy, adopting home-healing remedies since we can't hit the urgent care centers.

It makes sense, too, that when we lose access to the instant gratification of civilization, we are left to create our own. I think that, in a post-apocalyptic world, the people who can create stability and safety, with decent food and the comforts of a warm home, will be the true heroes.

Doesn't make for an exciting action flick, but... well, aren't we all discovering we prefer normal life? And baked goods. :-)

Weed Themes in Writing: Not That Kind of Weed

No, not the kind you roll, the kind growing through your driveway. The kind you face down with a cannister of Round-Up, yet stay your trigger-finger lest you nuke the toads in the process. The kind when you rip the leaves from the stems still has a wide and deep root system waiting to grow another sprout or twelve. The kind that starts in the meadow and eventually pops up by the porch.

Try as you might, those weeds are survivors.

They're integrated into the soil of your imagination. Germinating while you're plotting. They don't need water or fertilizer; minding or tending. All they need is you focused on making the garden bloom, clicking out the word-count, sentences flowing, scenes growing, climaxes building, chapters swelling, denouements wrapping.

When you're done, and surveying the fields of your creation, you might not see them. You might not be aware that in midst of the herbs and flowers you meant to cultivate, are the weeds of themes that are intrinsically part of the way you look at life.

It might take a reviewer to point them out. 

Once you spot those weeds, raise a glass to them. Now you see the enduring power of nature.

Your nature.