Tropes to be tired of

[mount_oregano]

Bookish has just published a column called “Tired of Tropes: Authors Dish on the Tropes They’re Sick Of.” The tropes include justifiable homicide, damsels in distress, brooding writers as main characters, and detectives carrying purses (apparently they don’t do that on duty).

Here’s what I’d say if I were asked:

What’s your magical superpower?
• Have your immortal gifts allowed you to breathe elemental forces into a hero’s sword and rescue the thrice-cursed island from the burgeoning darkness of the Sorcerers of Chaos?
• Did your mysterious visions and prophesies give you the wisdom to combat the deception of the shadowy spirits inhabiting the ancient forest before they brought death and destruction to the spirit-plane realm of the dragons?
• Has your secret faerie (note spelling) destiny led you on a quest as a silent, solitary warrior against the demons whose blood could restore the shapeshifter king to his honor?
• Did the inscrutable lords of the night hire you for your alchemist-fueled telepathy to wreak revenge against the mythical incubus bandit and her soulless minions, only to betray you?
If so, perhaps you could forgo writing your autobiography as a fictionalized epic trilogy during 2018.

What tropes are you tired of?

— Sue Burke

Comments

[larryhammer]

Unearned power-ups without consequences.

[mount_oregano]

Yes. Nothing comes easy, and everything has a price.

Sort of like real life.

[cmcmck]

All too many bloody wizards!

[mount_oregano]

Agreed -- possibly even before Harry Potter.

[asakiyume]

I think I get bored with style quirks rather than tropes: a little while ago I was VERY tired of list stories written in the present tense (these, fortunately, now have dropped off the horizon). More broadly, I'm not very interested in stories that condemn something that is very easy/no consequence to condemn. Oh, you're opposed to dictatorship, or the subjection of women, or a caste system? Oh wow, gosh! A story can explore any of those things in a good way, but if the main point seems to be to say, "How awful dictatorship is/how terrible when women aren't treated as full humans/how cruel and wasteful of humanity caste systems are" then no.

[mount_oregano]

Capitalist are easy to condemn as greedy, too. A punch of nuance wouldn't hurt the story.

[captlychee]

Well, I guess you meant 'pinch of nuance' but 'punch of nuance' has got to be a catchphrase for the times. It's one of those things where they seem self-contradictory but really describes the way nuance is used these days.

[mount_oregano]

That was a typo, but I see your point. A punch might be the right amount.

[captlychee]

Mine would be:

Mul>

Things are different, so I'm gay

Children adapt to the new world, buit adults don't

The colonists will always rebel against the parent government

The prostitute/servanrt/lady detective/girl thief with a heart of gold

[mount_oregano]

Sorry, I did commit a few tropes in "Semiosis."

[captlychee]

Well, hyou've restrained them so far (page 121). Pax has no-one to rebel against, so you've taken care of that, but I was pleased to see (page 68) that the protagonists were heterosexual. I don't mind homosexual characgters but using that just to show how different things are is a trope so annoying I usually drop the book and rre-read Ringworld.

In any case, tropes are sometimes necessary. If they didn't generally work they woyldn't last long enough to be tropes.