thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.
please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them
legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes
The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film
this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful
As editors, I constantly use tropes to illustrate points. I often use the terms discredited her hopes, or harmful tropes, or cliched trips. They are tools and I reference the site all the time. But as a reminder tropes are tools not something to avoid.
If there is one thing I have learned in all this time it’s to never trust someone who asks you to harass people on their behalf. Even if they’re your friend, because sooner or later you’re going to be the one on the chopping block.
(I mean, you shouldn’t be harassing people anyway, for you or for anyone, whether it will come back to bite you or not, but also the person who leads a harassment campaign with you today will run a harassment campaign against you tomorrow. It’s always better to just quietly disengage that person from your life instead cause they aren’t good for you or anyone else.)
If cruelty is okay when done to certain people, there is always motivation to lump more and more people into that category- either to avoid accountability, avoid guilt, or to gain a measure of power over others they didn’t have before.
do yall even know how good dinotopia is. i’m going mad in my brain right now because I was thinking about my half-imagined redesign of skybax rider society again. the complexity of the criticism of imperialism and liberalism. the fucking worldbuilding and lore. i’m obsessed with their treaty history and the place of piscivores in pelledrine society. I want to write essays on the treatment of sacred land and traditions of corpse disposition in dinotopian society. I could stare at bagel kentrosaurus forever
