Tropespotting

I'm going to come right out and say it: I don't like tropes.

I know what you're probably thinking. A trope is a pattern; it is a superficial similarity of narrative content. How can I not like tropes?

Let me clarify. I don't like what the current fad (and it is a fad) of named tropes has done for our ability to engage in meaningful literary discourse. We have turned literary analysis into a parlor game of Tropespotting, in which we identify patterns of content. This turns many of us away from a deeper understanding of the themes and forces that underpin the tropes themselves. We have forgotten how to analyze why a trope works (when it works) or fails (when it fails).

I see this frequently in social media accounts from authors who post videos on YouTube. The Top Ten Tropes in Fantasy. Worst Tropes Ever. The romance tropes which the vlogger adores, despises, recommends, etc.

But I say: what's the use?

Consider the purpose of a label. We have a word like apple which suggests a category of things. All such things in that category have certain traits in common. In the Venn diagram of entailed meaning, an apple is a fist-sized fruit with white or whitish-yellow flesh and a thin, crispy skin of red, green or yellow; it has a stem end and a blossom end; it has a core containing seeds, which themselves contain a certain amount of potassium cyanide; it grows on trees, and it ripens in the fall. We can even create a sub-category of apple to denote its endless varietals: Granny Smith, Fuji, Braeburn, Red Delicious, Pink Lady. We can observe how each sub-category differs from the parent.

The label here is powerful and useful. I can say I like Honeycrisp apples, or obsesrve that Golden Delicious apples make good pies. I don't have to specify the quality of the apple; it is assumed that when I speak of eating an apple, I speak of an apple that is ready to be eaten. It is automatically entailed within the act of eating that we are contemplating a ripe, fully matured apple, one which has not spoiled, and not an apple in some other inedible condition. By using the label, we have narrowed our discussion to the characteristics unique to the varietal and excluded other factors.

Now note that when people talk of tropes, we do it differently.

Authors and book-bloggers might say I like this trope, but only if it's done well. Or they'll say I can't stand this trope, but sometimes it's really good and I just can't help myself. Or they'll say I always like this trope, even when the book is garbage.

What does that tell you about the trope label? To me, it says that the label isn't particularly useful for literary analysis.

As with apples, we try to use trope labels to discuss the set of all stories that contain the trope, but we fail. We can't always easily discuss whether the trope is good or bad, easy or difficult, or sophisticated or mundane, without bending over backward to qualify our likes and dislikes with an outside factor: writing quality. When used for literary analysis, the label fails its most basic purpose, that of grouping like things together.

When we use trope names in this way, in my opinion, we're talking about the wrong thing. It would be like discussing the comfort of different mattress by referencing their shapes, or the beauty of roses by their price — in other words, comparing superficial similarities rather than fundamental metrics of quality. We should be talking about why this trope usually fails, and how to make the trope succeed.

Instead, we've turned literary analysis into a game of Tropespotting, which is neither enlightening nor engaging — at least to me. You may feel free to disagree.

There is value to having names for tropes, because patterns of similarity do exist. Trope names are simple and soundbite-worthy in the Internet era. They allow us to easily recall other stories with similar structural elements. As a tool for deciding whether a story is good, I find that tropes fail. Returning to apple varietals, they are named for apples that are edible, but tropes are named for patterns that are discovered in both good and bad media. One might say one does not like a certain food — scallops, perhaps, or broccoli — but it might be more accurate (at least for most people) to say one has never had that food prepared in a way that satisfied.

Why create labels based on patterns found in bad literature, like "Mary Sue?" Why mix them together with the labels for patterns based on good literature? It would be like grouping the names of diseases in the same list as the names of medicines. What use is that?

Lastly, I feel that identifying tropes is not a difficult or useful skill to acquire. That's memorization and recognition of patterns. On the scale of Bloom's Taxonomy, recognizing a trope is the very lowest level of understanding — Knowledge, which is the memorization of facts, and Comprehension, which rises to the level of comparing facts. In order to analyze a book properly it takes higher levels of understanding: Application, Analysis, Evaluation. (Synthesis, not so much.) Why dumb down our discourse? 

So I don't like tropes, or at least not the parlor game version of same. When I send a dish back, I don't blame the ingredient; I blame the cook.

In my next entry, I discuss an alternative to tropespotting.