Why Some Tropes Fail

In this ongoing series of blog posts, I discuss why I dislike the recent fad of naming tropes, and how a model of setups and payoffs gives us a better way to discover why certain tropes often don't work, even when they sometimes do. (You should probably read those two entries first.)

Of the many tropes I often hear excoriated by readers and writers, several stand out. Let's examine some of them using the setups-and-payoffs model to see why these tropes so often fail.

The Mary Sue

The classic form of this trope is the character who is best at everything. She (or he, in the case of the Gary Stu) is younger, prettier, better, smarter, stronger, faster, and more beloved than everyone else in the cast, and she has no difficulty achieving anything. Tasks that befuddle and bewilder even the most seasoned veterans are child's play to her, and everybody is always constantly impressed by everything she does.

Diagnosis: all payoff, no setup.

The Mary Sue character often doesn't work because the reader is not given the opportunity to consider multiple potential overlapping outcomes. This happens because Mary Sue is so good at everything, there is always only one outcome: wildly improbable success. There may not be any intervening narrative time to allow other possibilities even to be contemplated. Instead, the author leaps directly for the happy ending, leaving the setup extrinsic to the story. I suspect the setup resides in the author's chosen audience — either the author herself, or some person whom the author hopes to please.

It's important to remember that the original Mary Sue was written as a parody of bad fan fiction, so there is purpose behind its badness.

Course of Treatment: needs a robust setup and some narrative space to develop tension

It's perfectly fine to have a character that is amazingly powerful and well-liked; the enduring popularity of Wonder Woman might be considered an example of a character that succeeds at this trope. She is powerful, wise, skilled, and almost impossible to defeat; but she can be defeated, on her own terms, and she must labor to overcome these defeats like any other hero. We might similarly consider Sherlock Holmes as a typical example of a Gary Stu.

Love at First Sight

Two lovers meet, their eyes lock across a crowded room. They fall instantly in love! Cue the sweaty love scene, the declarations of infatuation and adoration, and the inevitably overdone sequel.

Diagnosis: overdrawn at the setup bank.

When Love at First Sight fails, it's usually because the author tries to extract more payoff than the setup has warranted. Without doing the legwork to make the romance click, the author tries to squeeze maximum joy out of the presumed-perfect relationship.

Course of Treatment: minimum setup means minimum payoff; focus on something else.

Two of the best-loved works in all of fiction use Love at First Sight, and very effectively. You may scoff, but it's true.

In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo falls instantly in love with Juliet. However, Shakespeare is clever enough to provide just enough setup to make the rest of it work, and he's careful not to overdraw that balance. First, we learn the Capulets and Montagues are blood enemies. Then Romeo is introduced as a lovesick teenager (one strike) who's in love with a woman, Rosalind, that he can't have (two strikes); and his friends drag him to a ball to take his mind off things. He meets Juliet, a Capulet, and we're off. But ol' Billy Shakes doesn't let his payoff get too far out of hand. Romeo and Juliet spend almost no time playing lovey-dovey together, which means we aren't given too large a dose of syrupy joy. Instead, he focuses on the dramatic tension keeping them apart rather than the meager setup keeping them together. We never even get to see the happily-ever-after ending (because, spoiler alert, everybody dies at the end).

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennett falls instantly in love with Charles Bingley. Like Shakespeare, Austen is clever enough to provide no more payoff than the setup deserves; before long, Charles is whisked away from Longbourne to London by the machinations of Mr Darcy and his own sisters' interference. Jane Bennett must endure more setup, traveling to London in a pitiful attempt to reconnect with Bingley. Lizzie Bennett can only resolve Jane's romance with Bingley by untangling her own with Darcy: confronting him about his interference, declaring him not to be a gentleman, and so on. In other words, even though Austen has Jane and Bingley fall in love immediately and instantly, there's no payoff until Austen has given herself the time and space to add 50 more chapters worth of setup; and when the payoff comes, it's a simple declaration of marriage and we are rushed along to Lizzie's own denouement. In other words, Austen makes it work because she doesn't demand more payoff for Jane's romance than the setup deserves.

Let's do one more.

Woke Up and It Was All a Dream

The usual form of this trope, the one which so often fails, is the one where the author tries to deceive the reader. The author has taken the trouble to set up the protagonist with hopes, dreams, fears, and goals; and for a brief passage, the author tries to inveigle the reader into believing those hopes, dreams, fears, etc., are coming to pass. Then the author yanks out the carpet from beneath the reader with a shout of "Surprise! I was an unreliable narrator!"

Diagnosis: one setup, but asks for two payoffs; temporarily unreliable narrator

When this trope falls on its face, it's for a very simple reason. The author has built a single setup into the story, then tries to make it pay off twice. The reader gets to experience the catharsis of the first (false) payoff, but then the author demands the reader reinstate the prior level of dramatic tension without doing any additional work. This technique might have worked (and may still work) in a world with powerful social motivators that a) need no restatement and b) aren't specific to the character; for instance, a Victorian lady might have a nightmare about being caught alone with a gentleman. Presuming your readers are also 19th-century gentlewomen, they may not need additional reminders that this activity is verboten. But usually when we try to apply this trope, the audience will throw up their collective hands and shout "Cheap!"

The audience may also be negatively reacting to the use of unreliable narration, a gimmick in which the author abrogates his responsibility to clearly communicate what is actually happening. As the conduit for truth and reality in the fictional world, the author makes the reader dependent upon them. This particular trope asks that the reader permit, and then forgive, the author's deliberate transgression. It is not always easy to recover the reader's trust after that moment. (Note that the reader may react differently to this trope in a story where the unreliability of the narrator has been firmly established, although I can't say that I've ever seen it done.)

Course of Treatment: a) do not claim the false payoff; and/or b) re-establish the setup.

I have several examples of this trope being used successfully. Here I'll present only two of them.

The Princess Bride. In the film version, the Grandfather reads that the king has died, and Buttercup is forced to marry the rotten Prince (viz, Humperdinck). Buttercup is then confronted in the town square by a hideous crone who mocks her for not marrying the man she loves (viz, "Boo!").

The trope is made to work here because the Grandson instantly questions the narrative, long before the audience has an opportunity to do so. The dream sequence thus lampshaded, there is never any serious attempt to trick the audience into paying off the dramatic tension of the first setup (approximately "Buttercup loves Westley and wants to marry him"). Furthermore, the film goes a step beyond this: as soon as Buttercup awakes, she confronts the Prince, which re-establishes the original setup and even raises the stakes; now Buttercup is imprisoned. We leave with the original setup and dramatic tension not only intact, but escalated.

Pet Sematary. In the novel, Louis Creed has what he believes is a nightmare: a patient of his that died from a traumatic accident, Victor Pascow, visits him in the night. Pascow, horribly mutilated, embodies Creed's fear of death and his recent failure as a physician. Creed follows the zombie Pascow into the night, believing he is asleep, as Pascow takes him to the Micmac burial ground and warns him of its dangers When he awakes the next morning, he discovers his feet are covered in dirt and pine needles.

Here again the trope works, because Stephen King first convinces us that it is a dream, before convincing us in the reveal of Dr Creed's dirty feet that it was not; this is the reversal of the typical sequence of the classic trope. Also, the dream sequence is not a payoff for any future fear or desire of Creed's; it is a reminder of a past fear that came true. Last, the dream sequence is not a false payoff, because it is itself a setup; the zombie of Victor Pascow arrives only to deliver exposition.