Trope-a-Dope
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Yes, there is a preoccupation for an originality that doesn't exist. Nothing is really new. The important thing isn't the story but how it's told.
And that's where Avatar falls. It's an ok film, spectacular in it's way. But you can't justify the narrative of Avatar by mentioning the scarcity of original storylines because that's clearly a fact every movie has to deal with. And yes, you don't have to be a douchebag about it, but that's a completely different argument.
The article has a good point, there are those that gain a sense of superiority by being able to reference other (usually more obscure) stories to diminish another. I don't think Avatar is a good example of this though.
And that's where Avatar falls. It's an ok film, spectacular in it's way. But you can't justify the narrative of Avatar by mentioning the scarcity of original storylines because that's clearly a fact every movie has to deal with. And yes, you don't have to be a douchebag about it, but that's a completely different argument.
The article has a good point, there are those that gain a sense of superiority by being able to reference other (usually more obscure) stories to diminish another. I don't think Avatar is a good example of this though.
Very true.
Of course, that's not to say TvTropes.org is a bad website. That site is a whole new kind of entertainment, like reading out of a history or literary criticism text on modern culture that was written by people who aren't boring, and is cross-linked up the wazoo.
Like nuclear power, the good or bad of becoming trope-literate is on what you do with it.
Of course, that's not to say TvTropes.org is a bad website. That site is a whole new kind of entertainment, like reading out of a history or literary criticism text on modern culture that was written by people who aren't boring, and is cross-linked up the wazoo.
Like nuclear power, the good or bad of becoming trope-literate is on what you do with it.
There really are no more "original" stories. There haven't been for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. What we have now are countless variations on themes, and occasionally a new concept swapped in to replace an old one. Seeing how these variations can play out is good enough for me.
Sadly, it's not good enough for those people who just have to be one of the "cool rebel" types, who think that hating something everyone loves just because everyone loves it makes them "ahead of the curve" or "smarter than the sheep". And then they fanatically and tirelessly belabor their opinion as stone-solid fact, based on nothing more than their own beliefs and views. Because, obviously, if you like THAT movie you're a freaking moron, since nobody with a triple-digit IQ would be caught dead watching it. The fact that it broke every sales record in the universe only means that everyone else is stupid- but I'M smart, since I know it's terrible.
Yadda yadda, blah blah, etc. You've heard this story before.
Sadly, it's not good enough for those people who just have to be one of the "cool rebel" types, who think that hating something everyone loves just because everyone loves it makes them "ahead of the curve" or "smarter than the sheep". And then they fanatically and tirelessly belabor their opinion as stone-solid fact, based on nothing more than their own beliefs and views. Because, obviously, if you like THAT movie you're a freaking moron, since nobody with a triple-digit IQ would be caught dead watching it. The fact that it broke every sales record in the universe only means that everyone else is stupid- but I'M smart, since I know it's terrible.
Yadda yadda, blah blah, etc. You've heard this story before.
I think most readers of TVtropes forget to read this helpful bit on the front page:
Even if everything was cataloged into tight neatly boxes(as those smug aliens presumed), it's the way those boxes fit and are made to fit with each other, that turns the stories so great.
To clarify "tropes are not bad:" tropes are CONCEPTS. Nothing more and nothing less -- concepts that recur in fiction. And there's one thing a lot of people forget about TV Tropes: the works that have examples of the most tropes [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeOverdosed] are also, by and large, the wiki's favorites. Doctor Who, Buffy, Order of the Stick, Evangelion, Discworld, Negima, Warhammer 40,000, Gurren Lagann, Dr. Horrible, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Super Robot Wars. Chock-full of tropes, and tropers eat them up not in spite of that, but because of it.
Wow. A Caustic Critic talking about how Tropes will Ruin Your Life. I've never heard this one before.
/irony
/irony
You forgot Haruhi, goddess of tropes herself.Shay Guy said:
Thank you once again, Moviebob. Your line of thinking has coincided with my argument since the beginning of all of this whining about Avatar's non-originality, and even before the film was made. To be cliché regarding clichés: there is nothing new under the sun. To say that something is unoriginal is a completely irrelevant criticism - there is nothing original in the first place.
Why? That's easily explained. We have six billion people alive today, and about one hundred and six billion people who have lived on the Earth and died before us, with all of their stories to add to our own ones. In the face of odds that steep, to pretend that any story we write - even if it's in a made up language - is in any way "original" is the height of arrogance, so the only "originality" we perceive is 100% subjective.
This situation provides each of us, and ultimately humanity itself, with three major choices.
One, we follow the path of the aliens in your story. We split everything into broad, classified clichés, and everything becomes dust. We understand the trope, therefore the story has no meaning to us. We gain nothing "new" from it because we've "seen it before". As a result, the banality of the endless information sea eventually overrides our sense of enjoyment in said information, while our addiction to it continues to grow.
Two, we follow the path of the young man. We individualise everything, we understand meaning on the most subjective level, therefore enjoying our own experiences while decrying others', concluding on our superiority over beings potentially more objective and intelligent than ourselves. The result; a ceaseless wave of love for certain stories or genres that is so individual that we rarely have anything to relate to others about, or else polarise into groups so strongly defined by interest that they seem like new cultures... eventually leading to deeper conflicts and the destruction, once again, of enjoyment. This is something that has already happened on a small scale with the culture of the "fan", which has lead to conflicts like the console wars. These conflicts may seem small now, but if you multiply that subjectivity across the whole human race, imagine the consequences. "Harmful" would be an understatement.
The third option, a middle option of sorts, makes more sense to me. Why not classify the tropes and understand them objectively? But why not, in response to the tendency towards jadedness, nurture a sense of enjoyment when it comes to the commonality and archetypal nature of storytelling? The best of both worlds is easily achievable here - all it takes is to believe in meaning regardless of its commonality. After all, to be useful, meaning doesn't require originality - meaning is in meaning. Even if a hundred thousand people have walked our exact path previously, that doesn't make our own personal experience and variations in that path worthless. That doesn't make our own self-discovery meaningless. We see the dust, the base similarity of all stories, and we remember that though it is common, it is made from the stars of knowledge and wisdom. Enjoyment is thus maintained, and the addiction to information does not destroy the spice of life.
The aliens assume that for something to be meaningful, it must be interesting to them. The failure of logic there is obvious. The mistake in the young man's approach is less clear, but nevertheless present; he fails to realise the entertainment value of his story is degraded (for the aliens) by its commonality, even though that story retains meaning and useful conclusions about teenage love. Boredom and meaning are entirely different and separate concepts, and sadly neither alien nor human in this story understands the difference. Luckily, they need not connect at all times, if we dare to suspend belief. That is a challenge that the Information Age has presented to us, so I hope that we learn the lesson.
Why? That's easily explained. We have six billion people alive today, and about one hundred and six billion people who have lived on the Earth and died before us, with all of their stories to add to our own ones. In the face of odds that steep, to pretend that any story we write - even if it's in a made up language - is in any way "original" is the height of arrogance, so the only "originality" we perceive is 100% subjective.
This situation provides each of us, and ultimately humanity itself, with three major choices.
One, we follow the path of the aliens in your story. We split everything into broad, classified clichés, and everything becomes dust. We understand the trope, therefore the story has no meaning to us. We gain nothing "new" from it because we've "seen it before". As a result, the banality of the endless information sea eventually overrides our sense of enjoyment in said information, while our addiction to it continues to grow.
Two, we follow the path of the young man. We individualise everything, we understand meaning on the most subjective level, therefore enjoying our own experiences while decrying others', concluding on our superiority over beings potentially more objective and intelligent than ourselves. The result; a ceaseless wave of love for certain stories or genres that is so individual that we rarely have anything to relate to others about, or else polarise into groups so strongly defined by interest that they seem like new cultures... eventually leading to deeper conflicts and the destruction, once again, of enjoyment. This is something that has already happened on a small scale with the culture of the "fan", which has lead to conflicts like the console wars. These conflicts may seem small now, but if you multiply that subjectivity across the whole human race, imagine the consequences. "Harmful" would be an understatement.
The third option, a middle option of sorts, makes more sense to me. Why not classify the tropes and understand them objectively? But why not, in response to the tendency towards jadedness, nurture a sense of enjoyment when it comes to the commonality and archetypal nature of storytelling? The best of both worlds is easily achievable here - all it takes is to believe in meaning regardless of its commonality. After all, to be useful, meaning doesn't require originality - meaning is in meaning. Even if a hundred thousand people have walked our exact path previously, that doesn't make our own personal experience and variations in that path worthless. That doesn't make our own self-discovery meaningless. We see the dust, the base similarity of all stories, and we remember that though it is common, it is made from the stars of knowledge and wisdom. Enjoyment is thus maintained, and the addiction to information does not destroy the spice of life.
The aliens assume that for something to be meaningful, it must be interesting to them. The failure of logic there is obvious. The mistake in the young man's approach is less clear, but nevertheless present; he fails to realise the entertainment value of his story is degraded (for the aliens) by its commonality, even though that story retains meaning and useful conclusions about teenage love. Boredom and meaning are entirely different and separate concepts, and sadly neither alien nor human in this story understands the difference. Luckily, they need not connect at all times, if we dare to suspend belief. That is a challenge that the Information Age has presented to us, so I hope that we learn the lesson.
That's only for boys. Girls are always the losers on the gender playing field, and that's not only a stigma, but a bonafide trope.NewClassic said:
Oh dear jeebus, the amount of time I've spent on TV tropes recently...
I find myself worrying about following this road sometimes, and I constantly have to remind myself what is good in movies, TV, video games, etc. lest I become too jaded. Yes, apparently there is such a thing.
A similar phenomenon occurs in other things as well-for example "being rebellious" becomes a marketed trend...and if you can't see the fallacy in that you need eye surgery. Extending cultures to pretenders who sort of grasp the basic concepts, but miss the spirit. Criticism should be about improving quality by explaining what's enjoyable and what isn't. Not making yourself seem smart when really you're just pretentious.
Oh, and I almost feel like scolding moviebob for putting a link to TV tropes in this article. You've doomed them all to countless hours of wiki-surfing, only to later wonder where the hell the last 3 days went! How could you!? Sending anyone that link is an unspeakable act of cruelty...(which is why I do it all the time)...on a related note, my favorite TV tropes page- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Uncyclopedia ...which links to the Uncyclopedia page on TV tropes, which links back, also links to the wikipedia page on TV tropes, which links to the TV tropes page...that whole juncture just exploded my brain the first time I saw it. Not to mention that both the TVtropes and the uncyclopedia page are spot on.
I find myself worrying about following this road sometimes, and I constantly have to remind myself what is good in movies, TV, video games, etc. lest I become too jaded. Yes, apparently there is such a thing.
A similar phenomenon occurs in other things as well-for example "being rebellious" becomes a marketed trend...and if you can't see the fallacy in that you need eye surgery. Extending cultures to pretenders who sort of grasp the basic concepts, but miss the spirit. Criticism should be about improving quality by explaining what's enjoyable and what isn't. Not making yourself seem smart when really you're just pretentious.
Oh, and I almost feel like scolding moviebob for putting a link to TV tropes in this article. You've doomed them all to countless hours of wiki-surfing, only to later wonder where the hell the last 3 days went! How could you!? Sending anyone that link is an unspeakable act of cruelty...(which is why I do it all the time)...on a related note, my favorite TV tropes page- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Uncyclopedia ...which links to the Uncyclopedia page on TV tropes, which links back, also links to the wikipedia page on TV tropes, which links to the TV tropes page...that whole juncture just exploded my brain the first time I saw it. Not to mention that both the TVtropes and the uncyclopedia page are spot on.
Frankly, i'm amused by people who can say "i've seen it all before" just because they read TV Tropes Wiki. They are so foolish. Tropes are not cliches, and what ultimately matters is assembly and delivery anyway. I could pick any work described there, and rearrange elements so that it becomes completely different. Then i could create a masterpiece of literature or a godawful B-movie out of that script.
The most important thing Moviebob noted though, is that broad strokes may be similar - but subtle details is what creates true uniqueness. Warhammer 40.000 and Supreme Commander are both about pan-galactic war dragging on for millenia, but can you say they're exactly similar to each other? Not with a straight face.
The most important thing Moviebob noted though, is that broad strokes may be similar - but subtle details is what creates true uniqueness. Warhammer 40.000 and Supreme Commander are both about pan-galactic war dragging on for millenia, but can you say they're exactly similar to each other? Not with a straight face.
There are still a few original stories floating around. Parts of them will be broken down, without doubt, but those parts that are original still stand out. Of course, we could always collapse the whole set by setting a trope for those that check tropes, in a manner of moebius-style tautology, and catch the whole pompous lot of them into a net. It would be like one of those "How to keep an idiot busy" shirts, keeping them locked in a circle of tropes until they fade from existence.