Trope Floats
While skimming this first segment in a chapter-by-chapter review of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books (there’s monsters called trollocs???), I came upon this link to TV Tropes, an incredible collection of storytelling clichés. A few highlights:
- All Myths Are True In fantasy settings, the idea that all myths, folk tales and prophecies are either accurate descriptions of past events or accurate predictions of the future is so often used that it deserves to be called a cliché. It’s used so often, in fact, that exceptions to the rule are far more notable.
- In the Dune novels, the Bene Gesserit… purposely spread made-up prophecies that any member of their order can fulfill if needed. Thus, a member stranded on an otherwise hostile world can appear to be The Woman From the Prophecy. Which ends up biting them in the ass, hard, when Paul Atreides starts fufilling prophecies left and right and the Bene Gesserit are so used to treating prophecies as fakes and tools that they don’t see The Messiah in front of their faces until it’s too late to do anything about it. Lampshaded by Herbert in one of the Appendixes, an after-action report by the Bene Gesserit that points out all the clues that a lot of people who should have known better ignored. Alternative explanation: Dune is an Idiot Plot and Frank Herbert knew it.
- Arbitrary Skepticism is the tendency of characters who deal with the bizarre on a daily basis to be unreasonably closed minded. Sometimes this makes sense – just because aliens exist, it doesn’t mean that unicorns do – but often the viewer is left wondering how the characters can still be skeptical after everything they’ve seen. The Agent Scully is fond of this.
- Idiot Plot Popularized by film critic Roger Ebert, a term for a plot that hangs together only because the main characters behave like idiots.
- Half the Harry Potter novels hinge on adults giving Harry and his friends incomplete or misleading information about what is going on because they don’t want to burden young Harry with the Awful Truth. This never helps, and by the fifth novel you start to have serious doubts about how wise The Dumbledorereally is if he thinks that keeping the truth from the Heroes will somehow get them to keep themselves out of the action. He himself admits that this was pretty stupid in the fifth book.
The wiki relies a little heavily on anime for examples, but if you scroll a bit past all the Yu-Gi-Oh references you’re sure to come across some familiar books and films.
