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Tag Archive for stereotypes

Tropes and Time

May 29, 2016 Writing Comments Off on Tropes and Time

XKCD

I’m working on rewrites to my upcoming novel this week, and I’ve been doing quite a bit of noodling on character motivations.  Combine that with the recent online panic about Captain America turning out to be a sleeper-agent for Hydra (in the comics) and I’ve been banging my head against tropes, subversion or tropes and all the different ways you can explain a character to a reader (or a viewer, or a gamer).

I get that these tropes exist for a reason.  They’re a shorthand (not always a good shorthand) that taps into the shared experience of everyone who has been consuming media for the past 20 years.  Notice I only say 20.  We humans have a notoriously short lens.  Take an English class sometime and read through anything written before the turn of the 19th century.  Notice how much time your teacher has to spend on setting the context?  Explaining the cultural canon of that timeframe so that you can appreciate the actual depth of the books you’re reading?  Once you know things like; the term “nose” as a common metaphor for “penis”, your understanding of a works can change on a very fundamental level.

The point is that this body of trope and metaphor, what is often referred to as the “cultural canon” is constantly changing and updating.  The tropes of 50 years ago are, by and large, unintelligible to the incoming audience.

But what this means is that these things that we are railing against, these shorthand pieces of storytelling that tap into the cultural canon to cut out hours of work and exposition, these are temporary.  We have the chance to change and direct where they go and what replaces them if we start putting the extra work in now.  There will be fits and starts, of course, there will be throwbacks and reversions to type, but we are already pushing the canon in a new direction.  The idea of a villain with a sympathetic backstory?  That’s NEW, that entered the canon within the past 30 years.  The idea that hero can fail, then *return* to being a hero again?  That’s also NEW.  So while it’s disappointing to see one-note throwbacks, we need to keep in mind that those are on their way out.  As long as we keep pushing to create the new canon, replacing those older, now negative tropes with an easy to use toolkit of new ones, we can keep this evolution moving forward.

The Shortest Distance

June 16, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on The Shortest Distance

Lets talk about shortcuts for a moment, shall we?  Emotional shortcuts, character arc shortcuts.  We want to hate them.  It’s pretty much universally understood that they are the lazy way to do things, and yet AND YET we persist in using them.  When you *really* think about them, they often take the form of stereotypes, and those can be an ugly thing in inconsiderate hands.

We know, as game creators, as designers and writers, that this is a cheap hack.  We drop in a set of conditions (bad*ss language, scar on the left cheek, military haircut, post-military drug addiction, murdered parents) with the purpose of triggering understanding on the part of the reader.  We are tapping in, for better or worse, to the decades of storytelling that has gone before so that we can sketch a character in a single paragraph, rather than taking the entire chapter.

Creating a fully rounded character takes time, it can take the course of an entire AAA videogame, or an entire novel to take that cutout and make it flesh.  But audiences, and critics, are impatient.  They all want to consume faster, they all want a fully rounded character presented up front and in a single paragraph so they can get on with things.  It often feels like what we are being pushed to create is simply a new version of the cardboard cutout, rather than being allowed to flesh out a character as they should be, over time.

to be continued…