TV Tropes

Man, this site is awesome. I want to build a small community of like-minded weirdos who use these and other terms like them to talk about TV and other mass-media storytelling. Critical quote:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

I was introduced to the idea of (literary) tropes and topoi by a fantastic English teacher named Eric Keenaghan. They're essential for understanding both dense symbolism and surface meaning in literature.

But I especially love the use of the idea of a trope, here. They're not cliches! The best part of the quote is in the definition, which I'll quote again even.

...a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations...

These ideas are SO important for informing one's approach to one's culture. When we know more about what characterizes the sensibilities of the population we are part of, we have an EXTREMELY useful tool for ingesting all media intended for wide distribution. Furthermore--and this may not be a legit logical leap, so feel free to fret, true believers--it seems that we can assume the most successful mass media voices are the most skilled in dealing with tropes. I'm not claiming anything about whether those skills are causes or effects (ie, chickens or eggs) of the success, but the general correlation seems like a reasonable assumption.

"Duh," right? Most of this is obvious. When we know the things that tropes identify, we are better information consumers.

What I think is important, though, is being able to identify them AS tropes. Jargon is usually useless outside of its native sphere, but I think that the definition of "trope" is nothing less than a survival tool in today's world.

Everyone's able to identify cliches. It's a natural tendency for humans to identify (and tire of) things/patterns/exemplars that they've seen before. Boring and predictable mean safe and inviting. There's (apparently) entire conferences based on the preference for the same ol'-same ol' in birds and beasts alike.

But if we are able to separate out tropes from cliches, we start to tell the difference between a cliched piece of useful wisdom like

Judge not, lest ye be judged

stereotypes, like

"Women are catty, phony and hypocritical because they are slaves to the whims of their unstable emotions."

and a trope that reveals something about how we think as a people, like the "such a phony" trope:

Character A is talking about Character B, who will be entering the room shortly. B is generally a "nice" character. A does not like B, and says B is "such a phony", but as soon as B enters, A pretends to be nice to B, thus being as big a phony as they claimed B was. For example:

A: Here comes B. I hate her. She thinks she's so perfect. She's such a phony.

[B enters]

A: [sweetly] Hi B! Great to see you!

Usually found in a Sit Com, and usually performed by a female character.

Sub-trope of Hypocritical Humor.

The trope focuses on our culture's fascination with the mysterious connection between judgemental maxims and hypocrisy. THIS is the kind of thing that isn't a universal human trait. This is what we want to be able to name when we see it. This is what we might expect NOT to find in another culture (or, for that matter, applied to "qualified" sources of judgement in our own: cf. Mentors).

Do these definitions work? I don't know.

Cliches: kernel of truth, something everyone says but no one puts into practice. (a cliche to describe a cliche!)
Stereotypes: originally a source of dominance over non-esteemed social group, a prejudice that a large number of people "believe" to varying degrees

Trope: the expression of all of the sources of cliches, stereotypes and more...but situated inside of the idealized world being portrayed (even on the news!).

SO think of mass media as a laboratory. An idealized space of our own collective creation where the independent variables are the various little tropes running around and the dependent variables are the rates of success for each trope and their collected or individual uses. And yes, I did say OUR collective creation. Popular culture and its audience are increasingly symbiotic, and very soon I expect we won't be able to distinguish the two. And who cares? It's the thoughts that matter, and the tropes are how to get at them.

And if we can describe tropes in their "natural habitat," we can recognize them in those times when they're used for more nefarious ends. When politicians talk about "main street" vs. "wall street," what in the hell are they talking about? Is the distinction really there, or are they just trying to drum up support by acting like they're on the side of "us regular folks" (by the way, who?)?

NOTE 1: I really really really don't think memes are tropes. Memes might use tropes, but these are two different animals.

NOTE 2: Hm...while being lost in wikipedia I came across a mathematical use of the word "topos." Maybe I can make some hare-brained connection. But then, an identifiable recurring event in my own personal thinking was best described by Umberto Eco:

"...losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real."

Foucault's Pendulum p.468

In the near future, when all of my time isn't taken up by typing and reading about linguistics, I bet I spend a shitload of time on this idea.