A trope is an aspect of a narrative that is used commonly. They can come in many forms, such as characters, elements of a genre, and even plot points. Storytellers have repeatedly implemented them because they can serve as foundational building blocks to a story, and audiences have come to expect them in certain stories. For example, when we watch a romance movie that starts with two characters in conflict with each other, we can expect them to fall in love, thus creating the “enemies-to-lovers” plot trope. Although some speak of tropes in a bad light, it’s important as storytellers to understand their uses and why they are used.
Tropes don’t have to be bad, that’s why they are used often. A trope becomes bad when they are overused or used poorly, and that’s when they turn into cliches. The difference between tropes and cliches are that the former has the potential to be subverted or combined with other elements of the story to differentiate itself from previous times the trope was used. On the other hand, cliches are expected by the audience and the same every time, which makes your story feel telegraphed and predictable. That is the worst mistake a writer can make because you will lose your audience’s attention.
Let’s look at some examples of tropes from different categories. Character tropes refer to the types of characters that we often encounter in certain stories, such as the Jock, the Chosen One, or the Mad Scientist. Note that these are different from character archetype (Leader, Mentor, Outlaw, etc.), which are big-picture, broad starting points that give general traits to characters. There can be a million different possible characters with their own characteristics that can be classified under the same archetype. Character tropes are specific, apply to a character’s desires, appearance, or flaws and are the same type of character.
An example of a character trope is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. This trope is characterized with quirky, eccentric female characters whose purpose is to be the love interest of the male character and aid in his transformation without having any real desires of her own. In “Garden State”, Natalie Portman’s character exists in the narrative to inspire change in the main character after his mother dies, without going through a true emotional arc of her own.
Genre tropes are created specific to the type of story being told. An example of a genre trope would be the Wild West Showdown in western films, where the protagonist and antagonist have a showdown. Or the Red Herring trope in mystery films, where the protagonist is given false information to distract him, lead him down a false path, and give the villain an advantage.
Like we mentioned before, some tropes can be turned into cliches if the way they are implemented is predictable and not cleverly changed. To prevent your story from becoming predictable, we need to subvert the tropes, which means to give it a sense of individuality. A great example of subverting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is found in the film “18×2 Beyond Youthful Days” (SPOILERS).
Ami, a Japanese tourist, travels to Taiwan and meets Jimmy, a young student on summer break. The film is intercut between two parallel timelines; the past, where Ami and Jimmy meet and their relationship develops, and the present, where Jimmy is 36 years old, loses his company that he built, and goes on a journey to find Ami. Throughout the film, we understand that in the present timeline, internally Jimmy feels that he has placed his life’s purpose in the wrong place. He has devoted his life to building his company and finding personal success, but at the cost of his special interpersonal relationships that were very dear to him. Now that he has lost everything that he prioritized in life, he feels lost, and needs to reconnect with Ami, who he loved. As we learn this about Jimmy, we witness the relationship of him and Ami from friends to soulmates in the past timeline.
You can start to see the character trope begin to come through. We think that Ami sole purpose in the story is to show Jimmy in the present what it means to truly live and to help him change without having any arc for herself. But near the end of the story, a twist! Up to this point, the story had been told through Jimmy’s POV. We understand his feelings and no one else’s. Now we return to the past timeline but this time through Ami’s eyes. We learn that she is dying from a disease and she wants to travel to see the world before she passes away. She never planned to fall in love with Jimmy, so when we see it happen, we understand the pain she must feel to love someone so much that she can’t bear to share the pain of her impending death. So instead, she suffers alone. With this technique, the storyteller had kept Ami’s character a secret, until the end where her desires and pains are revealed to make her into a compelling, complex human character.
Shortly after, we jump back to the present day, and we learn that Jimmy had known of Ami’s death before he starts his journey, and his travels aren’t to Ami herself, but to the places where he experienced life with her. This makes us look at everything that happened before differently. We now know that Jimmy wasn’t travelling to seek Ami for her to fix him. He was travelling to remember her.
This film is a masterclass on how you can take a standard character trope and turn it into an emotional, real human being.