Abandon all Tropes! (Well… Sort of)
Written by Sanam Blakesley
Trope and hope. The joys of rhyming are just about where the similarities stop.
Most of the time, I can only praise the way that modern literature and media consumption is going. Representation has never been better, both on and off the page. Writers from all walks of life are finally writing about characters who don’t resemble a stale white loaf of bread. But it seems that there is one thing that is killing my hope for the future of reading and writing.
Tropes. Love or hate them, they’re impossible to escape. By definition, they are merely a “recurring element or a frequently used plot device in a work of literature or art” (Dictionary.com). They have been around since the dawn of writing, even before we had a name for them, and if you’ve ever been sucked into the vortex of TV Tropes, you soon realise that every single character and subplot can be attributed to a trope. But it’s not their existence that’s the problem, it’s the growing addiction to them as a marketing technique that is slowly eating away at the normal consumption of media.
We can find our blame in a cultishly hive-minded and creatively named corner of TikTok: BookTok. This is a community of writers and readers who, though mainly harmless, are completely responsible for what has happened to mainstream literature consumption. Through increasingly niche recommendations and a carnal taste for certain romance tropes (I sometimes wake in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, with the phrases friends-to-lovers and found-family haunting me) the community has managed to change the way people choose the books they read and write.
A definitive found family: Lilo & Stitch | Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon | Source images: Disney
Instead of picking books for their story, people are choosing them based on tropes. Tropes exist to be played with, to be experimented with, and if people are reading a book just for everything to go as they expect, you’re going to get a whole lot of disappointed readers if you subvert their precious tropes. What is the future of writing if we suddenly have a list of rules to adhere to?
Writers are starting to shape and bend their exciting and inventive plots just to make sure they have room for a trope that will lure in an audience who is only there for one tiny aspect of the story. When an audience is forcing themselves through something they’d never have otherwise read just for a certain relationship dynamic, that’s when it all starts to feel a little hopeless. Can you imagine if The Great Gatsby had been marketed purely as right-person-wrong-time? And what would Wuthering Heights be considered: adopted-siblings-to-friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-Kate-Bush-song? Reducing a book to its tropes only limits our understanding and enjoyment of it.
Nevertheless, the book community is an ever-changing one and you may find the fact that marketing tactics of books have been impacted by random teenagers on an app has a weird dash of hope about it. Unless you’re feeling cynical like me, in which case you will most likely agree that it’s limiting and unhelpful. Most of all, you’ll be sick of characters having to share a bed because there just happened to be a mix-up in the hotel room. Save it for your fanfictions, write something unexpected.
Edited by Stephanie Trevena & Tabitha Smith