Tropes vs Realism (vs ???) · 1:58am May 7th, 2018
I think I found this about half a year ago. and I'm still thinking about it constantly. It might be the most important idea on story writing I've seen in years.
Hey he even ties it back into My Little Pony, so for once I don't have to.
The basic gist is that we're often stuck in this false dichotomy between traditional tropes and realism.
The actual game set in Morrowind tends to be very fondly remembered by a lot of people, and I think it’s because it gets that same thing I praise My Little Pony for. It understands that the appeal of fantasy is not just a balance between cliche and realism; that fantasy is more than “Lord of the Rings, but”. We are shown a foreign land with living gods and legalized assassination and incomprehensible magical diseases. These things stand outside the conventionally accepted cliches, but like cities in the clouds we accept them as an element of the setting and eagerly explore the ramifications and wonder they bring.
How many times have you seen an argument on the internet that goes something like....
"This part is unrealistic, that armor is way too heavy to swim in."
"Oh come on. This has dragons and magic, and you just now notice this is unrealistic?"
"Your face is unrealistic."
We're too used to this, we have trouble specifying what we mean by the fantastical rules of a setting, and the inconsistent errors. They're both "unrealistic" but have very different effects on the audience.
And I think this conditioning pushes writers even further into extremes, entirely rejecting either realism or cliches. And often I see this turn into the belief that originality itself is impossible, because everything falls somewhere on the spectrum of cliches and realism. Some just rewrite the same old stories, only adjusting it further to one end of the scale like it's an improvement.
This has changed a lot of how I look at stories, especially in MLP fanworks. I don't mind people having different preferences and tastes for realism/tropes, but I do notice when someone is able to use the fantasy element of the triangle to full effect... whether it's the fantasy that Lauren Faust came up with, or new fantastic elements they're adding in themselves!
I personally feel that if you believe originality is impossible, it becomes self-fulfilling.
I... don't think I buy it. I've never felt much doubt over whether a particular aspect of a fantasy world was "original" or "unrealistic", though I agree it's hard to explain exactly why. But I never have accepted many of the examples he listed as being "part of the fantasy". If one particular weapon functions much more effectively than it should, and there isn't an in-world reason for that (e.g. "this sword was forged by the ancient dwarves and inscribed with powerful runes), it bugs me. Guys in Japanese RPGs holding stupidly-large swords bug me; it doesn't look cool, it just looks stupid. Stormtroopers who can't hit anything, ever, bug me. Heroes who are fighting again one day after taking a bullet in the shoulder bug me. Pretending that knocking someone unconscious by hitting them over the head can't cause permanent brain damage bugs me. Fighting styles that are reliably superior to all other fighting styles, yet which few people use, bug me. All that stuff is lazy and ignorant, not fantastical world-building.
A lot of those things are tropes, but being a trope doesn't give them a free pass; it only makes it worse. It means the author bases their world on other fiction rather than on their own ideas--meaning it's a sign not of creativity, but of unoriginality. If I read a story about somebody in armor climbing a castle wall using a grappling hook, I know it was written by somebody who thinks that's possible because they read other stupid books, and never tried to use a grappling hook that way (I have), nor read enough history to know they were never used that way. (Grappling hooks were first used to climb vertically in the D-Day invasion, by using artillery pieces to fire them. And they weren't ropes, they were rope ladders.)
oberlinlibstaff.com/omeka_hist244/files/fullsize/97412a147ef86a74fd5b0fb6566c8a18.jpg
Anything physically impossible that the world gives away for free, for no other reason than to make writing easier or to make the tasks of people in the fantasy world easier, is stupid.
Also, the distinction between original, vs. stupid and lazy, still holds for tropes. Stupid tropes annoy me even more than stupid original ideas.
Part of what marks something as original, or just stupid, is whether it matches the other original parts of the world. The idea that knocks on the head cause no damage is usually found in grim superhero and private eye comics, in which the world is corrupt and dangerous. They aren't the kind of worlds that give you free passes or protect you from harm, so the "bullets don't really hurt all that much" trope is just stupid. It doesn't fit.
But a lot of of stupid world-building is deliberately stupid--elements that were designed (or memetically selected) to promulgate real-world ideas that are stupid and damaging. A stupid idea is still stupid, even if it fits the rest of the fantasy world.
The "10% of your brain" thing is a stupid trope. The person who wrote it probably did believe it was true in the real world, because most Americans do. It's a stupid belief which people love because it makes them feel like they're actually geniuses, and that there is some magical path to bringing out that genius involving not decades of study and experiment, but prayer, meditation, or, perhaps, eating organic foods. Any time I recognize a story idea that is designed to reinforce and justify damaging and stupid ideas in the real world, it's a stupid idea, not because it's unrealistic in the fantasy, but because it's entire purpose for being is to promote stupidity in the real world. A story that makes people dumber is a bad story, by definition.
I admit I'm appealing to objective standards to distinguish "creative stuff that is fun to think about" from "stupid stuff that a stupid person thought looked cool." Like stupidly big swords--some graphic designer who is interested purely in surface appearances thought they looked cool, and other bad artists and animators agreed. A Renaissance artist, to whom the physical nature he was portraying was part of the beauty, would never have found a picture of something grotesquely impossible to be beautiful. I happen to think the Renaissance artist was objectively right, and the giant-katana animator objectively wrong, because this seems to me to be a case where the aesthetic preference of the katana animator is based not in an honestly-acquired preference between alternatives, but in ignorance of the understanding of physics and mechanics that enables one to even perceive the other alternative.
A formative moment for me was when I was maybe 6 years old, and my parents were reading me and my siblings CS Lewis' Prince Caspian. Near the end of the book, when the good Narnians are overthrowing the evil, technology-using humans, a river god appeals to the Pevensies, saying, "Break my chains". They figure out that he means "smash the bridge across my river." So the Narnians smash the bridge, and rejoice that they've freed the river god from this horrible human technological thing.
To which I said, "Now hold on--the Narnians need that bridge. This is a really long river, and we've already seen there's no other way across it. It's not a dam; it's a thing up over the river that doesn't have any ill effects. What's the river god's gripe? Why is destroying their transportation network a good thing?" And this opened my eyes to the whole anti-technology theme that's rife in 20th century fantasy, especially Lewis and Tolkien, and which is stupid and literally destructive. It does fit with the rest of the world-building in Lewis and Tolkien, but it's still stupid--not accidentally stupid, but aggressively, deliberately, objectively stupid.
The "hero who won't use guns" trope is another deliberate, thematic trope, being used to illustrate a stupid belief: that if a person is pure and righteous enough, karmic forces will protect him and give him victory--therefore, not using the gun actually leads to his victory, because the karmic benefit of not using guns is more powerful than the gun. (It's doubly stupid when the villains inevitably fall onto their own knives, or otherwise accidentally kill themselves, so that the hero gets the effect of using a gun, and it's a good effect, but isn't tainted by touching a gun.) And I know, from prior experience, and from being acquainted with medieval literature and Greek and Eastern philosophy, that the idea of karma has been a part of Western and Eastern culture for about 2,500 years. Appealing to it is part of a worldwide, millenia-old literary tradition whose purpose is to make you stupider. The particular variant involving guns combines belief in karma with hatred of technology.
A puzzling case, maybe more worthwhile to think about, is the deterministic combat of the Iliad, in which the winner of any fight can be predicted ahead of time unless the gods intervene. This is stupid, and is a belief which reinforces the then-predominant stupid beliefs in a natural and objective social hierarchy. But it's also an integral part of the Iliad's main theme--that men seek their own good by risking their lives in combat, because eternal glory is worth more than temporary life. This theme is stupid, but it was essential at that point in history--it was, perhaps, the key to re-creating Mediterranean civilization. I give the Iliad a free pass, both because I can't judge it as merely stupid when it had good social results, and because its stupidity doesn't threaten my physical well-being. I can regard it as a product of another culture, with anthropological detachment.
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a lot of stories have narrative arcs and structure, which is a harmful belief when life tends to be quite the opposite.
it's much more realistic to write a post-modern novel where nothing happens and nothing makes sense
it'd be pretty harmful if a cartoon about talking horses showed that the sun independently revolved around a flat earth, and that seasonal climates can be controlled
I'm being facetious, but you didn't mention a single example of what you think is good world-building
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Is it? Is your life really like a post-modern novel, in which you're buffeted by events beyond your control, never figure out what causes them, and never achieve any personal satisfaction? Or has your life in fact had arcs, during which you learned or accomplished something? If so, when relating these arcs to someone else, might you omit describing events such as brushing your teeth and sleeping?
I think, rather, that post-modern novels are bad because their view of life as hopeless, incomprehensible, and out-of-control is false and damaging. So I think this example supports rather than refutes my view.
Look, you've gotta distinguish between things that are intentional, and things that are accidental, and between things that are actually meant to communicate a stupid belief, versus things that are not.
Everybody knows the sun and moon aren't controlled by talking horses and the earth is not flat; those are not dangerous ideas. Whereas if you wrote a TV show based on the idea that a coterie of evil capitalists was manufacturing vaccines designed to make children autistic, that would be a damaging and stupid belief, and it would be bad world-building. Not bad in the sense of the craft being lazy or stupid; bad in the sense of being damaging to the society it is inflicted on.
If MLP teaches girls that they can have autonomy and power, that's good. If it teaches them that males are stupid and the source of most evil, and so shouldn't have autonomy and power, that's bad.
An important criterion is whether the author even knew he or she was changing the story world. If somebody swims across a river wearing a suit of full armor, the author didn't say, "This is a fantasy world in which armor is magically light, and I will use this scene to illustrate that!" That's not wondrous or interesting; it's just stupid. The scene created that aspect of the fantasy world, for no purpose except to get somebody across a river, and the author probably wasn't even aware of it. It was world-creation spinning out of the author's control.
Whereas having the 2 sisters control the sun and moon personalizes the cosmos, illustrates the power structure in Equestria and characterizes it both as natural and benevolent, and reinforces the personalities of those 2 important characters. It's actually a subversive retelling of creation myths, because the sun and moon are controlled by ponies who are very special, but not perfect, eternal, infallible, or undefeatable, nor demanding worship or supplication. It materializes the gods, making them out of the same type of matter as other ponies. This is a smart, almost Epicurean idea, which combats very prevalent stupid and damaging ideas.
Lauren Faust knew that it's not physically plausible for horses to fly, but decided to make that a part of her world, and integrated it into the world with the idea that all ponies are magical, and that the expression of pegasus magic is the ability to fly, a different way of interacting with clouds, etc. It was all deliberate and consistent, and though it was impossible, it wasn't deliberately stupid. You can read it as an element used in the creation of a fantasy world which enables certain analogies to be drawn with the real world, which may then be used over and over again to communicate any idea. This is qualitatively different than an element of a fantasy world that is simply one idea to communicate, and communicates the same thing every time you see it. That's not really world-building; it's propaganda. If the element of the story world is itself the idea to communicate, and it's a stupid idea, then the world-building is stupid. If the element of the story world was created accidentally, it's also stupid, though a different type of stupid. Good world-building is building a world, not assembling a set of symbols for a particular message.
Ghormengast is an example of good world-building, although all the symbolic elements conspire to create just the kind of modernist despair that I dislike so much. It's good, I think, because the despair isn't inevitable. You can see that the world used to be different, and that the decay isn't explained using some stupid medievalist or Marxist narrative about abandoning God's laws, the evils of money and quantification, or an inevitable arrow of history, but mostly as a result of contingient human attitudes, beliefs, and goals. The world-building conveys a single gestalt, but without imposing stupid philosophical beliefs.
If world-building promotes damaging beliefs, that's bad. If it's the result of an aesthetic sense based on ignorance, it's flawed, and inferior to works that are not. If it happens accidentally because the author isn't paying attention, or because it's convenient for the plot, it's bad. Those 3 cases account for most of what I've talked about.
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Intentional stupidity is good?
Whew, I'm safe then.
4855487 If you just want to sling insults without reading what I wrote, I'm done here.