FLEXIBLE CONCRETE, PART 3, or 'TvTropes is Bad for You'

Hello all!

Winter hasn’t gotten me yet and I hope it hasn’t gotten to you either. This post is an inconclusive wrap-up for now. I’ll probably visit it for later. Or I’ll never finish it, who knows.

When last we left I talked about how we are in a period of genre-death in the Entertainment Industry. I spoke of factors related to how entertainment of the USA is a mess, because there’s too much of it. (You still have death of stories by nihilism—by having nothing great to aspire to—but that is a different factor and topic.) The Industry makes an environment that favors stories that are guaranteed to make money—usually by quantity. There are so many authors who write that every story, its Theme and Variations, have been tried at least once and repeated for easily 100 years (1920s being when USA comic books, Hollywood, and pulp fictions got into full swing). This is mostly good enough evidence to show that every genre goes through 4 phases, etc. before dying.

This does not include factors like Post-modernism (grrr) or an Unspecified Political Movement that rhymes with ‘joke’, who occupy the engines of the Entertainment Industry and are accelerating genre-death by making un-funny parodies of everything they can get the copyrights to. Those two factors are their own stories.

I also mentioned that you, the, uh, Potential Audience, have to realize how glutted, over-stuffed, drowning in entertainment you are, and that frankly you do need to show some responsibility in what you partake. Moderation, and being on the lookout for the ‘moral of the story’. Or make your own stories.

Hmm, more thoughts, more thoughts…aha! How do we approach stories? This is a question for two people, those who enjoy them and the authors. I’m both, so I got insights into them.

As an audience member, how do you approach a story? Openness to it. Suspension of disbelief. Let the story play out. But also, I’ve noticed there is an implicit trust between the audience and the teller—‘I believe what you say; I listen.’ There’s an impetus on the teller to not abuse this trust by setting the tone, for example, or giving a coherent narrative that is understandable. Or, or, to not forget important details of the story. Very important in verbal re-tellings. The narrator better not forget his lines. The simple, understood stuff that not even the Post-modernists can corrupt in literature, because then they wouldn’t be able to communicate their lies if they didn’t speak properly.

What do You expect from the story? If you are not open to surprises, you’re in for a fussy time. Did you go in with an assumption? What are they? If you expect to ‘just be entertained’, you are setting a low bar for yourself, and that encourages authors to set low bars for their works. Are you looking for something new? That’s possible in the short term, or if you are in ignorance of a given genre. Are you expecting something to be ‘done well’? That’s unrealistic for newer things but fine for older, established tales. Are you happy with whatever is put in front of you? I applaud you for your genuine simplicity, for being happy and grateful for whatever comes along the way. That character trait is a gift.

Do you expect a story to be, ‘on demand’ though? That’s how we got into this mess. I won’t call stories as gods, who demand your respect. Stories innately talk about other things. Did you know that? The worst stories talk about themselves—as in, stories that talk about the parts of stories. I don’t mean a 1st-person narrator, that’s different. I mean, the stories that ‘know’ they are stories and give you a wink while pulling back the curtain—and by that I mean they strip naked and expose themselves to you the audience. Metafiction, as it’s called, is schlock. It is stories that don’t even suspend their own belief about themselves—they are the center of their own attention…sorry, that is its own tangent. It is why the book The Princess Bride (1973) is repugnant, but the film The Princess Bride (1987) is better because it becomes a different yet more humble tale.

Expecting a story to be on demand is a kind of disrespect. Bossing them around is the first step to denying reality. Because that is the foundation of stories—truth and reality, both stranger than fiction. An entirely fictional tale can be still be truth if it points to real things; it can be real by speaking of real things and ‘borrowing’ their substance. The highest stories are always theology—the highest truths and realities. I need not explain the importance! That is why, the more real, the more true a story is, the more respect it deserves. Again, stories are not gods, they merely speak about them.

That’s where you come in! What’s your attitude? Now, hold on, I am not denying playfulness with stories. People play with story all the time—play is a creative state-of-being. If you don’t out-create entropy, you die. What do you play with? Just as one can play with mostly harmless things from wooden sticks to uranium rocks, so to can a person play with harmless to dangerous things of a story. I don’t like this analogy, but messing around with a story can be like messing around with a machine. Mess around with something important may break it, or so jumble up the insides that you need to make a new machine from the leftover parts.

What are tropes? A trope is a common narrative shorthand. It is a quick-use tool, a stereotype, a fast-explanation that the audience understands immediately. Tropes are the death of stories, and their nest is the website, TvTropes-dot-com. (This is not helped that, in my own decades, TvTropes have become more and more Progressive-leaning, but unfortunately it is progressive-leaning people who are the most interested in the ‘mechanics’ of stories.) Think of every gimmick in the police cop movies—the loose cannon with a Magnum, the buddy cops, the eager young cadet, the criminal gangs of different nationalities, etc., as examples. Heck, Reality TV does this same thing by getting clashing personality types on the show…Anyway.

Sure, TvTropes warns that quote ‘TvTropes will Ruin your life’ end-quote. It says that with a cheeky, cheery smile that disarms you of how God-d*mn dangerous it really is. And not because the website is Progressive-leaning!

The danger to stories is when a story becomes ‘only’ a collection of tropes, OR is treated as a collection of tropes. Oops, to explain, TvTropes is a public database wiki founded in 2004 by a bunch of dudes who got together in Internet chat rooms to discuss storytelling and story-techniques in television writing. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of crime fiction, sitcoms, and fantasy serials were coming out every season, such as Buffy the Vampire-Slayer (1997), which was the main focus of the chat-groups. And then, it kept expanding. TvTropes began codifying all the tricks of the trade, branching out from television to every pop-culture thing available—books, video games, table-top RPGs, sometimes famous commercials, everything the USA Entertainment Industry has put out. TvTropes even has pages for Japanese, and Korean, anime and manga (animation and comic books, respectively).

But, remember, ‘tropes’ existed before TvTropes began codifying them. Tropes were the tools of the trade for authors in the Industry. Quick, easy, and you could play around with them in half-a-dozen ways each (TvTropes codifies those variants, too).

Tropes are a double danger just as they are a double benefit. The benefits to author and audience are they fill in broad narrative strokes so that the story/film/stage play/etc. can get to the main dramatic action in a timely, well-paced manner. They can, for author and audience, be important details, nuance, and imply that there is more to the story, but there is no time to cover it. (‘Subtext’ as it is called in the Industry.) Now, tropes are NOT archetypes (curse you Jung!) but may include them. Tropes are NOT styles or genres but can be included in the style or genre. Tropes DO NOT point towards reality! At best tropes can give a respectful nod to truth and reality, but do not offer an explanation of reality. Tropes are not myths.

‘Tropes are tools’, says their nest-site. I can agree with that phrase, but there is more that TvTropes (TvT for short) does not say. Tropes are low-resolution stereotypes. They are not detailed pictures. If taken by themselves, they don’t amount to much. Even the ones that try and cover the high realities (death, creation, time, magic, etc.) can only talk about them in broad swathes. Tropes don’t necessarily talk about the core or nature of a thing. (And how can they, that’s the purview of phil-/theo-/meta-ology.) Tropes are often an expression of the thing but not the thing itself.

This is the danger of tropes—they are cardboard substitutes for craft. Authors use tropes as a crutch to make up for their poor skill. Because the author does not show a ‘thing’ in all its weight and punchiness, the audience instead gets…a cardboard drawing of ‘the thing’. And because it is a less intense version of ‘the thing’, the audience eats tasteless gruel. This means, the audience either gets accustomed to tasteless gruel, or in some cases they get sick of it and do something wild*. Meanwhile, other authors copy the tropes, both the best examples and the bad examples.

[*Like making their own show or cult or sub-culture that promotes intense things. A lot can happen in the name of making life more bearable, or exciting.]

As an example of the former, of a gruel-eating audience, we can look at the Otaku culture. In the late 80s and early 90s and all through to today, Japan began exporting it animated entertainment to the USA. The Otaku were the first anime/manga nerds on both sides of the Pacific. (The term was invented by the Japanese essayist Akio Nakamori.) The Otaku were like the precursors to TvT in a way, because they were connected by the Internet and file-sharing technologies, especially public databases. Their main focus was the booming anime industry in Japan*, and the shear variety that came out of it. And they talked about it nonstop.

As an example of the former, of a gruel-eating audience, we can look at the Otaku culture. In the late 80s and early 90s and all through to today, Japan began exporting it animated entertainment to the USA. The Otaku were the first anime/manga nerds on both sides of the Pacific. (The term was invented by the Japanese essayist Akio Nakamori.) The Otaku were like the precursors to TvT in a way, because they were connected by the Internet and file-sharing technologies, especially public databases. Their main focus was the booming anime industry in Japan*, and the shear variety that came out of it. And they talked about it nonstop.

[*Quick explanation—Anime is heavily influenced by older American animations styles, including by Walt Disney, and then anime became its own thing as it developed. Japan was occupied by the USA for 20 years after WWII, it was bound to happen. In the 1980s Japan had a huge economic boom, and bust, that allowed for the entertainment industry there to skyrocket, especially Anime. In addition, USA action hero movies greatly influenced the anime of the 80s and early 90s. Anime has bounced back and forth across the Pacific for some time. It shows, because the USA adopted Anime styles of hand-drawn-animation. It’s the joint cultural project of Japan and the USA. A victory by and for art ;) ]

I forget who said it—I forget the name*—but I believe it was a Japanese sociologist who had a harsh critique of Otaku culture. They were ‘database animals’ in his words. He meant that Otaku nerds will consume any anime they get as long as it draws from the database. As long as an anime-show has the tropes they want, the Otaku will gobble it up, no questions asked and no concern for the wallet. [*Aha, it was Hikori Azuma, who was speaking in the context of ‘we Japanese got our whole world blown up and we’ve filled it with anime culture’. It is pretty depressing.]

The Otaku phenomenon and the Tropes problem are tied to a larger problem, one I’ve mentioned. Entertainment is supposed to be ‘safe’, if not medicating. One did not give rise to the other. These and others are factors that have converged together in a vicious cycle. Poor authors make poor entertainment that lowers the bar of the audience who want only what they know to be safe and familiar and they’ll spend money without thought for it. Got all that? Perhaps, this is why the great words of Philip J. Fry ring true—‘Clever things make people feel stupid and new things scare people’ and ‘at the end of the episode, everything’s always right back to normal’ said with irony (Futurama, ‘When Aliens Attack’).

Well, I won’t ramble too long anymore. Hope you all do well.

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More to follow!