Tired Trope Kick-out

I was watching what was a great series of horror shorts when one of the pieces comes out of the blue with an excessively overused trope that I am really sick of seeing. You know it very well too I bet. A person has information that could help the police once they get past the fact that it is a supernatural perpetrator. This in and of itself is not a story problem even as often I've seen it. Now, this informant meets with the detective on the case and starts in about how the detective will think the informant is crazy. Mistake number one. Certainly the informant is intelligent enough to know that it's hard to believe so why don't they think ahead to find a way around that? This is way too often made worse by how the informant came into this information about the supernatural, which is a part of the trope--and the worst of it all--that there was a previous case involving just such a modus operandi as the current crimes.

In the particular case of this series there is a further bit of information. The informant knows about the particulars not only because of the previous case, but also because a relative was directly involved in the old investigation. Yet, the informant never does what any reasonably intelligent mammal would do and start off the conversation with "Hi, my name is Clara and I have something to tell you about your case because my deceased grandfather was a crime scene photographer and I found old case files that seem just like what I saw in the news papers." No, instead the conversation goes, "You'll think I'm crazy... there's something unnatural going on... the victims eyes are missing..." and the detective immediately has suspect number one right in front of him because no one not on the case is supposed to know anything about the missing eyes.

Instead, why can't script writers--I have no idea if this trope is repeated in novels but I have to imagine it is--sidestep this tired, and frankly pretty lame from the first instance whenever that was trope? What happens if this and other overused plot devices are put aside? How will the stories differ? Sometimes movies with tongue firmly planted in cheek, or with an attitude that all of their competition sucks flaunt these ideas. Sometimes they even knock these scenarios with flare and style. Not all tropes are bad, just like stereotypes. The word trope itself refers to different things with the meaning I have here being in line with the idea of "TV tropes" rather than traditional literary tropes. I'm personally fond of a trope I like to call "heritage speaking" where intelligent, somewhat socially awkward, characters speak as if they come from an older time period, but it is instead actually a matter of their family's status and its link to stuffy archaic thought and speech.

Mood: breezy.
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Arches Better than Stereos

Stereotypes may be overused, misused, and maligned. However when there is enough about them that is true why wouldn't they still be of use? The answer is that they would. However, they may do their work under the auspices of the different closely related word, archetype. What is the difference between the two? Well it is a matter of degree in the amount of thinking put into using the qualities being ascribed to the group/person who is a stereotypical or archetypal representation of others. A stereotype is shallow, possibly inaccurate, often negative or deprecating, and at the worst clichéd. The last of these really makes a mess of stereotypes, and into which archetypes are much less prone to fall. In other words shallow clichés are bad, deeply thought out archetypes are good.

The use of archetypes falls into two different camps as far as this discussion. The first is obviously archetypal characters. In horror these can be archetypal monsters. There are vampires, werewolves, zombies, constructs (like Frankenstein's monster), devils, and ghosts. These are in addition to normal people archetypes such as the gentle giant, the strong silent type, the loveable rogue, star crossed lovers, traitors, manipulators, abusers, and such. There is some crossover with types like the reluctant monster who, human or inhuman, is driven, or more likely provoked, to do evil and wreak havoc by others who figure him or her for the stereotypical monster. The part to remember of course is to maintain the character as an archetype and not stereotype it.

The other camp of archetypes are the archetypal conflicts, or plots. There are considered to be four of them with variations possible, but not held separate. These plots can even be combined in the same story line--perhaps even best used in pairs. They are defined as man versus himself, man versus man, man versus nature--the fourth is sometimes questioned whether it counts--and man versus society. Society doesn’t actually act on its own but via proxies, hence the debate. A lot of variations come from man versus man with the opposition being inhuman, such as supernatural beings and technological human approximations ranging from artificial intelligences to robots of myriad kinds. Of course the supernatural may take the place of nature, and technology of society.

Mood: relaxed.

Music: Chains Of Misery by Iron Maiden and Molly's Chambers by Kings of Leon.

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Divergent Meanings

I would like to start with a little bit about what has happened during the hiatus I planned. I had every intention of starting the blogs back up in the middle of the month, after finding that the Battered Spleen Productions Knowledge Base coding work was taking longer than expected. Then when it came time to write the first article I was sick the entire week. So here we are now. Please accept my apologies.

Sometimes words are a losing battle. One word that gets a lot of bad press is stereotype. There are times that an idea is a stereotype not because it's an easy, and often incorrect assumption upon which to fall back, but because it is actually such a common occurrence. Other times it does suffer from bias and misinformation. Such biases and the flurry of reasoning and illogic, both at once in some cases, had been covered before the hiatus. Getting back to the losing battle, sometimes one of these stereotypes, when tied to a single word should maybe be considered a lost cause. When this happens there are essentially two options to consider. One is to use a different word altogether. The other is to accept, in the sense of ignore, the negative connotation.

Now, I in no way mean to malign anyone with this, or stir up trouble, or look down on anyone. Caveats and warnings like this usually are enough to cause confrontation, practically something of a tie in--in and of itself--to the themes being pursued in these Dark Corners. What I speak of is a word that has rather negative connotations to many and varied people, but at the same time strikes at, beyond the direct offensiveness of it, another group. The controversy over misappropriation of this word may even be to one degree or another misinformation itself. It may only be a piffling insult. It is hard to tell from the outside. Such is the nature of bias and ignorance. So, what is this contentious word that deserves such preamble? The word is witch.

To horror lovers everywhere witches are evil and vile people bent on vengeance, violence, depravity, and associating with all kinds of other evil. Witches though are also members of the Wiccan faith. Therein lies the problem. It might be inferred now that I would consider using the word witch in connection with the beliefs of Wicca's a lost cause. I am in no position to decide such a thing. The problem lies in using the wealth of horror mythology and material on evil or satanic witches. Some people take offence at putting the word evil in front of a group's name, like there is any group of any size that is 100% free of evil, no matter how much we wish to dismiss such people as not belonging to the group. However, doesn't that fly in the face all that has been discussed on twisting ideologies?

Mood:

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