dramspringfeald wrote:
You spoke against tropes.
No, I didn't. You didn't read my post properly. I spoke against the website TV Tropes, not the usage of tropes or archetypes when writing fiction. Your entire post is telling me things that I literally did not, at any given point, show any problem with.
TV Tropes is a terrible site because it started as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite and decided that every single work of fiction could be properly analyzed specifically through how Whedon wrote Buffy. In Buffy, a character is usually a riff on some sort of horror concept, but "inverted/subverted/whatever". That's Buffy. That works. But even if you ignore the major TV Tropes flaw of "every single thing that has ever occurred in a story is actually a fictional trend" and the fact that this concept is inherently stupid and relies on overanalytical semantics, it's just flat out ridiculous to put EVERYTHING through the prism of Whedon's writing philosophy for Buffy. Not even Whedon's other work can be dissected the same way that Buffy can. Firefly can't. TV Tropes thinks it can, but it can't. When you actually move out of the realm of genre fiction, all TV Tropes is capable of doing is pointing out that stuff happens and that this is a website of a collection of stuff.
You see someone who disagrees with how TV Tropes runs things and thinks "Wow, he disagrees with how popular fiction has been written for years!" No. I'm fully aware of archetypal writing and how most stories in genre fiction can be boiled down to Joseph Cambell. My problem with the specific website is that when it can't analyze something like Buffy it's just resorting to saying "stuff happens that happens in other stuff" with no real thoughtful analysis as to why. It gets to the point where after TV Tropes has exhausted genuine archetypes or motifs worth cataloguing, it starts grasping for straws because according to this website every tiny moment in any story is just a building block.
It's one thing to evoke archetypes. It's one thing to sit down and say you want to do a hero's journey by way of Buck Rogers, or you want to create a character like the Shadow but give him a sidekick named Robin. That's completely different from "I'm gonna use a story about this trope combined with these tropes and invert these tropes." With the former, you're thinking in ways to do something new with an old idea. With the latter, you're soullessly combining a bunch of old ideas in a catalog and assuming something new comes out of it. Batman isn't "The Shadow+MOAR TROPES XD", Batman is a hero in the tradition of the Shadow and Zorro exploring different types of stories. Star Wars isn't "Monomyth+MORE TROPES XD", it's the Joseph Cambell tradition fitted to the setting of a fantasy world in space.
These SOUND the same, but they're really not. TV Tropes's entire wheelhouse is about being able to absurdly recognize a trend in literally
every single thing that has ever happened in fiction. When you evoke an archetype, you write that archetype from your perspective. "This is how I see Zorro." TV Tropes more or less promotes writing to the idea of adhering to tropes, not noticing specific tropes that inspire you. That's how you get crap like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aO9Gkc1gJg&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuAYqgb3wuI&feature=plcp
To write archetypal fiction, you see a trend/archetype/trope you like and put your spin on it. To write how TV Tropes analyzes things, you cobble together a bunch of stuff you recognize. Those are not the same thing.
And the thing is? Your post doesn't address anything I actually said. You instantly assumed that my disliking of TV Tropes and my assessment of it meant I disliked the notion of archetypal fiction or that I didn't notice the various similarities in millennia of heroic fiction. I think that says wonders that your mind instantly went to that just because I thought TV Tropes is terrible as a basis for analysis. As if thinking TV Tropes is fundamentally flawed means I'm ignorant or unlearned.
I'll say it again. TV Tropes saw how Joss Whedon wrote Buffy and thought inverting/subverting that one thing we recognize would work for
everything ever. Which, no, it doesn't. Not all works are based around tweaking popular archetypes of pop culture or heroic/mythic fiction. Gummo isn't. Countless novels aren't. The problem with TV Tropes as a website is that, once it realizes its run out of recognizable archetypes it decides that every possible thing you could write down is a trope. To prove my point, I'm even looking at the "August Underground" page since it's one of my favorite films. They consider
masturbating and
hitting something with a baseball bat to be tropes of fiction. These are not tropes, these are things that happen. If TV Tropes considers everything to be a trope, then it cancels out its own purpose because this means nothing is actually worth pointing out. Because of how needlessly in-depth TV Tropes is, you don't even NEED it as a resource...because anything you write down is putting tropes together.
TV Tropes is literary analysis through the crooked lens of Whedonites and weeaboos having a large baby.
As for the whole protagonist thing. Make us a Hero YOU identify with, then Wreck him. Make us feel bad for him, then have him lift himself up and take the day.
just be careful with the Wrecking because too much will make them a masochist (Vash - Trigun) and too little will make him seem like we were cheated.
And to address my actual point: a protagonist is ultimately subjective, like anything else in writing. What you say is very true and applies to many stories, but what about stories that don't do that? To bring up August Underground again, the protagonists are all serial killers who slowly destroy themselves. I find them fascinating protagonists and am very engaged in their adventures, but they don't fit your parameters at all. By the logic of having a single criteria for how a protagonist is good, I shouldn't like their stories. But I do.
A protagonist should fit the story you want to tell. If you're writing some sort of genre story or a rousing action/adventure, it IS a good idea to have heroes that can be identified with and overcome adversity. If you're doing a story about three serial killers and exploring their dysfunctional surrogate family dynamics, however, I'd hardly say the quoted criteria should be given to them.
Whatever your story's goal is, the protagonist should fit that goal. Sometimes they don't always win.
Coming up with a unique character is fine and all but they tend to be bland and tasteless and they usually end up as Merry Sue's. "This character is so awesome because she's like a god who knows everything and can kick anyone's butt and can't be defeated." They are called Merry Sues because PEOPLE like to inject their lives into them like some creepy puppet-zombie. Why? Because that character is them "but you know with a thing for sparkly vampires... and werewolves who go to school and want her because she is a walking talking sex goddess, and everyone who talks bad about her is beaten up and or killed"... because back at home The author was a fat, loner who watched too much Buffy and wanted Spike to bone her in high school.
Yes, but that's still inherent to fanfiction. There is a mountain load of fiction, ranging from everything to The Divine Comedy to modern television shows like Seinfeld, Stella, or Jon Benjamin Has a Van, where the creatives involved are essentially writing themselves. Hell, The Sarah Silverman Program is literally about how its protagonist, based on its creator Sarah Silverman, is
inconceivably correct about everything despite being mean-spirited and obnoxious. And it manages to be funny because of execution of the scripts, the delivery of the dialog, and the absurdity of the stories. Having an amazing supporting cast helps too.
The notion of a Mary Sue is an irrelevant, meaningless concept. If someone's self insert is dull and painful, it's because that person lacks creativity or skill. Their original characters would be equally terrible. In today's age of boundless creativity and experimentation, nothing should be forbidden. You can make anything good. I'm not confusing creativity with compatibility (mostly because your entire basis for that is a claim I...never made), I'm arguing that fiction should be allowed to do anything and there is no handbook for how certain things should be.
Going back to my contribution to the thread: whatever your story wants to do, the protagonist should be molded for that story. Not everything is genre fiction, but not everything is experimental either.