Trope Inversions Are Awesome

Tropes exist for a reason. They set up promises for genre fiction, and they provide sign posts that remind the reader that you respect the conventions of the literature that they love. However, some tropes have become so overused and so stale that they’ve becoming an irritant to readers universally.

That said, I happen to really love trope inversions. A trope inversion is where one takes a trope and invert it so that it no longer follows the normal progression of the trope. This can be done by exaggeration or by flipping the script. Here are some examples:

”She’s not like the other girls” trope.

This a major trope found in romance and romantasy. In this trope, the female lead character has a minor so-called “flaw” that sets her apart from the rest of the female dating pool. Examples include, she’s a bookworm or wears coke-bottle glasses or has a really big schnoz or melts glass with lasers beams that come out of her eye-sockets. These “little foibles” provide consumer resistance when the damsel enters the dating pool.

To make this fresh, exaggerate this by really making her not like the other girls. “Marcy was not like the other girls. She was a skin walker wearing the skin-suit of the last woman sacrificed to her, but she still wanted to feel pretty at the prom even though she had a creepy lizard tongue.”

“Villain tries to bargain with the hero” trope.

In this trope, the villain tries to entice the hero to join his cause by trying to strike a bargain with the hero. Everyone who sees this knows that the hero will not compromise if presented with a bargain because it will betray the trust the audience has placed in the hero. So unless your hero is a real jerk and you’re willing to throw the reader under the bus, this a pretty pointless trope.

However, you can flip the script using an attempt to bargain initiated by the hero to expose a moral compromise of the hero. “James, our hero and childhood friend of the villain, tries to bargain with the bad guy. He is torn between loyalty to his old friend and his responsibility to save the lives of countless innocent people.”

“Bad guy kicks a puppy” trope.

This is the consummate trope of the Save the Cat writing guides. The hero saves a cat and the villain kicks a puppy. But this convention is so stupid because it is so overused.

On occasion, make the hero kick a puppy because he’s allergic to or just hates dogs. And make the bad buy save a cat and let a child die because he likes cats more than people. I used this inverted trope in Reliquary of the Dead when Alicia Stripes kicks the scatterbug.

“He’s so big and she’s so small” trope.

Another trope from the romantasy genre. He’s a big, strong, giant manly, man-man exuding with toxic masculinity. She’s a small, weak, frail, mouse of ineffectual femininity—she’s so small and useless, she can’t even pick up a short sword weighing less than French knife. This trope is so stupid but it’s everywhere right now.

But there’s a cool way to flip this trope. If she’s small, make her really small just like Tinkerbell: tiny, powerful, capricious, with a violent anger management problem. A few violent outbursts with dead people on the deck, and soon people will forget that she’s small.

“Let me tell you my master plan” trope.

We’ve all seen this. The bad guy monologues for twenty minutes while effectively doing nothing to the hero. The villain’s actions must have a purpose even when he speaking, a purpose that must transcend mere gloating.

Okay, there’s a lot of ways to flip this one. Make the good guy explain it all to the bad guy to let the villain know the hero is one step ahead of him. Another way to flip this is to make the bad guy reveal things through suggestive questions that don’t confirm or deny anything—not only can this annoy the hero, evasive questions also have the bonus of being creepy. Or use the dialogue as a means of tormenting or punishing the hero—I’ll leave this one to your imagination.

Conclusion

I could spend all day making up novel ways of inverting tropes. Suffice it to say, I use inversions in my writing to make old ideas fresh. There no new ideas, but there are new ways to express old ideas. And bringing those new expressions to your writing will keep your readers on the hook and interested in whatever your characters say next.

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