Tropes, Brain Fluid & Love That Defies Death
A story involving intimacy, two people meet and form a union.
I could describe Pride and Prejudice, or the one where a plumber drops his toolkit to work on the pipe, and the lady drops her drawers.
These are polar opposites.
I’ve opined before that fiction is all fantasy, and why I prefer the older terms Sword and Sorcery / Science Fiction, and noted that stories enjoyed by folks who would never admit to liking either will enjoy the fantastical science of a popular thriller. It’s a matter of degrees. Back in 1986, in Red Storm, Tom Clancy featured the F-19A, a very fictionalised version of the still-secret F-117 stealth fighter.
Degrees of difference matter, and creating a tale of romance and adventure will, by necessity, use familiar ideas, oft called tropes. These are a kind of meta-word, a recognisable construct, “tall, dark and handsome” Random Hero can come in many shapes and sizes. Like a random hound, but these are all variations on a kind: a noble guardian shepherd, a wily herding dog, a friendly retriever, a plucky wee terrier.
Stringing together tropes of various sorts is not so different from putting together words or notes to create a melody that becomes a hook, a brainworm.
Part of the craft is explaining how things happen, or choosing not to.
A friend noted that Extra Sensory Perception or psychic powers are a frequent trope in science fiction, even though they are practically magical. Sometimes there’s the old chestnut, we only use 10% of our brains, thrown into the mix as a reason why… which isn’t strictly true, I say strictly because there are some very interesting cases of severe hydrocephalus recorded by John Lorber, where brain mass gets compressed to ~10%. Yet, in one case, a mathematics degree student possessed an IQ of 126.
The Spectral Detective is a story that dances along this line between fantasy, religion, and science fiction. It is Raiders of the Lost Ark, meets Daredevil, by way of Sam Spade.
The Chimera Cycle is Frankenstein does Dracula. I borrow from everywhere; I strive to include all the recognisable monster tropes that are familiar in such tales. Both stories are fantasies and are science fiction, but without interplanetary travel and lasers.
Pemberley is a fantasy, but its time and place do not need explanation.
Explanations aren’t always necessary. George Lucas, in his first prequel tried his hand at technobabble to explain how the Force worked. Yet the audience, who accepted laser-swords, aliens, and interplanetary travel without explanation, didn’t need it, because these things already felt familiar. The challenge is whether the story needs midichlorians to explain things that are even more fantastic still.
Not everyone likes the same thing. Others like many things. There is a polar difference between a classic tale of romance ending in the consummation of the marriage, where the author fades to black, versus the short-on-story encounter, that jumps the pipe wrench to go right to the complexities of human plumbing with all the delicacy of a workshop manual.
I, for one, like explanations. I prefer to know how and why things happen in a story. For example, I like Conan has a time and place. It bugs me that Westeros doesn’t. Familiar miracles—the Force, the Ark of the Covenant—need less explanation because they echo old beliefs and everyday wonder, and here’s why I think that is.
It’s familiarity: these are old tropes, exaggerations of people’s everyday experiences and beliefs. Where are explanations needed?
When the fantasy does something more unusual.
I find John Carter’s trip to Mars a speed bump. He falls asleep in a cave and wakes up on Mars. It felt wrong to me. What happened? How, why? Yet when the kids go to Narnia through the wardrobe, it works—because there is a door. There is familiarity—like a book has a cover. It feels like a tiny room, and imagination makes it a secret gate, a magical portal to somewhere else.
What speed bumps or shark jumps have broken your suspension of disbelief? And which familiar tropes or beats have swept you happily into another world?