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WriteOn! Literary analysis with a light touch [1]

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Date: 2024-09-26  

We organize to understand, in the hope that understanding what we are doing will allow us to do it better. Once something has a name, it can be brought into focus, analyzed, and comprehended.

One way to think of a literary work is as a structure built out of tropes. A trope is a literary device, a significant motif, theme or literary convention that sets up expectations in the reader that will either be fulfilled or subverted. As such, it is a building blocs of storytelling in all its different forms. Understanding tropes will not magically make anyone a better writer, but it will help a writer become more knowledgeable about their tools.

The web site TV Tropes is too lighthearted and scattered to be treated as Word of God on literary tropes, but it is easy to use and covers a vast area of popular tale-telling in its broadest form — not only novels and stories, but movies, television, and video games. The central mission of this site is to break down literary works, mostly from popular literature, into their component tropes. It is strong in some fields that are unfamiliar to most Western audiences, such as the aesthetics of Japanese animation, introducing a number of concepts that are immediately recognizable but have no exact equivalents in English.

TV Tropes began in 2004 as a fan-site for the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (hence the name TV Tropes), but has been built out by its own staff and contributors into an attempt to dissect nearly everything even remotely literary, to the point that it has been accused of stifling creativity through over-analysis. If you took their every word as gospel, this might be the case, but their material is usually thought-provoking, and sometimes amusing as well.

Take, for instance, the Japanese word tsundere. This describes a disposition that is universal, but is difficult to convey concisely in English: a volatile mixture of love and hate by one person towards another, a “can’t live with you and can’t live without you” obsession caused by feeling a strong attraction and hating the fact that you can’t ignore that attraction. This isn’t confined to Japan, as the site underlines by providing a relevant quotation from the Roman poet Catullus.

Another Japanese term that captures a phenomenon that is hard to describe in English is moe, which literally means “to bud, to bloom.” It is used to describe a character that causes others to be instinctively protective or nurturing, “the ability of a character to instill in the audience an irrational desire to adore them, hug them, protect them, comfort them, etc. To evoke a sort of Big Brother Instinct or Heartwarming Moments, regardless of gender.” We might say “cute,” but “cute” is a far shallower term and doesn’t really convey the strong impulse to assist that moe does.

Will knowing such words as these make you a better writer? I don’t think so. But being able to recognize and reflect on these concepts might lead your mind to useful places.

A example of another concept that TV Tropes introduces is Blue and Orange Morality. Blue and Orange Morality refers to a rigid and consistent moral code, “black and white morals,” but set up with values that are so different from the ones that we hold that it’s impossible even to decide whether the creatures concerned are “good” or “evil.” They are simply Other; consistent according to their own rules, but their rules make no sense to us, just as ours make no sense to them.

This is similar to Values Dissonance, but the main difference is that societies with Values Dissonance can, at least on a basic level, generally measure one another by the same concepts of Good and Evil, or even Order and Chaos. With Blue and Orange Morality, the values are so foreign that such concepts can no longer be applied. They may not even know what these things are, or even if they do, may find them confusing or unworthy of consideration.

Then there are Van Helsing Hate Crimes. You may recognize the name in the trope from vampire fiction, the hunter of Dracula, but where does the “hate crime” come in? This trope is when the monsters… aren’t necessarily monsters. They may have a monstrous ancestry, or there may be a prophecy about them, or rumours, or suspicion, and a few of them may actually be behaving badly — but most of them just want to be left alone. Van Helsing Hate Crimes consist of killing them all “just to be sure,” wiping out entire “monstrous” groups based on the fear that they all have the potential to be evil. The trope He Who Fights Monsters (from a famous Nietzsche quotation) is used to describe a hero of this sort. He Who Fights Monsters has themselves become a monster because of their obsession with fighting monsters, which has taken them past the Moral Event Horizon, the stage at which a character does something that proves them irredeemably evil.

TV Tropes also contains extensive summaries of works, most drawn from popular literature, such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel series. There are outlines and summaries of other theoretical works, such as the thirty-one “functions” or plot devices identified by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folk Tale. Finally, there are a large number of more or less relevant supporting essays: biographies, historical notes, and descriptions of such organizations as the royal house of Great Britain.

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