Richard's Online Journal
Money For Old Trope
As the last post suggests, right now, I really should be working. Instead, I’ve been reading TV Tropes, a wiki devoted to all those familiar recurring elements in everything from books to anime, comics to videogames. As revenge, I’m going to ruin your evening too. In a good way.
What’s fun about this site is that it’s not one of your assassination type sites, a la The Agony Booth. Entertaining as that can be for a true stinker, the negativity can get tedious, especially when just about every sentence is desperately hunting for something to slam.
TV Tropes walks a more moderate line, starting with the premise that most of its subjects aren’t necessarily bad, just… well… familiar. Some very much so, like Why Dont Ya Just Shoot Him. Others are more specific, such as Locking MacGuyver In The Store Cupboard. Most have fantastic, perfect names for things you’ll have noticed, but probably never put a name to, from Cut Lex Luthor A Check to Church of the Deus Ex Machina.
World of Warcraft: Show this map to a geographer, and watch them cough up their skull in horror. Especially if they’re Horde.
One of the downsides of writing for a living, especially coupled with spending untold hours immersed in media of just about every type, is that you develop a real hypersensitivity to this kind of thing. It’s annoying, especially to people around you in the cinema, not something you can switch off. I can think of at least one book I’ve reviewed where I longed to fly out to the author, sit him down with a copy of Space For Dummies, and make him write ‘Spaceships Don’t Stop On A Dime’ a million times. Right next to the forty-year old fantasy authoress stuck alternating between ‘Male refractory period’ and ‘Boobs don’t work like that’ until the heat death of the universe.
Her husband has my full sympathy. I suspect the children may have sprouted from pods.
(Of course, all this hypersensitivity doesn’t stop you making the same mistakes in your own fiction. It’s much easier to spot other peoples’ blunders than your own, which is why you never proof your own work, and every writer has been heard to say something along the lines of ‘It Sounded Okay In My Brain’…)
This seems like a good opportunity for some audience participation, since comments have been quiet of late. It’s a little game we like to call:
Name Your Trope!
My favourite of late comes from games, although and I’ve seen it in at least three movies and TV shows over the last week. It’s one of those wonderful effects that only ever happens on TV — a sniper takes up position, takes aim at the target, and there it is, ready to deliver a hot bullet to the target’s torso.
Your friend and mine, The Little Red Dot Of Doom.
Everything I know about warfare, I learned from Team Fortress 2.
The basic reason it exists is that otherwise nobody would be able to stop the assassination, and the episode/movie would be over pretty quickly. In practice, precision weapons like that are designed to hit within a certain area at a distance rather than necessarily a specific point — there’s no sense trying to shoot out a target’s eyeball when everything from wind to the curvature of the Earth could play a part in throwing the shot out by a few imperceptible bits of an all-important degree.
(Of course, there’s another use for the Little Red Dot, which guarantees I’d want one if I ever became a professional contract killer. I’m not saying it’s likely, but you’ve got to admit: if someone doesn’t pay up, sticking it on their chest probably works better than a politely written final demand. So maybe it’s a Justified Trope after all…)
Your turn.