Tropes Galore

J.C. recently wrote about about recognizing tropes in your writing and why you shouldn't be turned off by them.  I couldn't agree more with his statements. It reminds me of the definition provided on the homepage of tvtropes.org:

"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means 'stereotyped and trite.' In other words, dull and uninteresting."

This is a wiki that catalogs tropes for tv, movies, books, comics, radio, and other entertainment.  It's extremely comprehensive and will be the single biggest time suck you will ever find on the internet.

There are currently three short pages for J.C. Hutchins's work:

• 7th Son
• Personal Effects
• Personal Effects: Dark Art

This was my favorite trope listed on these pages:

Creating a page for The 33 would be fun to do at some point in the future.  These are the first few that instantly come to mind:

• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (The 33)
• Founder of the Kingdom (Mr. Inns)
• Mass Teleportation (The Farmhouse)
• Myth Arc (one story-telling structure for this series)
• Monster of the Week (another structure J.C. plans to use for this series)

Clearly, The 33 is not in any way original.  I would even advise against reading The 33 if you want something original, but if that was your criteria for not liking something, then I would recommend locking yourself in room and never read, watch, or listen to anything ever again.  TV Tropes clearly shows everything is interrelated, whether intentional or not.  This is why I hate it when people crap all over James Cameron's Avatar based on trope recognition alone.  I liked Dances with Wolves, I also liked Fern Gully, I also liked Pocahontas.  Okay, so as an environmentalist maybe I'm not the most objective of critics for those types of movies, so I'd recommend reading  J.C.'s review of Avatar.

I think part of the reason I enjoyed 7th Son on a different level than some of my friends was that I had not seen these tropes so much in other literature.  Now that I have expanded my experience in SF/F genre the connections are far more clear.  This doesn't negate that sense of awe, but enhances it.

I first found tvtropes.org when looking deeper into the content of the Harry Potter series.  That book series appears to have absolutely no original content whatsoever.  That being said, I have enjoyed that series even more since learning about some of JKR's influences and I can truly marvel at what made that story so spectacular.  Individual components made it a page-turner, but was how everything came together as a collective whole, that made it a masterpiece.  I still feel like not enough attention has been given to the masterful way JKR has composed the series with ring composition or the shear magnitude of blatant and subtle foreshadowing of every major and minor plot element.

I think that while both 7th Son and The 33 are in some ways unoriginal, the way the stories are crafted and the way characters interact with each other are just unique enough to really make it enjoyable. The medium in how its being told also adds a point towards originality.   

I know that fans of J.C. also tend to enjoy podcasts and ARGs.  If the TV Tropes website is at all intriguing I'd recommend checking out the podcast for this website: On the Tropes.  They also had this brilliant web-series and ARG that has since ended.  It's a show within a show called Echo Chamber: