You can read the descriptions in non-spoiler mode so that a description that gives away something crucial in the movie is blanked out. And as in most wiki style sites, you can add your own suggestions or comments, as long as you register and log in. A lot of fun to just read through a few when you have some minutes free. It's a bookmark for me; when the day is not going well, I know that reading the trope "Carrying a Cake" will make me smile (think Rodney Dangerfield in Easy Money).
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Tropes
I have been reading a lot about tropes lately. A trope is a word or expression that is used in a figurative (not literal) sense. For example, "Saturday's game will be a cakewalk" doesn't mean that there will be cake at the game. And "the President's speech was a home run" doesn't automatically mean that a Cubs pitcher was involved. I've been especially interested in tropes that have to do with writing fiction, as evidenced at the website TV Tropes. This website categorizes typical situations, characters, and other plot devices with words or phrases that call them to mind (tropes). For example, one trope is called "Always Save the Girl" in which the plot says that the hero makes it uncomfortably plain that he/she values the life of their Love Interest over those of everyone else: friends, family, or even all other life in the universe. Luckily the site gives examples from TV (Pushing Daisies, X Files, House), Literature (Harry Potter), films (Indiana Jones, Matrix Reloaded), and video games (Final Fantasy IV). There are thousands of tropes to look through with lots of supporting material. A "Scrappy" is a universally hated character - Scrappy-Do, Wesley Crusher, Chris Bosh Jar Jar Binks. A "Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot" is any character or movie that is a combination (usually technically impossible) of cool things that is better than the sum of its parts - the Borgs in Star Trek TNG (zombie pirate cyborgs), Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles, and the movie Peewee's Big Adventure, in which Pee-Wee Herman meets a magician, a fortune-teller, an escaped convict, a zombie truck driver, a giant, a hobo, cowboys, and bikers - and then ends up getting chased by water-skiers, Santa Claus, and Godzilla.
You can read the descriptions in non-spoiler mode so that a description that gives away something crucial in the movie is blanked out. And as in most wiki style sites, you can add your own suggestions or comments, as long as you register and log in. A lot of fun to just read through a few when you have some minutes free. It's a bookmark for me; when the day is not going well, I know that reading the trope "Carrying a Cake" will make me smile (think Rodney Dangerfield in Easy Money).
You can read the descriptions in non-spoiler mode so that a description that gives away something crucial in the movie is blanked out. And as in most wiki style sites, you can add your own suggestions or comments, as long as you register and log in. A lot of fun to just read through a few when you have some minutes free. It's a bookmark for me; when the day is not going well, I know that reading the trope "Carrying a Cake" will make me smile (think Rodney Dangerfield in Easy Money).
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Chris Bosh jokes are home runs.
ReplyDeleteAlways save the girl has nothing to do with "he/she" and "his/her" love interest. It about males privileging the lives of their female mates (and thus the mothers or eventual mothers of their children) above their own. That's what we do. That's what we've always done, and a few decades of political "correctness" isn't going to undo millions of years of evolution.
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