I’ve noticed a growing tendency, when stories are analyzed on the World Wide Web, to talk about them from two angles: Genre and tropes.

Let me start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. I am one of the people who likes to think about genres and tropes, to the point where I once wrote a somewhat lengthy series of posts on this very blog which I titled Genrely Speaking. I enjoyed writing that series and several people have told me they enjoyed reading it. I haven’t added to it recently, largely because I’ve already written about all the genres I feel I know well enough to expound on. I still think having a reference for genre conventions helps more than harms discussions of fiction.

I haven’t delved as deeply into tropes in my own essays but I have read a great deal of that authoritative internet reference known as TV Tropes. I like tropes just as much as I like genres. They’re frequently more useful than not when discussing fiction and they make useful widgets to think about when working on stories or characters. In general, when used wisely, tropes are good storytelling tools.

However, when wisely used, tropes and genres are tools for discussion. Not analysis.

Tropes and genres are like colors. There are a lot of them, theoretically infinite numbers of them, but people have a general understanding of what is meant when they are invoked. No one pictures the same red in their mind’s eye when they hear the name of that color. Yet if I told you my car is red you wouldn’t expect my car to match the exact shade of red your mind’s eye defaults when you go looking for it. You realize that red is a spectrum in the truest sense of the word.

Tropes and genres have the same power. Everyone pictures a different movie in their mind’s eye when they hear of an adventure movie. At the same time, no one would really question you if you said you wanted to watch an adventure movie and you chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Or The Rescuers: Down Under. Or Jason and the Argonauts.

That is because these are all adventure stories, even though they come from different eras, are filmed in different mediums and feature wildly different protagonists with different goals. When we discuss them, we see the similarities that make them alike, even though they are wildly different. They take us to exotic locations. We go there with brave souls, seeking to fulfill grand and meaningful goals. We will see dangers there and our heroes will overcome them by virtue of their simple yet noble characters, with a decent side of hard work and daring do.

On the other hand, there are problems tropes become a tool for analysis rather than a term for discussion. Take, for example, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. Knives Out, is a whodunnit murder mystery and one of the key witnesses in said mystery is Marta, a nurse who gets violently nauseous and vomits whenever she lies. These kinds of pronounced personality quirks are very common in a certain kind of mystery. They add spice and interest to the puzzle because they offer the audience testimony they know is true, something that can be leveraged to make the puzzle both easier and more difficult to accomplish.

However, at the climax of the mystery in Knives Out the culprit is cornered because Marta lies several times without apparent difficulty. This is “explained” by having her throw up after the scene is over. The problem is, this breaks the narrative by having the character do something we were repeatedly told she could not do without any clear explanation. There is nothing wrong with this twist inherently. Yet nothing is done earlier in the narrative to justify it so it feels more like a plothole with a postage stamp over it than a serious development of the narrative. This is typically justified as “subverting” the trope underpinning Marta’s character.

Johnson does something similar in Glass Onion, another whodunnit, when he introduces the character Helen Brand as the identical twin sister of the murder victim, Andi. He was praised for doing something innovative and new with the genre. Why? Because the murderer having an identical twin is a trope often associated with bad mysteries.

However, Andi and Helen being twins doesn’t have any impact on the plot, other than introducing plot holes. Andi is invited to a retreat for the tech startup she works for but she’s been murdered. So Helen accepts the invitation in her place, bringing the detective Benoit Blanc along with her in the hopes she can solve Andi’s murder. She isn’t discovered until she reveals herself and the murderer never reacts to her presence with a world famous detective in any way. In short, the twin murderers trope isn’t even subverted. It’s not in play. It’s not even really important to the plot. Andi could have simply survived the first murder attempt and the rest of the story could have played out as written, except with less exposition to explain how her twin sister pulled off impersonating her.

In spite of this, Johnson receives a lot of praise for this decision.

The problem is, subverting a trope is something that must be done with care, thought and careful setup in the narrative itself or it becomes arbitrary, dependent on the audience reading the story rather than the storytelling. These choices do not expand on the story’s theme, do not illuminate the characters, do not add intrigue. They just eat up screen time and appeal to the audience’s understanding of tropes and conventions to make… a joke? Do they even have a point? It’s hard to tell.

Overall it’s poor craftsmanship and worse communication. Yet Johnson has received a lot of praise for the way he plays with tropes because people are only looking at the tropes and not the way they fit together. It’s a bit like looking at a house built with cedar wood and praising it for its excellent construction, in spite of the cracked foundation and leaking roof. The building is more than its materials just as a story is more than its genre and tropes.

This problem can creep up in the reverse, as well. In the manga Freiren: Beyond Journey’s End, the character of Himmel is vitally important to understanding the world. He is a hero who spent a decade of his life fighting demons and eventually defeating the demon lord, ushering in a more peaceful era. One of his companions, Freiren, is an elf who ultimately outlives him. As the name implies, Freiren: Beyond Journey’s End focuses on what this elf does in the decades after their triumph over the demon lord. It’s a deep, introspective story about memory, identity and what it means to live for a really, really long time.

Himmel is a character who is vitally important to understanding Freiren’s emotional journey. Those that pay attention find him to be a rich, fascinating and nuanced man. However it’s common to see the general discourse online boil Himmel down to a flat, simple character who was “the hero.” He fought the demon lord because he was the hero. He won because he was the hero. He was a charitable man because he was the hero.

This ignores Himmel’s boundless ego, an ego that led to him personally posing for statues in dozens of cities across the north. It ignores how hard he pushed his companions to measure up to his standards. It overlooks his naivete in the face of demonic evil, which led him to spare his enemies early in his career and directly led to tragedy. Most of all it ignores the many questions Freiren’s relationship to Himmel raises about him.

Himmel was in love with Freiren. Yet in spite of the many opportunities he had to appeal to her he never offered her a relationship, even once their work was done. Why? Time was a chasm between them – Freiren is more than a millenia old – and Himmel was deeply aware of that. Was that enough to drown Himmel’s high opinion of himself?

There are hints part of his obsession with statues stems from that. Was Freiren the source of his craving for legendary status or did she just feed into something that already existed?

Was Freiren really unaware of Himmel’s feelings? If so, why did she find herself weeping at the graveside of a person she only knew for ten years?

These and other questions are a vein of deep, rich reflection on human nature encompassed in a charming, heartwarming story that plays out at an expert pace. Slapping a simple label on this central character and saying, “It’s because he’s the hero” is a grave disservice to the author, the characters and the audience. Yet when tropes become analytical tools, that’s exactly what happens.

I like tropes and genres. They’re very useful tools for summing up an idea when we start to explore it. Yet when they become the end goal of exploring an idea we’re locked into simple, shallow and ultimately flat considerations of those ideas. Stories suffer for it and so do we. To go back to an earlier analogy, it’s best to think of tropes as the materials we build our story from. They have strengths and weaknesses of themselves, sure. However, in an actual story they have to be shaped, fitted and attached to one another with purpose and skill or even the best trope will make for a poor story.

Focus on purpose and skill and we’ll see better stories overall, no matter what genres and tropes are used.