If you could get rid of ten tropes...

[KatG]

Haven't been involved in fandom much? What you'll actually get is considered terribly dumb. And if people are kind, a hundred disagreements with a thousand counter-examples.

Yes, I have been involved with fandom much. And that's why I've had many conversations with people, including these forums and the Writing Forum, where people are making those kinds of statements and being called wise for them. In fact, we've got two of them going on now.

There are numerous fans who assert that most other fantasy readers only like stories with happy endings and so dark fantasy stories are less liked, less successful and appreciated only by the discerning. Or they will concede that some dark fantasy stories do well, but insist that it was only very, very recently that this occurred. Neither of these assertions is historically accurate and completely ignores horror. And yet fans and authors often make it and others agree that it is exactly right. Likewise, a large contingent of SF fans firmly believes that real (hard) SF has been systemically killed off because most readers want space opera, time travel and military SF, with aliens and spaceships and laser pistols and post-apocalyptic grim futures. And others agree that they are wise when they say it. Which is how hard SF has been dying for nearly a hundred years. They are not considered terribly dumb for saying these things by many. We have these scripts and we pass them around, but the scripts have little to do with the real market.

You remember, Laer, when you asserted that the YA market was 90% female authors? It had seemed that way to you because of general observations you'd made and because of what people told you. But it's factually wrong. To explain why it was wrong, I spent 15 minutes in a YA section of a chain store while my daughter shopped writing down over twenty names of major and bestselling male SFF authors. And that was just a tiny section of the SFF authors in YA. The reason I puncture these balloons when they come up is because they are based on faulty research and intelligence gathering and they could make things difficult for marketing works. "Tropes" have nothing to do with getting works sold or rejected. It's a notion the fantasy community has become obsessed with and it has nothing to do with the actual market.

Not at all, but the elves, within his mythic structure, stand somewhere between the gods and the rest of us lowly beings. No Middle Earther feels a sense of awe and reverence when a troop of dwarves or hobbits walks by. And sure, Tolkien threw in a few brunette elves, but none that are short, hairy, or black-skinned. The message: Nordic = good.

Not exactly. Tolkien wanted to create a less commonly used version of fae (turn the fae on its head you see,) and decided to use the term elves instead of fairy. He used a bit of the Norse gods and the Ring. What he mainly used however was the Irish Seelie Court, who were traditionally tall and pretty in myths, and then he mixed it with Christianity to have elves be fallen angels who are diminishing away from the world of men. That's why they're a bit more noble and awe inspiring than the Norse gods, but they've fallen -- they are why Middle-Earth is in grave danger -- by selfishly trying to hold on to their realms, they blocked the natural growth of the land and men, and made the Three Rings thereby, setting everything off. They acknowledge their mistake and that they will go to the West (Heaven.) They leave most of the work to men in LOTR. Three of the tribes of elves have mainly dark and black hair, including Arwen. A couple of other tribes have gold hair and one tribe has some elves with silver hair. Their skin color isn't really given. So to say they are all Nordic with a "few" brunettes is not accurate. (Legolas' hair color isn't given, but his dad is golden haired so it was reasonable to make him a blonde in the films.)

The orcs come in several different species. Some are described as black-skinned but others not. The Ur orcs, the leaders, are tall. They are mostly not described as hairy. They are possibly the corruption of elves in origin and also stand in as demons/lost souls re the Christian allegories. Sauron the White turns out to be a villain. The men who serve Sauron aren't described much in LOTR, but in the Silmarillion they are described as southern, darker people, but many of them are enslaved, not evil, and other villains are white. The really hairy short ones are the dwarves who are the good guys. Aragorn is described as dark, if tall, and seems to be loosely based on Robin Hood.

The other really short, hairy ones are the hobbits who are the actual heroes of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. They are continually underestimated by everyone because they are short, peaceable folk, and they prove that they are actually the worthy ones, more heroic than the taller people. It is a main theme of Tolkien's work. The hobbits are the regular folk who save the day. Tolkien was able to trademark his hobbits because while there was the folklore hobbit, his were considered particularly distinctive -- they were unusual.

Tolkien's use of tall elves in his story was unusual at the time -- not a cliché but instead a turning on its head of most fairies in stories. His combining Irish myth with Christian theology and Nordic overtones was very unusual for the time. His version of elves became considered a cliché in other people's fiction because of the 1960's, 1970's popularity of Lord of the Rings, followed by the launch of the category fantasy market, but was not when he published. Neither the use of fairy folk in his works nor the unusualness of what he did with those fairy folk were the reason the books became a phenomena, nor sank out of sight. So a lot of people claim to want to see an end to tall, powerful elves today, but would not have in the 1950's when Tolkien published Lord of the Rings.

When we turn a "cliché" trope on its head, we get another trope. The white hats are a trope, the white hat who is the villain is a trope. The pretty person who is a villain is a trope. The deformed person who is a hero is a trope. The dark, broody warrior who kills is a trope. Pick a plotline, it's a trope. I totally agree on the racial side, we have a lot of work to do. But those issues never seem to be what people want to talk about when they talk about tropes. Instead, they just think if they pick an item from Column B, it will be less common. It's not and hundreds of other novels picked from Column B. It doesn't have any correlation with how they sell.

Again, it remains an interesting thing that while the word "trope" is spreading in discussion of fiction, only in fantasy fiction is it an obsession and a problem. Except that it's not really a problem in fantasy fiction as no one seems to actually pay much attention to it in the market. They just like to talk about it in fandom, but only about some of the tropes.