Week 10 Story Lab

For my storylab project from this week, I delved into the TVTropes website, which was honestly more fun than I thought it was going to be! First off, what peaked my interest the most were the “Horror Tropes” – going from there I was able to look into some of my personal favorite kind of things from horror movies/stories/media. My favorites (going into it) were “calls are coming from inside the house”, psychological horror, and ominous knocking. Furthermore, when I was looking at this list, there were so many specific types of tropes that I wouldn’t have been able to identify. Examples of these were: “Kensington gore”, “Giant Eye of Doom”, and “Eldritch Abomination”. I was pretty fascinated by the eldritch one, which described these alien-like beings as incomprehensible beings (basically the cosmic horrors that Lovecraft had written about). The idea of looking at something that would drive any normal person insane is quite a great concept to write about – maybe delving into the madness itself, changing the character’s motivations/reasoning dramatically.

Since I’m somewhat of a comic-book nerd, I naturally found the comic-book tropes section in the website, which were cool to look at (since one doesn’t always think of the many tropes that have been used to death). Favorites that I was able to find were, the “creator cameo”, “hit spark”, and “silent scenery panels”. Each one of these tropes add a depth to comics that normally wouldn’t be there with the traditional animation methods + if you just drew the characters every panel. Topes are such an important (and integral) aspect of every type of media that exists – from the stories that we’ve been reading, to movies, and even music! The tropes that exist do because of a specific reason (if they avoided becoming clichés) is that they worked the first time that they were used.