Week 12 StoryLab: Tropes

This week, for my Story Lab post, I decided to delve into the media tropes website again, just because I found it so interesting the first time I was looking at it. For the first area that I explored, I went into the love tropes, because I wanted to be able to put a name on some of the things I’ve seen so commonly used. The “sub-genres” of love were all over the place – from attraction, to forbidden love, and to love is a crapshoot, there were way more areas of love than I originally thought.

The first sub-genre that I looked at was the Attraction Tropes. Some of these feel like they’re simply observations of normal aspects of human life – an example of this was the trope “Has a Type”. Yeah, while that is used within television/media, that’s a regular, everyday type of thing. An example of what I think is more of a trope is the “Hot Librarian” trope. This isn’t an everyday thing, this is something that was started by popular media, not the other way around. While reading through the tropes, one word in particular caught my eye, “Moe”. I had no idea what it meant, I immediately thought of Moe from The Simpsons, but I was obviously wrong. Moe is a person that brings out the big brother type of instinct, one where you just want to hug and protect them – it was started in Japan, which is probably why I’ve never heard of it before (at least not in definable terms).

I finally decided to look at the love is a crapshoot topic, where love can influence the story in random ways (hence, a crapshoot). Favorites of mine within this were, “crazy jealous guy” and “the power of friendship”, both of which can have heavy influence over how the entire story pans out.