What are some bad ways to subvert tropes?

Question

I recently came across something I wrote in 4th or 5th grade, where the MCs, a girl and a boy, were superheroes. One wore a blue costume with knives, and the other wore a pink one with flowers... BUT PSYCH! The girl wore the blue one! And the boy wore the pink! Your stereotypes mean nothing to my unsharpened-pencil wielding mind!

Now obviously, that was written by a child, and I guess it's more of an inversion than a subversion, I feel like there are a lot of trope 'subversions' that feel similarly... cheap, for lack of a better word. Badly thought out, perhaps.

I just can't think of any examples right now.

So what makes a trope subversion fall flat/ boring/ "cheap"? Examples would be nice too.

Answer 1

I think the problem with the blue-pink subversion is that there is no clear reason why; other than the intent to surprise the reader. And secondly, it is not clear this trope subversion has any actual story consequences.

Normally, trope inversions have at least some rational reason for existing. e.g. Wonder Woman is one of the first female super-heroes (appearing 1941), but rationales are offered for subverting the 1941 tropes about women: She comes from an all-female society, so their military and defense are necessarily all female. Likewise she can be unafraid to fight, blunt and aggressive and take charge: In our society traits associated with males, but in an all-female society without gender-based roles, it would be necessary for some females to take on the roles of generals and soldiers, and there would be no stigma associated with it.

Trope inversions are generally justified in fiction, in some way. The character acts against type out of necessity, or out of upbringing or life experiences that taught them some non-typical lesson. The nerd can fight because his father made him learn to fight. The woman knows sports because her father was a coach and fanatic, and loved her, and naturally she bonded with him over the sports he watched all the time, and grew up liking them and understanding them.

One bad subversion of a trope is to declare an opposite and provide zero reasoning for it. That looks too obviously like a contrived surprise.

A second bad subversion of a trope is when it has no actual story consequences of any kind. We need our female protagonist to have a lot of sports knowledge for a story reason; perhaps this lets her solve a puzzle or understand a reference other people would miss.

Now of course, the reasons we give for a trope inversion are themselves contrived, but that second-level contrivance doesn't matter much. Or you could bury it in a third-level contrivance: Wonder Woman comes from an all-female society. But why is it all-female? If we get into reasons for that, we have a third-level contrivance, and by burying it this makes it all more plausible (since the "all-female society" sounds a little implausible).

But often just the 2nd level contrivance is sufficient, if it sounds plausible -- A father that is a sports fanatic is in keeping with a trope, with a daughter as his only child it is plausible she grows up loving sports herself, going to games, and understanding the games because in her world that is what fathers and daughters do.

Added from comments: In fiction any extreme ability (for either gender) stands out and readers expect it to matter, somehow. Failing to meet this expectation disappoints them. Fiction is not real life! To readers extreme abilities mean something, that is the psychology of reading stories. If we read that a character has superpowers, but by the end of the book has never done anything with 'em, Then why did the author give them superpowers?

Trope inversions are very similar to this; if you subvert the trope you are creating an outlier, an abnormality, something the reader does not expect and does not regard as "normal". It generally needs to be justified, and then also needs to influence the story, and the more unusual the abnormality the more influence it should have in the story.

Answer 2

TL;DR

If it leads to new situations or fresh characters, GREAT!

If it's at the very end of the story and it's just there to pull the rug out, BAD!

Playing against types

A stereotype inversion is still only 2-dimensional. Chances are it doesn't really alter the plot much. It's probably better than the usual, but not by much, since it's still based on stereotypes and tropes.

Take for instance the trope subversion that Luke and Han are heroes who rescue Leia, a damsel in distress. The trope would be that the men go in, guns blazing with confidence, and the grateful Princess Toadstool gives them a reward from her father's treasury. But in Star Wars all the storybeats are subverted so the guys are bungling amateurs who get themselves trapped in the prison block, and she's actually some sort of ball-busting toughguy who has to rescue them.

The plot doesn't really change though. They still "rescue a princess from a tower" and escape by the seat of their pants. By the end they are regular heroes and she is a princess handing out rewards. The story is filled with moment-to-moment subversions – it's a fun ride, but the overall plot and especially the ending are 100% expected.

The unexpected ending

In contrast, every few weeks we see some variation on a question about "Can my villain win?" and the answer is always "Of course, but why, what does it add to the story and say about your world?"

In 99% of stories where the reader is expecting a Big Battle™ at the climax, the protagonist will be an underdog and the villain will be overpowered. It doesn't actually subvert anything by letting the overpowered villain win – the typical storybook ending is the subversion. The opposite of the storybook trope is "reality". It's not actually a trope subversion – it's nothing. It's normal.

It was a 2-dimensional trope before, but when the "bad guy wins" it's 1-dimensional. But the real issue is this "subversion" doesn't lead to anything. Maybe it works, but it's the ending so it can't be explored or developed. At best it's a quick gotcha, at worst it's a shaggy dog story.

Subvert All Tropes

IMO, the reason we've been hearing non-stop about "trope subversions" is they are a reaction against formulaic movie writing like the 3-Act screenplay and "Save the Cat" tells that leaves the average media-saturated human aware of what is coming. It's now an edgy trend to break the rules just to break the rules, (as opposed to 1977 when an avalanche of inverted tropes in Star Wars felt fresh and fun).

If you only look at trendy media produced by HBO and Netflix, you'd think there are no more stories, just a continuum of "story rules" that exist to be broken so the audience can experience temporary confusion, anger, and scream WTF, then go and complain about it on social media to drive show curiosity and cultural cachet. It's an Emperor's New Clothes effect where the subversion feels radical. This is a commercial decision, not a storytelling decision.

Most creative artists recommend to not chase a trend. By the time you get your trendy work published the market will be saturated with copycats, as well as the grandfathers that re-emerge from back catalogs. Publishers and readers alike will be hunting for the next new trend, which might even be a reaction against the trend you've been chasing.

It can backfire too of course. The same fanboys who worshipped Star Wars (ironically choosing to focus on it's jejune "hero's journey" aspect while ignoring the many trope inversions that make it entertaining, had a cosmic melt down over The Last Jedi's trope subversions. Now, according to Youtube analysts, audience expectations must be subverted in a specific way or you're "breaking the rules" wrongly.

The irony of that statement suggests we are already at peak trope subversions. Trope subversions are becoming a trope.

in conclusion

• Character trope switcharoos can lead to a fresh take on old plots ("Cinderfella"), but protagonists still need arcs and narratives still need satisfying conclusions that feel like an ending.
• If you're going to subvert the plot, do it early so an interesting narrative can come out of it. Gotcha endings are only appropriate in genres that are intended to be unsettling. They will signal that they exist in a gotcha universe – thriller, horror, weird, crime, psychological, etc.
• Avoid (as opposed to subvert/invert) character clichés as much as possible by writing deeper, more realistic characters. A rich character with complicated motives and realistic consequences doesn't need to be subverted.

I think character is far more important to holding reader interest than subverting tropes and trying to surprise readers with the unexpected ending.

Answer 3

If you're just doing it for its own sake to bask in your own 'cleverness', it stands out like neon in a windowless room (see: The recent fallout regarding the ever-'subversive' Season 8 of Game of Thrones). Intent is a lot more transparent than people think.

If you're subverting tropes to discuss said trope, or simply because that's the story you want to tell, that will bleed through too, and come off as much better. The former example is what has a lot of post-modern artsy points.

Subverting for its own sake amounts to 'look, here's the thing that people usually do, and BAM! Now it's the other way around!'.

Subverting to discuss, however, would go more like this: 'Look, here's the thing that people usually do, but why do we usually do that? It doesn't always make sense, and especially not in the universe I'm writing. Instead, this other thing will happen.'

The difference is palpable in how it's executed.

Answer 4

There's a danger with subverting tropes, in that you can end up giving misleading promises ... e.g. your story seems to be a romcom for the first 20 pages but then !surprise! it's a horror--well, all the people who wanted horror have not even started the story (they thought it was a romcom), and the people who started it because they wanted a romcom are now terribly dissapointed (they didn't want a horror story) ... that's a very coarse example; you can get the same kind of problem even with much more fine-grained trope-vs-subversion attempts

Answer 5

There have been a lot of good answers so far. I think a few areas have been missed. So, on top of the other answers, I would add:

As Social Commentary:

Since tropes represent, in a small way, our expectations, subverting a trope can be used to put social norms in stark relief. The Star Trek episode "Let this be your Last Battlefield," featured the struggle between the only two surviving members of an entire planet engulfed in war. The reason for the conflict, when it is revealed, served to put the racial struggles of 1960's USA in a very different frame.

If this context, the dynamics of the societal property need to be preserved when the trope is subverted. Like an abusive-parent trope could be subverted to reflect abuse by excessive permissiveness rather than cruelty. But, if that was a synecdoche for a socialist government -- promising everything to everybody -- it would be challenging to make work. But, the original trope makes a good synecdoche for a totalitarian government.

As Misdirection:

If a story can seemingly rely on a trope, without clearly declaring it, then the sudden subversion can permit the story to unfold in new directions. This requires that the text of the story implies conformance with the trope, so the reader adopts it as part of their internal model of the world. Then, when it is important, the real mechanics can be revealed and the reader sees how their assumptions led to their own surprise. The 6th Sense is an example of this type of subversion of a trope.

But, if the story contains details that are dependent on the original trope, then the contract with the reader is broken and the work can feel badly done.

Answer 6

One very bad way of subverting a trope is thinking you're being clever and subverting a trope only it's Dead Horse Trope and no one actually uses it straight any more. For instance, there have been instances of non-genre writers trying their hand at a genre and think they're being innovative and daring and subverting all sorts of tropes, only the tropes they've subverting aren't in use in that genre and haven't been for decades. The writer, essentially, is basing their "innovation and daring" on something they remember seeing (or worse, hearing about) decades ago which they think is an essential part of the genre, but isn't actually a thing now days.

Simplistic example: suppose an author want to try their hand at science fiction, but they only thing they remember is that the heroes were squared-jawed men of action who rescued the damsel in distress from the aliens who'd taken her for...some reason. Well, this author is going to bust the genre wide open; his hero is going to be a woman! Someone just as good in a fight and with a blaster as a man, and better then most. And, to add on to it, there will be space marines, and some of them will be women too!

Okay, sure, daring and subverting tropes...seventy years ago. I've spent literally decades with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner and Honor Harrington and any other number of badass women in genre fiction. I've seen the Adepta Sororitas fight on thousands of worlds, Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper running around the solar system, Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr running around the galaxy, and so on and so forth. In other words, the idea of Badass Action Girl isn't something new or novel in the least any more, so someone writing as if it's a new and exciting idea is almost guaranteed to suffer an epic fail.

That's probably the most common way for a trope subversion to go bad; not knowing that subverting the trope is pretty much the only time the trope even shows up at all any more.

Answer 7

I think the best answer lies in your question. The key, to my thinking, is whether you are actually subverting the trope or whether you are simply not following it for the sake of not following it. Subversion implies that you are invalidating, mocking or demonstrating the limitations of the trope.

Why do we see tropes used so often? Because on some level they tend to work. They become tropes because they lead to interesting stories. They set reader expectations. Not meeting reader expectations is not a good thing in general. Imagine a story that begins with a scientist describing his latest creation: a super bomb with the capability to destroy an entire planet! The story is about the scientist's love life and the bomb doesn't come into it again because it was just there to show that he's a very clever guy. Well, that sucks. "Does not meet expectations" is not a phrase you want to hear when you're having a performance review at work and it's not what you want people to be saying about your story.

I don't know if you saw the movie "Kingsmen: The Secret Service". I was kind of disappointed when the main character didn't end up with Roxy, the feisty young recruit he befriended during training. So that would be an example of a trope not followed but not successfully subverted. I expected something and felt cheated when I didn't get it. On the other hand consider the original "Rocky" movie. The trope would have been if he had won at the end and become world champion. He didn't but the ending was satisfying anyway. He redeemed himself and he found things that were important to him and that meant more than a title would have.

I don't know what happened in your superhero story but imagine this: the villain wants to unmask Blue Blade. He and the reader think they've figured out that it must be the boy but then the boy and Blue Blade unequivocally show up at the same time. Then in the denouement you reveal to the reader that Blue Blade is actually the girl and the boy is Pink Pansy. This is still kind of lame but it uses the trope to set up a trick ending. The reader is led to question the assumptions that led him or her to conclude that the boy had to be Blue Blade and the girl Pink Pansy. If successful, this subverts the gender expectation trope.

One last example: "Gone With the Wind". Scarlett goes through the whole book (or movie) trying to get the wrong man: Ashley. The right man, Rhett, is pursuing her and marries her without really "getting" her. She realizes that Rhett is the right man just at the moment that he has had enough of her and is leaving. He walks out and she is left alone determined to get him back, telling herself "tomorrow is another day." So, the girl doesn't get the guy in the end and it isn't a tragedy and it's kind of a cliff-hanger and who knows what happens to Ashley and... somehow it works although seemingly all the rules have been broken. Somehow Scarlett's character has become more important to us than the usual story conventions and the ending seems more real and more true to her nature than a typical tragic or happy ending would have been.

So there you go. Make your twist more interesting than following the trope would have been. Make it worthwhile.

Answer 8

The general problem with tropes is that they often indicate lazy writing, and since they're so shopworn, they don't tend to contribute much new, original or of value. But it doesn't have to be that way. One of the problems with the current craze for reducing everything to tropes is that it minimizes the way that you can always bring fresh new perspectives and your own writer's voice to timeless themes --something that definitely can't happen if you're only thinking of them in terms of what tropes compose them.

The problem with poorly subverted tropes is similar. The freshness they are supposed to provide is superficial and illusionary. Nothing really new or exciting is being presented. What the reader is being given is no less of a cliche, it has just been inverted in a mechanical fashion (Girls in blue! Boys in pink!).

The better way to subvert tropes, I would submit, is not to focus on them at all. If you find yourself writing something that you've seen or read a hundred times already in someone else's book, that you could write in your sleep, and that any other person could come in and fill in the details for you, throw it out, and find something more interesting, that won't be as much of a waste of everyone's time. But other than that, leave the trope-hunting for the readers and critics. There are fewer bigger warning signs for me than when someone deliberately describes their plotline in language taken straight from TV Tropes.

Answer 9

I'd honestly vote to close the question as opinion-based, but since it's attracted some answers, I'd demonstrate why by disagreeing.

• "Villain" victories and hero-designated villain team-ups are awesome. Readers shop for stories in which heroic characters win -- if they did, stories would be advertized by their denouements. They should root for the heroic person to win within the confines of the fictional world while they're immersed in it, and your job here is to craft a character they'd sympathize with.

• "Hero defeats villain" is not a subversion, it's normal. It doesn't matter that the villain's power is over 9001, the hero's status as the protagonist also figures into the prediction model, and readers are very much aware of it. "Villains" winning is not the norm in real life either, because when they do, the predominant media narrative will not present them as such.

• You do not need an excuse to "subvert" sexist stereotypes. The notion that a woman needs to be initiated by a man into consuming the product of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry is horribly sexist and demeaning.

• Subversions or not, character-building details don't have to have story consequences beyond the immediate and obvious. If a character goes out to buy milk, s/he doesn't need to later win a drinking contest against the lactose-intolerant villain. If, in the beginning of a story, a girl was returning from baseball practice and saw a trail of blood, she does not need to kill the monster with a baseball bat in the end. Chekhov's Gun is not a law of writing fiction, it's a rule for play- and screenwriting which simply says to not be a backseat director.

• Genre "subversions" are awesome. Romcom to horror and vice versa are established tropes. There are people who like both; more importantly, there are fans of that particular niche that a writer might want to occupy. You're not writing a genre, you're writing for an audience. A good marketer will know to sell your tragic love story of pre-Adamite horrors to fans of the tragic love story of malfunctioning AIs on an abandoned spaceship.

Edgy blue girl / fluffy pink boy is not bad by itself, it's bad in the current media context, as there's a glut of (bad) stories trying to get sold on the supposed originality and moral superiority of boldly "subverting" already outdated, tasteless and unused tropes. Those have gone the way of rickrolling, Erin Esurance, and Windows ME, and trying to look clever and original by subverting one marks the author as horribly out of touch with the real world. It would have been fine back when you were in 5th grade.