What genre tropes are you subverting in your story?

[Tejoka]

Well, I never set out to subvert any specific tropes, but it sort of happens since I'm doing my own thing with the cultivation genre.
Off the top of my head, tropes I'm subverting for the xianxia/cultivation and transmigration genre:

• The MC is originally from the fantasy world, and was reincarnated on Earth, then transmigrated back
• The MC doesn't have any convenient memories of the cultivation world
• The MC doesn't like fighting, but isn't actually bad at it
• There are other transmigrators and they actually shape the world and society
• Little face-slapping
• No typical 'arrogant young master' types
• Nobles can't just kill commoners without repercussions, there are civil rights laws
• No pseudo-daoism
• Sects aren't that powerful
• No harem (yet, at least)
• The MC isn't a psychopath and has strict morals that she follows, even if she can be ruthless
• No bs divine treasures that a character just happens to stumble upon
• Being a genius means being an actual, well, genius, but it has downsides
• There are powerful spirits/basically gods, but they don't much care about humans
• Having a special bloodline/constitution/ancestry doesn't make you OP
• a few more, but spoilers

 

[ForestDweller]

2. Strong harem MC surrounded by strong women (usually it's either a weakling surrounded by amazons or a strong and overpowered guy surrounded by bimbos who are well beneath him. Never are they on the same league). The guy still has an special and unique advantage, but he's not in a different league than his female peers.
3. Said harem MC actually being willing to hurt girls (they either never do or it's toned down. Here, it kind of is the point since it's a fighting centric story).
4. Fanservice AND gore (usually, gore and fanservice, especially when it involves girls, is never shown as a single theme. The only story to do so was Freezing and even they backed off the gore part).

Heh, that's in my story as well. First villain was an old hag with the appearance of a young girl and he blows her brains out in the end. And an upcoming villain is another girl as well.

 

[placeintime]

Mine is:
-The male protagonist suddenly becomes ugly to beautiful, face slapping everybody that dissed him before
-An ignorant protagonist that doesn't realize what's going on around him
-different types of yandere throughout the plot
- the male protagonist is actually a prodigy

That's all I could think of right now

Heres a link to my novel, Check it out:

A Chance To Become a Adonis

 

[Yairy]

@AliceShiki A mob protagonist reminds me of Goblin is Very Strong..

 

[OvidLemma]

A Chance To Become a Adonis

If it hasn't been pointed out to you already... unless it is a deliberate choice on your part for some reason... you've got a grammatical error in your title. It should be A Chance to Become an Adonis, since A is a vowel. I'm sure many people don't care, but errors in the title are a definite deal-breaker for me.

 

[AliceShiki]

@AliceShiki A mob protagonist reminds me of Goblin is Very Strong..

But that protagonist is lv 99, isn't it? At that point how can you even call it a mob instead of a hero or something!? >.<

 

[Skaviouz]

I thought https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlayingWithATrope was in interesting idea
I've read and watched a number of youtube videos on how to start or not start a story, and the unexpected seems like the best way to be interesting if the rest of the story is uninteresting like mine. So here is a WIP excerpt that I wrote yesterday.

Noticing two trucks he waited for them to pass.

(I mention trucks)

'Subverted that trope.' Izick has read plenty of online webnovels to know to stay away from truck-kun. After J-walking and dodging traffic like a little frog in an old game, he reached the sidewalk in front of the burger joint. He was thinking about getting either a malt or a milkshake when he saw a firefighter. As another firefighter was getting out of the red large vehicle, the passenger door hit him into an uncovered manhole, head first.

(MC deconstructing the trope which is very common approach by fanfics I have seen which is then double sub-verted, then the firefighter is mentioned but normally you see the truck before the firefighters considering that they are massive in size, then we call the truck red large vehicle and it is implied truck-kun fulfilled the trope.)

He woke up in a hospital bed, with the news playing on the wall.

(Sub-verted the trope as he did not wake up in a world of swords and magic aka another world)

"AB Conglomerate News of Seattle here, last night mysterious monuments were identified last night. With our magic scouters we detected magic levels over 9000. Super people from the hero guild arrived on scene to protect the treasure hunters looking for loot."

(double-subverted or even triple maybe, as it is unknown whether this is a new world or not yet -- but you know malts are a south thing, people from the NW would want a milkshake so you could also have foreshadowing mixed in?)

Izick realized that he is in another world, he is from Georgia and not Seattle.

(And this is my attempt to play the tropes.)

 

[AbigailWP]

The main trope im subverting is that storys have to be """good""" or attract an """audience"""... im a bit of a hipster

 

[OvidLemma]

The main trope im subverting is that storys have to be """good""" or attract an """audience"""... im a bit of a hipster

I dunno, that includes an awful lot of stories. In fact, it might be kinda mainstream. I'm more into stories that are best-sellers by virtue of being assembly instructions for cheap furniture that just happen to have popular genre tags.

 

[Jemini]

The closest I come to subverting any tropes is in going to original sources.

1. ) I do not have Tolkeinesque elves, my elves are based on original sources. They like to kidnap human children and turn them into pets.
2. ) I decided to replace half-elves with Gnomes and Dwarves in a similar manner to how Ligers in Tigrins are the result of mating a lion and a tiger. Whether you get a Gnome or a Dwarf depends on whether the mother was the human or the elf in the exchange.

Those are the main subversions in my story, but other than that I also go REALLY hard on the genre breakdown.

1. ) For the trope of the god/goddess who reincarnates the MC, I decided to really explore the selfish desires of the god in doing this, taking it to the same dark extremes as Kyubi from Madoka Magica.
2. ) I decided to straight up do away with all the pussy-footing around of making the MC the child of a duke or a baron (seriously, it's ALWAYS one of the two. The highest noble house or the lowest. It's never in-between.) Instead, I straight up made my MC a princess. But, she has to deal with ACTUAL royal duties and is spending all her time pulling her hair out trying to manage diplomatic deals while her friends are pulling ahead of her in their combat training. She started out the series as the strongest, but turns into the weakest due to the time she's lost from training due to having to keep up with all these complicated negotiations.
3. ) Combat scenarios might take 1 chapter max, and the time that passes in word is only about 5 seconds with the only reason it takes so many words on the page being because the fine manipulations of balance and point-control of a weapon have to be described in a lot of detail.
4. ) No single person in the cast can get out of a crisis situation on their own. Even the queen, the character in the series who has more individual combat power than any other character in the story thus far, needed to employ every gnome in the capital to help her last time she had to take personal action in order to solve a problem.
5. ) Oh, yes, right. I used original sources on the gnomes. Gnomes, in my world, are the absolute most talented earth mages in existence. Their claim to fame is being able to pass through solid ground as though it was air, and having absolute control over the soil and stone. (Yes, that is seriously how powerful gnomes were in the original renaissance magic sources.)

 

[MajorKerina]

My subversion would be light spoilers but there's one genre trope in Isekai I've always wanted to subvert.

Typically, the main character or maybe one of their friends are all the people who travel to the other world. Juuni Kokuki is actually my favorite application of this idea as people tend to be super screwed when it comes to another world. But I like the idea that more people than just the core group of protagonists have been reincarnated. Not Riverworld-level but something between.

 

[averagewriter]

For me I don't like anything related to 'Second chance'. For example ( Reincarnation, Returning to the past, Going to another world, ext.)
It feels sort of like 'escapism' to me. So I decided to simply avoid them and have the 'MC' face his own past and future.

 

[OvidLemma]

For me I don't like anything related to 'Second chance'. For example ( Reincarnation, Returning to the past, Going to another world, ext.)
It feels sort of like 'escapism' to me. So I decided to simply avoid them and have the 'MC' face his own past and future.

Unless you're dealing with deep philosophical or social issues in your work, virtually all fantasy is escapism. And, in a slightly looser way, all non-highbrow fictional entertainment is a sort of escapism. There's nothing wrong with it (I love fiction), but immersing yourself in imaginary plots is an escape from the real world.

 

[Emerald_Severwill]

1) Isekai but the the world is a nightmarish wasteland whose inhabitants struggle for life everyday
2) Fantasy races, but they're just human mutations that progressively get worse as time goes on.
3) Special powers are more of a curse than a gift/blessing.

 

[gaylolis]

currently writing a vrmmo story, where the game system actually makes me want to play.

i guess i'm tilted as fuck, on how shitty some of the games in vrmmo novels are, especially overgeared's satisfy. i couldn't understand why with a system so shitty, billions of people would play it.

man, these authors probably didn't even touch a MMO or play video games at all.

while the game's a piece of crap, overgeared's story was pretty decent, i guess. still, i would curse at satisfy if it exists.

 

[averagewriter]

Unless you're dealing with deep philosophical or social issues in your work, virtually all fantasy is escapism. And, in a slightly looser way, all non-highbrow fictional entertainment is a sort of escapism. There's nothing wrong with it (I love fiction), but immersing yourself in imaginary plots is an escape from the real world.

I was simply talking about the theme itself. The feeling it protray.

 

[Suzumiya]

Almost everybody here on SH writes some form of genre fiction - for me, it's mostly fantasy/sci-fi and gender-bent fiction that I write. Within each genre, there are dozens of tropes, and these can be helpful for making worldbuilding easier and letting readers know what to expect. But I'm also a big fan of subverting tropes and doing interesting things with them. For instance, in my Visions of Dark & Light story universe (isekai/fantasy), I've written a fantasy story where:
-Humans are the most powerful magic-wielding race (usually, they're middling to weak)
-There are tree people (well, half-tree) who are definitely not in tune with nature (usually, they're super in tune)
-And none of the traditional fantasy races are there (usually, stories are either all human or they've got the Tolkeinesque spread of races)
-Well, there are demons of a sort, but they're summoned into mortal bodies to use as an explored slave class (demons are usually powerful and infernal forces)

What genre tropes have you subverted in your story (maybe tropes people aren't even aware of usually), and do you think it's made for a better story?

That's a cool question! Thank you for asking it. :)

For me, I've mostly practiced in an academic setting, and I think it shows quite glaringly. That isn't to say I dislike it, always. But it is quite difficult for me to overcome it. So, one such trope that I'm trying to overcome is academia. This doesn't yet show in "Haruhism of a Lesser," but that's only because the portions I've written are intended to be from the perspective of a university student observing Earth 3^(n-42). Maybe that's a cop-out....

A second trope? I've kept a diary as long as I can remember. Every day I record my day in script, sometimes from my perspective- sometimes not. Here I try to avoid the trope of supposition, that is anything to do what is not immediately happening. It's quite difficult!

Then, of course, there's over-used speech-related tropes such as "it's a nice day" and "how's the weather?" I try to avoid such inconsequential speech as this in daily life as well as in literature. Overused tropes like "he's a good guy" or "it's cool" don't tend to mean much in literature, so I avoid them where possible.

My mentors always drove this one into me, stale metaphors and proverbs: low-hanging fruit; the apple doesn't fall...; patience is a virtue; .... I try to avoid these everywhere except in dialogue, since people really do use them all the time. I was in the military, and such stale metaphors and proverbs were used to great effect there! There was a whole culture around them! Truly awesome stuff.