Story Lab

For my lab I went on TVTropes and shuffled through random tropes and these are some of the ones I found that were worth writing about.

Once Upon a Time Trope - It's exactly what it sounds like. It is the trope how every fair tale used to start with "Once upon a time" and end with "and they lived happily ever after." This trope is a pretty obvious one, but it is the first trope I read about so I felt compelled to include it. Every journey starts somewhere, even if it isn't the most interesting.

Sdrawkcab Name Trope - This is a trope where villains or whoever will go by their real name, but backwards. This allows for a shocking reveal. A good example of this trope is a vampire going by Alucard. Then at the climax of the story the villain can reveal his real name was there all along. This is similar to Lord Voldemort being an anagram of "Tom Marvolo Riddle." I haven't read or seen an Harry Potter movie in quite a while so I apologize in advance if I butchered that.

Unscrupulous Hero Trope - In stories there are heroes and there are antiheroes. The unscrpulous hero is an antihero with traits of an ideal hero. "They are usually defined by dark experiences that have made them cold and unforgiving, and due to the settings in which they exist, there will usually be no compunctions to using more extreme methods. They are as much about payback (or any assorted type of catharsis) as they are the greater good, and their targets will be deserving of it, more likely than not." I was not aware of this specific classification, but after learning about it I can think of a few unscrupulous heroes. Captain Jack Sparrow and the Blues Brothers are good examples of this trope in film. In comics Red Hood and the Punisher are great examples of unscrupulous heroes.

The Snark Knight - This is the winner of the most fun name award. The entire entry is hilarious and definitely worth the read. "This character has a world-weary disdain for everyone, themselves included. They might see themselves as the Only Sane Man, but only in the sense that they're maybe one full notch above everyone else while still falling miles short of where they believe everyone should be." There are so many examples of this trope! Some of my favorites are Meg from Hercules, Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, Juno from Juno, Kim from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Obi-Wan. I use way too much self deprecating humor in my day-to-day life so a lot of my favorite characters are very snarky.

This is probably my favorite assignment we've done so far. I've really enjoyed learning about all of these tropes I didn't know existed. I am at the beginning of my descent down the TVTropes rabbit hole. 

The famous four words. Source