Tropes- they’re everywhere
Let’s watch a movie…
…great. Which one?
KUNGFU… and most think..
- Bruce Lee sort of ballet of violence some love it some hate it..
Oh no!!,
oh yes!!!
I haven’t finished, I say… the rest of the name is
PANDA
- Po, panda, Smiles, laughs, groans…
….can’t stand Cartooons,
…love animations,
…Po.. great character
See my point
2 words
1 at a time; very different images conjured up by each individually…
Then combined; retains the actions, the moves, but the frame has moved from serious to satire… still kung fu moves and terrible bad guys and the ordinary Po becoming extraordinary warrior… and nobody is taking it seriously… well except for the very young…
Tropism is the tendency of living organisms to react to their environment or surroundings; a flower turning to follow the sun or bending to gravity, to water or touch…
“The turning of an organism in response to a stimulus, either towards or away from the stimulus.” generic AI chat bot…
When we use the concept of tropism or tropes as a metaphor in describing characters, plots, ideas, we borrow this ‘turning towards’ aspect of tropism in biology…
The graphic illustrates the point…
Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most famous around the trope of enemies to lovers; and is a common theme in every culture and geography…
Tropes aren’t just confined to story skeletons; they also apply to the
- character…dumb jock, mean girl, femme fatale, anti hero, chosen one, wise elder, etc..
- mix of characters… serious and joking (Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte), the 3 stooges, the Marx brothers, Shrek, Fiona and Donkey..
- settings… historical, haunted house, alternative history, different planet, sci-fi post scarcity…
- Geography… arctic; tropical, island, space station, underwater civilisations…
Thus, a story or movie could be based on a central trope ‘star wars’ around which are woven many other tropes in the characters and their interplay… abrasive sexual tension, mentoring and growth…and the characters themselves are tropes… wise, naive, jaded, acerbic…
The trope shifts at the word level. Each word carries a payload of assumptions, and the combination either confirms or detonates them.
This is also known, in serious circles, as semantic priming, the Planck scale of language, the smallest atomic unit of meaning. The smallest unit where meaning shifts.
The collocation, the pair or group of words, is the workhorse of a language. One word creates a mental picture with likely trajectories. The next word/s creates the gestalt; the whole greater than the sum of its parts..
Nuclear: Armageddon, laws of physics, very small…
Family: warm, safe, supportive, dysfunctional, abusive…
Nuclear family: clinical, academic, neutral. Neither meaning survives the merger…
Ice: cold, frozen, natural, water…
Cream: soft, indulgent, warm associations, best…
Ice cream: joy, pleasure, hot day relief…
Smart; intelligent, capable, clever…
Phone: mundane, functional, fixed, wired
Smartphone: as in ‘cool’, a phone, a computer, wireless..
Petrol: fuel, fraction of oil, good for cars…
Station: trains, busses, of the cross, in life…
Petrol Station: where you buy petrol for said car…
{how might you describe for da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo…}
Oil: fuel, olive, good for cooking, black stuff, cause of wars…
Company: companionship, 3 is too many, organisation, social…
Oil company: locates, extracts, refines, and sells the oil derived, like fuels for every kind of transport from small and personal to huge and commercial…
{how might you describe ‘locates, extracts, refines, and sells’ for da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo…}
And the bland euphemisms of genocide
Ethnic: cultural, diverse, unique,
Cleansing: pure, clean, hygienic, religious, bodily…
Ethnic cleansing: genocide. Two neutral words together; one atrocity…
Collateral: security, banking, guarantee, correlate…
Damage: harm, destruction, physical, emotional, spiritual…
Collateral damage: Murder rebranded as accounting…
Friendly: amicable, relaxed, trusted, wanted…
Fire: heat, scorch, warm, comfort, cook, bathe…
Friendly fire: fatal for flesh…
Kung Fu: martial art, serious, unfriendly…
Panda: clown bear, cuddly, playful, friendly…
Kung Fu Panda: film fun for family…