Having a really galaxy brain thought process about how “originality” and “derivativeness” in books, and even just how well a book pulls off the tropes it uses…are all almost totally relative and subjective things.
People have discussed how, at one point, “the butler did it” or “Luke, I am your father” were stunning and unexpected. The biggest and most predictable cliches were, at some point, exposed to a big audience for the first time, and they were fresh and original and they worked.
But this doesn’t just happen for everyone at one point in time for every trope, as if the Trope Codifier comes about and from then on all people are like “ehh, it’s been done before.” This is happening on a micro-level all the time. An example is when a niche subgenre or long-running franchise starts to expand and get more fans. Newer installments or examples of the subgenre that are seen as tropey and dumb by Fandom Olds can be really popular with the newcomers because to people who are new, the ideas aren’t cliche or “already done.” They’re new. The same thing happens when a book borrows elements from a different genre—a fantasy book having a romance subplot that would make regular romance readers cringe is acceptable because the romance readers and fantasy readers are largely two different groups of people.
You also see this with people who are new to a genre or category of book—or people who are relatively new to reading in general. Middle grade and YA fantasy continue to produce very formulaic and unoriginal stuff, that people who read hundreds of books in that category generally hate. However, these books often gain fans who are captivated by them, because there will always be people who haven’t read hundreds of books in that category. There will always be people for whom your book is their very first experience encountering a particular trope or reading in your genre or even reading a fiction book for pleasure at all.
And all of us were new to every genre we’ve read, once upon a time. My first real YA novel I read was Origin by Jessica Khoury, and in hindsight the love interest and teenage girl main character were both pretty typical and cliched for YA, and the love interest was definitely described in ways that would make me cringe now, simply because “the ripple of muscle beneath his tanned skin” and the “smell of cedar and wind that clung to him” are in every. YA. novel. ever. But I didn’t have that reaction, and I was honestly pretty taken in, because I was like 14 and hadn’t read a genre-typical YA romance before.
Some books, I would argue, specifically exist to appeal to people that are category/genre newbies. That’s their niche. MG/YA variants of lots of genre fiction are often like this, because kids and teens just…have not read as many books due to just not having been alive as long. Children’s books still (unfortunately) get away with incredibly cliche portal fantasies about boy chosen ones because their audience is one that is always full of people who have never read a fantasy book before. Children, though critical and thoughtful readers, got born more recently than adults. Romance in YA or MG tends to seem formulaic and tropey. Horror in YA or MG tends to seem overdone and tropey. Of course there are outstanding MG and YA books for which this is not true, but for the broad mass of YA and MG literature, tropey works because the audience almost definitely doesn’t have the kind of experience with romance or horror needed to develop a sense that “ugh, this is such an overdone trope.”
So it’s true that “every cliche trope got used for the first time at some point,” but the corresponding fact that “every trope a person percieves as cliche got encountered by them for the first time at some point” doesn’t seem to be getting attention and I think it shapes the way we see genres and tropes a lot more.
There will always be people who will appreciate cliches because there will always be people to whom they aren’t cliches. There’s even some validity to the idea that the people who have read extensively enough in a category to bitterly hate its common tropes are outliers. The vast, vast majority of people don’t read hundreds of books per year, and therefore there’s a sort of volunteer bias going on with reviews of books from Goodreads book bloggers who devote a massive fraction of their lives to reading and reviewing books.
With fairly niche subgenres or just genres that don’t have broad, far-reaching appeal, I feel like it’s way more common to have a plague of what seems like tropey garbage constantly churning out to annoy the “Fandom Olds.” Horror is a good example. I’ve experienced this myself—there’s a post where a bunch of people are like “OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK” in response to a clickhole article where an astronaut is talking about seeing his fellow astronaut trapped outside the airlock begging to be let in while the same fellow astronaut is safely inside, warning him not to let in the doppelgänger. And like, yeah, a pretty fucked up concept—which doesn’t really affect me anymore because the clickhole article was like, the third time I’d seen it used in some online short horror piece. There have been stories in this exact format with some slight variation going around online for a long-ass time. And horror is always going to have this problem by the bucketload because the really (or even moderately) fucked up stuff does not appeal to general audiences, at least not in large quantities or consumed frequently, but dedicated horror fans are going to end up desensitized to all of the common tropes. Which is going to cause problems because the horror that’s the most appealing to general audiences is going to be the exact stuff that seems like insipid tropey garbage to the people who really, really, really love horror.
So now I’m thinking about how literally no one has literally complete knowledge of any given genre or category of book, because it’s like physically impossible to read all the books even in fairly niche categories because there are just so many books in the world. Which means that there are Forbidden Opinions about the cliches and tropes of them all that are literally inaccessible to mankind, but that hypothetically a person who’d somehow read them all would develop. We can extrapolate what those opinions would be, but we don’t know for sure what cliche or originality or uniqueness really is! Because none of us have ever experienced All Of Fantasy!
Like. Everyone’s experience of what a genre is is different, because everyone’s sampled literature differently. So everyone’s understanding of what a unique or original idea is…depends on and is limited by what they happen to have read or not read.
And the people who have read more books and who have been dedicated to the genre they like for 20 years or more aren’t necessarily more correct. Like, yes, they have a broader knowledge of the genre, but from a different point of view, don’t they matter less, since having read, say, 900 fantasy novels since the 1990’s makes them actually kind of an outlier in the category of people who enjoy fantasy?
Don’t mind me, just losing my damned mind over the idea that once you read enough fiction you in one type of way start to lose knowledge rather than gain it because stories literally are the human experience of them and relating to them and eventually you lose the ability to experience books as the vast majority of people do
Being well read gives you a perspective on the craft of story that others don’t have, but at what cost? Most stories are no longer for you, and they no longer have things to say to you in the same urgent, earnest way that they at one point did have. And most readers are not reading the same thing that you are.
Hhhhh
i’ve been reliably and repeatedly told that i can be a drag to watch a certain kind of movie with because i know enough about how stories are constructed to be able to call in advance what’s going to happen, or complain if the movie then goes on to ‘miss’ a beat. no one else was waiting for what i was expecting; no one else was dissatisfied because they could see how the story could be ‘better’. and maybe it wouldn’t be better. it would only be better to me.
i spend most of my free time reading. this makes me really good at at reading books! but really bad at being the kind of person most books are written for.
how come people are always begging game companies to put their games on new platforms so they remain accessible yet when bethesda does this consistently this is disliked?
what makes it “low-effort”? a port is a port. it’s no different from older games being available on Switch and PS4
it’s still being priced at 60? okay yeah that sucks. it should definitely be priced less high by now.
but still, if someone wanted to play, say, Skyrim for the first time, you could get it on any console one might reasonably own. that’s a good thing. comparatively, it’s far harder to play a game like Paper Mario, or any of the older Metal Gears. I appreciate ports.
good porting is like the gameboy zelda games. it was available on the 3ds playstore for $6 each so you could get all 3 for under $20
