Tropes I Don't Like (Part 3)— Symbol/Object Confusion

Yes, it's Tropes I Don't Like: Another One! In which I whine about media tropes I'm just not a fan of.

Today's trope is symbol/object confusion, or the assumption that a symbol representing an object contains some essence or link to the thing it represents.

I was a little bit hesitant to do a TIDL for this trope because it's everywhere. Speak of the devil. Poke a voodoo doll. I know your true name. Large swaths of sympathetic magic appear in so many places, including urban legends and pseudoscience that IRL people believe in.

Basically, anytime you treat a word, metaphor, simulation, depiction, or other way of referring to or describing a thing as actually being the thing (or at least having some connection to the thing), you are engaging in symbol/object confusion.

Frankly, I hate the idea of symbols having power for much the same reason I hate the idea of emotions having power; using symbols to understand and describe the world is how we work and treating the symbols as connected to, part of, or even identical to the objects is basically imposing our own heads on the world; "that's how I understand the universe, therefore, that's how the universe is!" Our minds link and cross-reference symbols, so we assume the universe cross-references itself as if the entire thing were in our heads. That level of anthropocentric thought borders on the solipsistic, and I won't have any of it in my writing.


René Magritte won't tolerate your symbol/object confusion either.

Tropes I Don't Like (Part 2)— Species Culture

It's not a recurring feature if it never recurs so now it's time for Tropes I Don't Like the second part.

Today's trope is Species Culture, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin— the idea that a species has a culture.

This trope is widespread in sci-fi, fantasy, and especially anything that caters to the furry fandom— basically, anything that has multiple species involved will try to give each of them (except humans) a single culture. Elves are smugly superior lanky blokes who shoot arrows. Lombaxes are really good engineers. Wombats aren't cultural relativists, for extra irony points.

At its most basic, any work that refers to "[species name] religion" or "[species name] art" or law or music or what have you is committing the sin of species culture. However, more egregious examples abound, where a fairly cosmopolitan city inhabited by multiple species will have one culture for each species, and each culture is universal to that species— because obviously, a vahamere who was born in Westmoreland and thoroughly steeped in Westmori culture would have far more in common with a vahamere who was born and raised in The Fells than a mandraga who was born and raised in Westmoreland just one town over.

The worst examples of species culture are generally from works produced by or catered to the furry fandom. By its nature, the furry fandom generally focuses on characters who deliberately affect a small number of stereotyped animal behaviours while otherwise acting completely human, and whose authors are careful to avoid any humanlike characterisation that might overshadow the affected animal behaviours.

Meanwhile, in real life any species that's at least marginally intelligent will have some degree of culture learned from its upbringing that it will pass on to and exchange with those it meets— and the more intelligent and social the species, the more complex its cultures will be. This means that when it comes to this one aspect of behaviour, real animals are actually more humanlike than "anthro" ones so take that furries.

Tropes I Don't Like (Part 1)— The Power Of Love

Today I'm starting a new recurring feature called Tropes I Don't Like. This is not a list of tropes that are bad, and I'm certainly not saying they can't be done extremely well. This is just a list of tropes I don't like, and therefore will not use in my writings.

Today's trope is The Power Of Love, but more generally, the concept of emotions having physical power.

This trope rubs me the wrong way in much the same way that religion rubs me the wrong way— it makes human experience the centerpiece of existence itself, saying, in essence, I feel it, therefore it must be physically potent. It registers strongly in my subjective experience, therefore its power must be objectively strong. What goes on in my head is perfectly reflective of the universe as a whole, therefore something that matters to me must matter to the universe at large. It privileges humanity to a grotesque level, and reduces everything else to a slightly overcomplicated human support system, which shatters my suspension of disbelief and makes me want to send very strongly worded missives to the responsible writers and their mums.

If a writer can pull off a story wherein humanity is objectively the most important thing in the universe without making me cringe, then this trope may slide but otherwise giving physical potency to human emotions is a trope I hate and will never use.

Random Things

Last night, I dreamed I was a werewolf. According to the dream, werewolfness was an autosomal recessive inherited condition, because my dreams like to be specific about those sorts of things. Symptoms typically manifest in mid-teens to mid-20s and include pronounced excitement or anxiety at the prospect of the next full moon followed by turning into a wolf for the duration of any night in which a full moon is in the sky. Exact nature of the symptoms vary, with some werewolves retaining full mental faculties while transforming physically while others act like wolves for the duration of their transformation.

In the dream, I secluded myself in a construction site for my first transformation, and discovered that I transformed physically while remaining mentally human. Except the next morning, I discovered that I'd killed four people who were trespassing in the construction site. After reverting to human the following morning, I was captured and imprisoned by an organisation that hunts werewolves but sued for my freedom on the grounds that being a werewolf isn't actually a criminal offence.

I was actually surprised to discover my subconscious wrote what sounds like a passable story. I don't think I'm actually going to write it though.

Metaphors And Realism: Breaking Bad Redux

Having made a very brief My Media Habits post for the show "Breaking Bad," in which I dismissed it as shite, I subsequently found, on a far more popular blog, a review of the show which praised it for a thorough deconstruction of male power tropes in culture; apparently, in the episodes I couldn't be bothered to watch, Walter White goes on at great length about how he's providing for his family while effectively screwing them over, which starkly parallels the way "family values" is used to justify male power at the expense of everybody, including men.

I don't much care.

One of the first things I learned about writing, when I was still cranking out terrible short stories in secondary school, is that all the metaphors in the world are wasted if the story doesn't make any sense on the surface. You can thoroughly deconstruct, parallel, satirise, or do whatever the hell you want to anything you want, but if, on an entirely concrete literal level, the story is absolute dross, you have failed and the only people who will pretend to like it are literature professors.

So I don't care what metaphors Breaking Bad manages to pack into the later episodes. The basic premise is too unrealistic and I don't buy it, therefore anything built on it is lost.