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#Bad tropes
futurebird · 2 years
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The Queen is Dead!
There is this tiresome old trope in any science fiction that deals with ants, (or aliens that are stand-ins for ants or termites or bees or any other eusocial insect,) where the queen dies and then, suddenly none of the workers can function anymore. The workers in this theory of what a "hive mind" is are all just automata that extend the body of the queen. This is, of course, totally backwards. It's the death of human queens that leaves their subjects disoriented. We misperceive the order and smooth functioning of eusocial colonies for authoritarianism. No society could function so well without a tyrant, a single central mind, we assume. A great man or woman who drives their history must exist. This is all human mythology applied to the alien world of ants. What happens when the queen dies? Well let me tell you, because I've seen it happen... sadly. Queens are the longest lived members of ant colonies. So, naturally if you keep ants, you grow attached to the queen. And it's true that without her the colony has no future in the long run for most species of ants (there are exceptions, who can gain new queens, or who have multiple queens... but most ant colony have but one) So, when the queen dies it's sad. But, when she dies the workers ... keep going. You see the advantage of a "hive mind" isn't that there is one central node doing all the thinking, no, the colony is a distributed organism. And when the queen dies it's like menopause for a human body. There will be no new children. (though all eggs and larvae alive when the queen dies will be raised fully.) The ants without a queen continue to care for each other, continue to grow their fungus gardens, or heard aphids, they keep storing seeds and feeding the young. With time, the last of the eggs and brood are raised to be adults. The nest is cleaned and tidy, everyone is fed, with all these tasks done the ants huddle together to conserve energy. They will keep tending the nest and eating when they need to... possibly for years. Menopause isn't the end of an individual life, it's just the closing of a particular door.
I do think ant colonies like this, like my own queen-less colony can seem a little sad. Eggs and larvae and pupae are such joys for ants. They lavish food and attention on their little sisters. No more little sisters means a less active colony, it's like winter has set in permanently. But ants live through winters. Sometimes many winters. If you give a colony in this state brood from another queen they will raise them with great excitement. But there is no peaceful way to move the workers to a colony with a living queen.
This situation happens rarely in the wild. There are so many other things that can kill a colony long before a queen lives so long that she dies of old age. In the wild there are also parasitic species of ants that look for colonies without a queen, or with a queen that is weak and easy to kill. These sneaky queen ants will "steal" a colony. Though, from the perspective of ants without a queen, this is almost a mercy. But, there is none of this... everyone falling over and dying or everyone going crazy you see in stories about hives. The queen is just one part of the colony... a critical part... but still only a part. And each individual ant still has her own life to live.
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batrogers · 1 month
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Civilized Or Not
So there’s some common Zelda fanon I wanna talk about, relating to civilization tropes I think some of y’all haven’t really thought about in detail before, and that’s Hyrule (Zelda 1 &2 Link), Wild (BOTW mostly), and Ravio (LbW).
I’m using the Linked Universe names, because that’s where most of it comes up, because these things happen most often where you can contrast the boys with each other. This is often done, quick and dirty, by people assigning “roles” to each without much thought. Ravio’s unfortunately tends to be extremely pervasive outside LU spaces, too.
But, in brief, there is a trend for people to craft these characters in a framework of innocent vs savagery vs trickery that can have some really unfortunate implications I’m not sure many are even aware of. Hopefully I can explain better where these ideas come from, why they’re so easy and appealing, and why we should try to avoid repeating them for more than just the sake of “easy” but also to stop repeating some really nasty historical tropes.
I would start from what’s probably the simplest one to address: the tendency towards a “feral” personification of Wild. This tends to come from two places: Wild’s amnesia, and the collapse of society around him and his lost place in it.
Now, brain damage is complicated. You can lose a range of things to any given injury because of the way information is encoded differently and in different places. You can lose memory and/or skills and/or coordination and/or balance, etc, because it all depends on what got damaged. But in-game a lot of stuff suggests that Link retains things like speech, reading/writing, coordination, and martial skills. None of the people who knew Link prior to his injury suggest he seems changed in any way not attributed to stress and anxiety...
And, more importantly, real people suffer memory loss just like that in the real world. Treating him like he’s become “feral” due to memory loss is cruel to actual people living with brain damage today, and if you go there you should have a good reason for it.
Social collapse is a wide-spread theme in basically every Zelda game. The threat that the Big Bad poses is almost always the destruction of society as it exists: Malladus literally vanishes the infrastructure of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks; the Twilight turns people into spirits living lives they don’t realize are questionably real in Twilight Princess; Veran freezes the passage of time to force people to work forever in Oracle of Ages. King Daphnes and Ganondorf under the sea vie over the fate of the world above in Wind Waker: keep what’s been made, or start all over again?
In modern culture, people tell a lot of stories about the fragility of civilization and what happens in its absence. You get the range from Lord of the Flies, in which children wrecked on an island attempt (and fail) to recreate civilization on their own, Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” in which Mowgli is treated as reckless and innocent, and a much more obscure piece from the 18th century “Paul et Virginie” (and likely many more I don’t know offhand.) Essentially all of them play with the question of how do people become civilized, and what happens when they do? In Lord of the Flies, the children were civilized and failed to maintain it; in the Jungle Book, the boy wasn’t civilized and innocently interacts with it. In Paul et Virginie, the children were (relatively) uncivilized on the (French colonized) Mauritius, raised by their mothers but when the girl was sent away, she becomes civilized and dies tragically to preserve it.
The two Links most removed from civilization are Hyrule and Wild. Wild “lost” civilization, losing both his memories of it and the structure of it. Making him feral, without manners, and without a place to belong is that kind of Lord of the Flies savagery mixed with Mowgli’s innocent playfulness: there isn’t a structure to adhere to, so he’s a savage. Whereas Hyrule is more like the Paul eg Virginie side: innocent of civilization, he remains pure and sweet and kind, unable to conceive of big concepts like evil or money or so on. Neither position permits them to interact with the civilization that is right there in front of them! Wild can buy a house; he has people who know and care for him. He has social connections and social rights. The world exists, but the fandom does not seem to want him to interact with it in favour of remaining “wild.” In Zelda 2 – a game explicitly set within a decade of Zelda 1 – there are whole towns with trade and a castle and massive structures with on-going life in them... but very few fans seem to ever reach into that story or relate it back to the first. Hyrule, the character, does not exist within Hyrule, the country.
Strangely, Wind Waker does not fall prey to this, I think because the structures are presented as fait accompli: Link wakes up with his grandmother and his sister, he has a defined home, and a society in which you spend the entire game forced to engage with. Zelda 1 & 2 were not sophisticated enough to waste resources on going as in depth in social terms (although such interactions absolutely exist in Zelda 2!) and BOTW leaves such interactions as optional: you can survive the game with minimal social contact... but it’s a choice to play with it that way, not the default. The ways in which this edges onto the noble savage trope, in which “uncivilized” tribes are either innocent or brutish (rather than complex social systems in their own right) is fairly obvious.
There is one other character in Zelda who gets treated to the question of whether he is an innocent, free of civilization and all its rigour... or something else. Ravio, coming from the devastated world of Lorule, can often wind up slotted into the scared, innocent child trope and unfortunately that’s the better position people frequently take. The worse one evokes the Merchant of Venice: the deceitful, Jewish merchant who values money over people’s lives.
Lorule (and Nintedo’s approach towards their humanoid Zelda villains in general) is near-eastern-coded in many ways, down to the fact that Yuga’s outfit is the spitting image of Ottoman dress. Yuga being a depraved bisexual (a common historical trope about Muslim men towards Christian men and boys), and Hilda being deceitful and conspiring against everyone she was once allied to are a backdrop to the ways in which Ravio is a greedy coward. He’s not an evil character in the game; the mechanic of penalizing death without being too severe is interesting and works well! But that doesn’t take away the stereotype, just like it’s not okay Nabooru is pretty explicitly predatory towards child Link in Ocarina of Time, too.
Arab and Jewish stereotypes often converge, because both people's originate from the same region, and both are hostile "Others" to Christian Europe and Nintendo doesn’t have a great track record of their near-Eastern coding in Zelda. It crosses the whole gamut from harem and amazon tropes with the Gerudo to breath-takingly anti-semitic or anti-black (Ganondorf being green, eg. non-human, in various incarnations), all packaged neatly in the ideal of medieval fantasy Europe. The scale would be impressive if it wasn’t so damn awful, but we can at least stop repeating it in our fanworks.
Wild doesn’t have to be feral to be a playful little shit; Hyrule doesn’t have to be pure and innocent to be kind. Ravio doesn’t need to be innocent or scheming, and he shouldn’t place money over Link’s well-being (If you chose to respawn at home, he is consistently only ever concerned for Link! Once you buy the items outright, he promises he'll still be there to take care of you.)
Do better. It’s more interesting that way, and I want to see that variety grow!
[If any of y'all would like me to dig up better sources on any point, I can do so but I didn't want to bog this post down further. I have largely left the anti-arab stuff alone because it's not the biggest issue with Ravio's fanon presence, which is the focus here.]
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itneedsmoregays · 6 months
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Shin Hati: Only scenes with Sabine involve running her through with a lightsaber, trying to kill her and taking her hostage.
Star Wars fans: aWwW tHeY iN lOvE
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coolishfoolishness · 8 months
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Fuck the "humans, when removed from society, become evil monsters because humans are inherently evil" trope. I want the "actually, society is what makes people evil and we'd be better off without it" trope. I want a story in which, when civilization falls, humans realize that tribalism, gender norms, conformity, government, and the economy are all harmful to humanity, and people live happier and healthier lives without them.
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fantasci-side-blog · 1 year
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Since I know a popular trope in fantasy and royalty stuff is marriage, both forced and arranged
Here's the difference between arranged and forced marriages copied from another post I wrote
No hate if you use the trope, just make sure you're using the right terms and aren't putting your culture on a pedestal while putting others down
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If a marriage is forced then it can't be called arranged, even if it's arranged for one, as a matter of principle and definition since arranged means they both agree. If either one doesn't agree, it's not arranged it's forced.
And arranged marriages are the norm in most of the world, most of which are healthy (most arranged marriages are perfectly healthy and the people involved are perfectly okay with it).
It's not that arranged marriages have more instances of unhealthy over love marriages — like you haven't heard of abusive boyfriends/girlfriends or otherwise significant others in Western culture — in fact, since arranged marriages mean that both person's families researched their potential spouse AND their family AND personal history, AND you find them more via word-of-mouth, arranged marriages seem to be the safer bet.
(of course, your family and friends can research your SO you're in love with too. But if you're like "I don't care about their past! They've changed!" that's, well, I hope the best for you.)
Arranged marriages can also have a period of getting to know the other person before making it official, and the engagement period can be as long as they want — I'm talking multiple years — where the couple interact and invite each other places, on dates, or just outings with family or friends, but it's all chill. Or just message each other on your phone.
You can even do the thing where you, like, ask your fiance to drop and pick you and your friends from places and stuff without anyone batting an eye (they're part of the family, your friend group (your social circle) etc now!).
Arranged marriages can (and most are) healthy; please don't confuse them with forced marriages which are (ideally) a crime both religion- and legal-wise.
Just wanted to clarify because someone once told me people confuse all arranged marriages as forced and think of the cultures where this is a norm as backward or in an otherwise bad light.
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checkoutmybookshelf · 11 months
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Uhhhhhh...Did Queen Charlotte just do a stealth version of the bury your gays trope? Because quite literally, where the heck did Reynolds go in...I believe it's 1815ish? Because he was there in the eighteenth century but Brimsley dancing alone suggests that he died somewhere offscreen in the intervening time
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memento-mariii · 11 months
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Speaking of the fae, what gets me about those "dark fae romances" that seem to be so "in" right now is that they don't do anything interesting with the fae lore. Like. Why even call your MC a fae if he never speaks in riddles and can just straight up lie all the time. Why call him a fae and make him impervious to cold iron.
Look. I know that "fae lore" is actually just a disjointed and often self-contradicting collection of completely individual folk tales and mythologies and that no such thing as the Definitive Fae Lore™️ exists, but c'mon. At that point he's just a guy with pointy ears. He's a tolkien elf with an attitude problem. You're allowed to write a yandere legolas fic if you want to write a yandere legolas fic.
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thediamondarcher · 4 months
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What writing trope do you just despise? (mine is forced amnesia to force discourse between main characters. It shows that the author didn't know what to do to make conflict)
yours is so real tbh. mine would probably be that type of romance books where one of them is clearly manipulative and that character is constantly being victimized (especially when the other character who's being manipulated is mentally ill, that's why i think heartstopper is a great example of a relationship where one of them is struggling with a mental disorder). the whole "love is blind" thing doesn't exist, if love is making you not see those bad things it isn't love, it's abuse (as an example i can say Effy and Freddie from skins)
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gwaindrifter · 8 months
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You know what trope I'm sick of?( though I'm actually not sure how prevalent it is anymore) the clearly autistic-coded character being tested for autism and then being told it's inconclusive or otherwise denying that it's autism. Like they did this with House, Girl Meets World, and so many others. It's like hey we're going to do this special episode where you think the character you've related to for so long is actually going to be confirmed as representation, and then they pull it out from under you. It's frustrating.
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adogwithadhd · 6 months
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Any movie with some countdown/deadline/ticking bomb should be held to justice if the time on the clock does not match the real runtime of the segment.
AND DEFUSING A BOMB IS NOT THE TIME TO START AN ARGUMENT > YOU SHOULD EXPLODE
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kid-az · 6 months
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Female on male double standards abuse my beloathed 🖕😀🖕
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lexr86 · 7 months
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Watching trashy TV...
And thinking about one of the bad tropes that drives me mad.
Person A is potentially going to die. They know it and they ask B to tell C that they love them, were thinking of them, etc, etc. But before A can tell B the full message, B cuts them off with a "Don't worry, you'll tell them yourself!"
Now, I get that the message here is that B is trying to reassure A that they'll survive. B has faith that everything will be ok and A won't die. But B doesn't know that for certain! And now they've just robbed A of the comfort that, in the worst case scenario, their message will be passed on. And they've potentially robbed C of their last message from A.
All because the writer(s) couldn't be bothered to write something other than this trope. Argh! Pisses me off every time I see it. 😡
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outlawssweetheart · 8 days
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Irritating fanfiction trope: Borderline vilifying (or straight-up vilifying) a character for being angry about something they have every right and reason to be angry about.
This happens in canons, too (looking at you, Strangers Things 4 and Avengers: AOU), and fandoms do this all the time with canon (looking at you, Jason Carver haters and Maximoff haters), but it is especially prominent in fanfiction. 🙄
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cepheusgalaxy · 21 days
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Worst Isekai tropes, drop
me first:
when the MC Guy, instead of dismanlting the slavery system in thei Fantasy World, buys a slave (*looking specially mad at tate no yuusha and mushoku tensei*).
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coolishfoolishness · 8 months
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Y'know I kinda hate the trope of "the protagonist/hero has to suppress their emotions/desires in order to unlock their full potential or whatever." Like, nothing about that is healthy or realistic. Also, how is someone supposed to be a hero if they don't care about anything? How the hell is not falling in love or having any sort of relationship with other people supposed to make someone more heroic? If I was forced to suppress my feelings all the time I would become a villain! I just don't get it!
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candiedbooks · 1 month
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You know what horror trope I hate? When characters who have nothing to do with this shit are the ones who get murdered, but the main characters who are the reason for the villain's motive all survive.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Scream movies. 🙄
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