Fantasy has a negative reputation often derived from its seeming reliance on tropes/stereotypes/cliches. You know, the power MacGuffin, the Chosen One, the Dark Lord, and all that.

Well, I have a deep and undying love for tropey fantasy and it deserves better than its reputations describes it. So, my latest project is to take the essential fantasy tropes and use them in a story. Not to subvert, deconstruct, or parody, but play them straight with the goal of breathing some new life into them.

To do that, I need to know which tropes people consider most genre-defining. Which ones do you think?

Could peruse the Fantasy parts of Tvtropes.org.

Just beware the rabbit hole.

Ok this is super cool because I always like the tropes too. Now let's see if I can actually name some, lol.

Honestly, the main thing that comes to mind is something I learned in a writing class: the mythic structure. It's where everything follows a set pattern with specific types of characters. It's super cool and I loved learning about it.

Ok that's all I have. Sorry I'm not more help; my brain is way too tired to think properly haha

True, but there's a million tropes on there, and not organized neatly enough by genre.



Oh, yeah! The Hero's Journey or Campbell's monomyth. That's definitely a good place to start. It'll be what I'm using for my story structure, absolutely.

I've heard of stereotyped races: elves always being tall, dwarves always mining, etc. You could give any fantasy races their most commonly seen characteristics.

The witch that is female, surrounded by dark, and secretive. Common to many philosophies; Yin (China), Shadow (Jung), High Priestess (Tarot).

Her opposite, the male warrior. Yang, Hero, Strength.

Slippery male thief who embodies Shadow.

Amazon warrior who embodies Yang.

Jung is great for this stuff, as is Christian Vogler's "The Writer's Journey". Didn't make it through Campbell's "Hero", he was so off that I didn't want to waste my time.

Addendum: Of course, the entire Tarot is a gold mine of the stuff. Can't say much for it use otherwise.

That is definitely what I'm doing. Not sure those are stereotypes as much as reflecting the Norse and Scandinavian folklore.



Oh, yeah, for sure. Those are good stuff to look into. I'm actually reading Vogler's book right now! Definitely useful and has some good stuff.

Hadn't thought of the tarot decks, but that definitely makes sense! Good start to my analysis of Eliot's Wasteland using its tarot symbolism.

Tall elves I tend to think of as a trope first seen in Tolkien (or at least vanishingly-rarely seen before Lord of the Rings and ubiquitous in fantasy influenced by Tolkien).

I'd definitely advise keeping tarot and other occult symbols at a distance. Story-wise, I can see them seeming harmless enough, but it creates an automatic familiarity for your readers between a story they really enjoy and care about, and subversive disciplines that can easily begin to whisper them toward comfort with and involvement in the occult.

Speaking from experience as a "discerning" reader and artist...

I think it's interesting that reading the Grimm Fairy Tales has a very consistent way of describing witches. I don't know that it's much of a modern trope, but they all tend to have red eyes and very poor eyesight.

I'm not so convinced. The idea of Elves being small is a more recent development compared to older folkore. I've found references to Anglo-Saxon Elves being human-sized.



Something to keep in mind then, I suppose.

Even modern tropes have their roots in older tropes. And my guess is for Grimm, it's from the usual conception of witches being drawn from the women who brewed beer.

My mind instantly jumped to the fact that people with albinism have both poor eyesight because of the extremely low levels of pigmentation in their eyes that make them appear red. I doubt that was what they had in mind, but the consistency on the subject did make it sound like it was grounded in some kind of condition.

Hmm...sorry if I mis-communicated. I wasn't suggesting using the tarot as a tool to tell the future. You might be hard pressed to write a fantasy without the Sun, the Moon, Death, and maybe a Magician. The cards are quantifying tropes we already have, not establishing much of anything new.

Perhaps (though I vaguely recall reading some analysis somewhere years ago about how "elf," "dwarf," "goblin," and/or "gnome" were used as synonyms in some set of tales, and the word "elf" was never used in any version of the Norse myths I read as a child), but in fantasy, from the chivalric romances on (if not before), my sense (from my own admittedly-eclectic reading) is that "elves" most often meant sprites of some kind, until Tolkien, after whom they were most often tall terribly-charismatic immortal people.