A bit of rant here, to take or leave.
There are a lot of ways to take a shortcut past thinking and into talking and for what at least seems to be a majority of people talking about books (and movies, etc.) the quickest and easiest thinking bypass is the process of reducing a work of art to a series of “tropes.”
There aren’t a lot of words I truly hate but this is one of them, at least in the context in which it’s become popularized. And you know what I mean.
There are two things that are terrible about this process of reduction into tropes and that is that it diminishes books and the authors who write them, and it diminishes readers. It diminishes us by forming boxes into which we place art and artists and people who experience art.
Let’s really not do that. In fact, whole generations of artists have worked diligently and creatively to break that conservative and reductive view of art even though it does make the creation and appreciation of art a little more difficult. That I understand. In “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art ,” William Deresiewicz wrote:
Art is for equipping us for modern life. Art became modern when artists ceased to work within traditions and embraced the imperative to invent their own. Art became difficult. Reading a poem, standing before a canvas, we no longer know what to think, because we have lost the conventions that would once have done our thinking for us. New demands are placed on us for comprehension and judgment. But such is modern life in all its aspects: a ceaseless cognitive and moral challenge, an attempt to keep our feet, and heads, on ever-shifting ground. Art tunes us for the task.
Art—and yes, once again, fantasy and science fiction novels are a form of art—does make demands on us, and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean we need to wrestle it to the ground. It means we have to exalt it, let it lift us, and fly around the infinite universe of creativity on its wings.
But how to express that on TikTok? That’s hard—it’s a work of art in itself. I can understand the urge to corral that experience into something that can be dissected and explained in some kind pseudoscientific way, even as I rail against. This is the origin of the “trope.” It’s become a way of pretending to sound smart. And I understand the desire to do that, the pressure the social media landscape puts on all of us. We can’t just like or dislike something, we have to review it, deconstruct it, defend our opinions like some kind of jailhouse lawyer building cases for why we’re right and the other person is wrong.
Can I be the one to remind you that this is not even a little bit necessary? I don’t know, but I’m just going to take on that role this week whether y’all like it or not.
To wit, I hereby grant all and sundry permission to like or dislike any work of art for any reason entirely personal and idiosyncratic and absolve you all from the need to defend that in the court of social media opinion.
You do not have to prove you’ve “close read” a book by identifying the enemies-to-lovers trope. And if you like that trope, I further absolve you from having to feel as though you can now only read books that somehow or another employ that trope—or that other people have said employ that trope—and grant you permission to read whatever the hell you like for whatever reasons including no reason at all. You are allowed to read said books without having to list the various tropes employed within nor share that list with other people who are either defending or attacking that or any other tropes.
Tropes are nonsense and will, under my new ruling, be disallowed from public discourse across all platforms and for all time.
This like all other edicts coming form me carry not the slightest shred of legal or religious standing and can be ignored, revised, or adhered to at the pleasure of anyone who hears it with no fear of reprisal, just as I stated it with no fear of reprisal because I hereby absolve myself of the responsibility of defending my anti-trope stance to anyone who should choose to defend the pro-trope cause.
So says I.
—Philip Athans
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
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