Hello, Readers! Clevenger here…. still.

As promised, while still working through letting Graham recover and get better I’m taking on double duty and writing the blogs on both cycles. I’m behind… because life. But, this is part two of the double post day!!!

So, now we are on to subverting tropes, and helping break cliches. But unfortunately, I cannot really talk about our biggest Trope Subversion. And it’s a doozie. The reasons I cannot speak of it are because one, it’s not my trope, it’s Grahams. And two, I don’t want to spoil the surprise!

We do have several other small trope subversions that we laugh about. The Prophecy trope is one that we wanted to subvert pretty heavy. We have an “Oracle” and she gives prophecies… but throughout you learn, they may or may have nothing to do with the plot of the story. Characters are coming and going, and it’s more about “revealing” character traits than setting them on their “destiny.”

So, there are a few “subversions” that we laid out, but I’ll let those be discovered by you as a Reader. (And hopefully, you’ll be reading it soon!) So I’ll talk a bit about “broken” tropes. Tropes that we were very happy to allow to be left on the creative editing floor. And probably my favorite is all the Tropes that could surround Moria. Moria is a character we introduced in Book Two (Shadow’s Reality) that was unexpected, but quickly became one of my favorites to write.

Moria was introduced to me by Graham. He asked a question about whether Symon should/would have a love interest. And from that question, I answered with Moria.

There were so many tropes that I was cognizant of that I purposely avoided. I wanted to break cliches and let her stand on her own. After all, she’s a powerful warrior, a professional soldier, and a psuedo noble. But overall, she’s an independent, fierce, and loyal woman. It would be easy to give her the “Amazon Brigade” trope and force her to decide between her love for Symon or her military career. But it was just as easy to say, no to that trope. She’s a professional solider, just like so many soldiers before her. Marriage, family, are all human qualities. Why should she not be able to be both? So we broke that Trope.

Another common female warrior trope is “No Social Skills.” She’s expected to be a badass and nothing more. We didn’t feel right about that either. The first time you meet Moria, she’s escorting the MCs around the town and conveying history and politics to them. She’s intelligent, graceful, and charming. Again, she’s a noble-like position and trusted by the palace. Of course she’s elegant.

And with that, it would have been easy to fall into the “Distracted by Sexy” Trope, where she uses her feminine qualities to beguile the MCs and position them into trust. But we didn’t want her to have an “agenda” with the MCs. She’s a contact, then an acquaintance, then a friend, and then she and the MC build a relationship. It’s not love at first sight, it’s a gradual, natural process.

What I found is that so many of the tropes surrounding strong female warriors make them one dimensional. They’re not like any women that I know in my real life. So i wanted to take the tropes that would limit her and break them. Much as we broke the boundaries of other elements in our world. Gender, sexuality, and race are descriptive qualities of our characters, but they do not define them. They do not restrict their place in our narrative. I think Moria is my favorite of these examples. (And don’t tell my main character Symon, but I actually like her more than I like him).

Hope you guys stayed with me on this journey about Tropes.

Be Kind.

-Clevenger