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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, it would seem. I am back from the dead. Perhaps the author of my own story was too cowardly to finish me off properly? Haha. This is actually a trope in fiction; the fake death. It is one we actively discussed and plan to avoid. A character’s death, if one dies, has to mean something or we are just messing around with the emotions of the reader and doing them a disservice.

So as Clevenger mentioned last week, there were certain tropes that we knew we could run into but wanted to deliberately avoid. Clevenger mentioned “End of the World”, where the plot was centered around a BBEG planning to wreck all of existence. Too big, too cliche. He mentioned several having to do with female characters, which we avoided because we wanted our females to be three dimensional, not cookie cutter damsels. However, Clevenger mentioned a few others that he didn’t have time to get into, so allow me. A “Moral Event Horizon” means your villains are irredeemably evil, that they have crossed that final line. This is rarely the case in real life, and we wanted a bit more realism in our story. When it comes to the main political and military players, the “good guys” have serious flaws that imply they have just as much to do with problems as the “bad guys”, and when seen from their side, the “bad guys” have some pretty valid points as to what they are doing.

“Forbidden Love” was mentioned as well. This story deals with LGBT relationships, and we deliberately chose to allow our characters to live in a world that was much more understanding than our own current societies. We have trans characters, same sex relationships, prostitution, and poly relationships. In the story, these people are judged by their actions and attitudes, not by their bedroom activities. There was actually one particular scenario, covered in two different scenes, where we went out of our way to show the level of acceptance in same sex relationships.

The last trope Clevenger mentioned us avoiding was Plot Armor. One of the biggest problems with prequels is that there is no real threat to the main characters. You can watch Solo all day long, and you know that Han, Chewie, and Lando are going to walk away without a scratch. There are plenty of book series that are the same way, where you know it is an ongoing series, and the primary characters are protected. That being said, Plot Armor isn’t only about death. In a more realistic story, bad guys can hurt the heroes, heroes can have lingering injuries, and the benefit of having a set length and outline for the story means that there is room for anyone to live or die. But only when there are valid storyline reasons for the death.

I think that is enough for now. Perhaps it is a little shorter than I would have cared for, but that’s okay. Clevenger covered a lot of the big points, and all that was really left at this stage was to expand a bit. There will be much more next time, when we get to the section on tropes we decided to pursue and deliberately subvert. Until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham