Photo by SLAYTINA from Pexels

Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

We are continuing our discussion on tropes. This time we really get to have some fun, and talk about some of the amazing tropes that we built our story around. Or perhaps I should say, the photographic negatives of tropes that we adopted. When we first started developing our core story, we had certain ground rules we put in place, one of the biggest being that we wanted grey, rather than black and white. This didn’t mean we wanted anti-heroes, more that we wanted flawed protagonists and sympathetic antagonists. In fact, when the story is viewed from the POV of the “enemy”, there is a strong argument to be made that they are the protagonists our heroes should be helping.

In fact, that is another thing that we flipped on its head: we did a lot of work to make the innocent-looking to be dangerous, and to take the teeth out of what would stereotypically be “evil”. We really want to make the reader take each situation and learn what it really is, rather than make assumptions about scenarios based on tradition and trope. In a similar vein, we tossed out the whole concept of certain races being inherently good or evil, to the point that one of our main characters is a Goblin.

And speaking of fantasy races, I always have a chuckle when I see a fantasy novel where they have Elves, Dwarves, and maybe a few other races, yet it seems like other than the token inclusions, everyone is still Human. Our world has nearly 50 different sentient races. Therefore whenever we added a character, whether main or background, we asked ourselves if there was a reason they needed to be Human. If there was not a compelling reason, we pulled out our list of races and got creative. And yes, we have an actual list of all the different races. Remember, originally Sainan was going to be a tabletop roleplaying sourcebook, so we were writing out details for other people to read through.

There were other tropes that we subverted, or at least deflected. For example, prophesy. The whole argument of prophecies vs free will always frustrates and annoys me, even though I can see why, from an author’s perspective, prophecy is so easy to fall back on. So we played with it, but flipped it around where it is more like advice, and the more annoying you are to the Oracle, the more misleading they make it for the questioner. It made it a fun little tool to play with. There are others we subverted, but discussing them in any kind of detail would really put a damper on some pretty significant plot points. Suffice it to say, we thought long and hard about tropes, and especially twists, and we did our best to be creative. I suppose we will have to let you read the books for yourself, and then you can judge whether we succeeded.

It seems like Clevenger was right, and it is kind of difficult to dance around our trope subversion without giving away spoilers. Hopefully we should have book one, Manticore’s Shadow, out by the end of 2022, and you can see how we did. Until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham

P.S. Hello, Readers! Clevenger here… sneaking in. Graham has an excellent point on our races and the work we needed to do to lay out Trope diversion. Our collective races really allow the reader to discard the stereotypes and evaluate the character by their attitude and actions.