Dark vs Light

Hi guys,


This trope is not unique to this genre but it is one that is across the fantasy genre. It works simply, there is a big bad guy who is the picture of everything that is evil and all the wrong in the world comes from him. To fight against him, is the paragon of virtue our hero.


What this trope is, is that it makes the character development easy as we watch the bad guy and the hero easy to spot. The hero’s development is pretty simple, and follows a linear path.

Discovery of the evil in the universe.

Discovery that he is, either the on chosen one or the next in a series of people attempting to do away with the bad guy.

As his power grows so does his goodness.

He contends with smaller evils in his friends and turns them into good paragons also.

They defeat the bad guy, though sheer uncompromised goodness.  Jokes aside, the good guys always end up winning, unless the story has multiple books.


The essence of this trope is that the evil is overcome by good, the result is the same it is a good system or government like in Star Trek or a personal battle as in Star Wars.

The flaws in this trope is that there is little room for character development and ambiguity because its clear whose side everyone is already on.

The advantages of this trope is that it allows the audience to know who is the right people to support and love and you can skip character development if your story is more adventure focused.


I know it sounds like the advantages and disadvantages are the same thing but I believe that they are the different sides of the same coin, your strengths can turn into your weakness.


A common way to subvert the trope is to have a character swing from good to bad, much like Marvels Deadpool or have a character change side in the process of the story like Darth Vader. When trying to subvert this trope, it needs to be considered that people might see the character struggling with which side he belongs as the main character. Make sure you give some time to the main character to either struggle with his character development.


Tropes allow us as writers to establish expectations in the audience, if we set up a good verses evil trope then the readers will expect that good will triumph eventually even if it looks like evil has won. It’s what the readers expect. It is possible to write a story in which evil wins, or it was revealed that evil was actually good in the first place, or that they are both evil and just shades of evil or both are good.


Keep writing and keep reading.


Peter.

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Published on July 06, 2018 17:00
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