I recently got myself into an argument with someone over gender roles in the Lego Movie. My acquaintance was of the opinion that the Lego Movie perpetuates the longstanding problem of not enough females in leading roles. I argued that as a parody, the Lego Movie was required to stick tightly to the tropes it was poking fun of.
But at the center of it, we agreed: women are perpetually under-represented in movies, and this lack of leading females is particularly harmful among the youngest audiences.
This leads directly to the the next issue: is parody even appropriate for the under-ten crowd?
But I’m going to set that discussion aside for now. I am not a writer of humor, so the issue isn’t a pressing one for me as a writer. What is of pressing interest to me are the tropes that lead to reoccurring problems in films and books, such as the perpetual under-representation of women and minority groups in stories for children.
First and foremost, there is the “three amigos” arrangement of characters. It looks like this. A lead male. Think Harry Potter, or Emmett. A female support character, frequently a bit of a killjoy: Hermione, or Wyldstyle. And a male support character, usually providing humor: Ron or Batman - and this character is often a child, animal, or imbecile. If the third character is old enough, then the three typically form a love triangle. Thus the Lego Movie Batman, who was both an idiot and part animal.
This core group is often expanded by the addition of a mentor figure, who drops in to push the plot along and often dies to further the plot - Dumbledore or Vitruvias. And frequently the group is expanded by additional comic or muscle characters, either as a permanent part of the group, an outsider who tags along for a bit, or someone who has defected from the villain’s team.
I recently picked up Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and I was stunned to see this exact arrangement of characters once again trotted out in its mind-numbing predictability, down to the male sidekick being both humorous and part animal, the female support character acting as the group’s dour grown-up, and a mentor (Percy’s mother) who kicks the bucket to move the plot along.
Oh, and the plot. All the usual fantasy plot tropes are there. Percy is the innocent, young, dopey chosen one, who is an outcast character complete with mysterious parentage, a prophesy, magical ability, magic sword, nay-saying goodguy grownups, death and resurrection, scary monsters, and a trip to the land of the gods. There is a quest involving the discovery and transport of a MacGuffin. In the games industry we called that particular trope a “FedEx quest,” but thanks to the Lego Movie I will now always think of it as “put the thing on the thing.” Move over One Ring! Mt. Doom has nothing on the Piece of Resistance going on the Kragle.
After my head finished exploding from seeing these tropes laid out in Lightning Thief like lab specimens, without any apparent self-awareness or self-mockery, I did a quick survey of movies and books in related genres. I wanted to know what stories successfully escape the strangle-hold of these tropes, and how. Is it even possible to write a fantasy or science fiction story without these tropes of character and plot?
Exhibit A: the recent string of dystopian sci-fi with female protagonists: Divergent, Delirium, the Hunger Games, and others. Hooray! We are now seeing females in the lead roles!
The trope is still there, though: a triangle of characters, two boys and a girl in a love triangle, only now the girl is in the lead role.
Well, no, I take that back: in Delirium, there is a triad of characters, but there is no love triangle, and two of the characters are girls.
What else has changed? In the two D books, the main support character, now male, doubles as the mentor! This is an intriguing twist, albeit a little disturbing to have the older mentor also be the love interest. If nothing else, it is refreshing to see the main characters cut loose without any real adult supervision. It is also refreshing, in a sadistic way, to see the love interest kick the bucket.
In all three of these stories, the character structure is a little more open. Aside from the support characters and mentors, the other roles are left largely empty, with characters drifting in to fill the roles only occasionally.
Quest-wise, thank the gods of fiction, there is no put-the-thing-in-on-the-thing objective. No MacGuffin to deliver. Instead of the used-to-death trek to Mordor - all three plots involve an escape.
Given that there are probably a thousand books published for every movie, I see far more variation from these plot and character tropes in books. In the fantasy genre, I can think two examples that have managed to significantly shake up their dependency on tropes: the Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, and Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale. I wouldn’t doubt that the avoidance of tropes has something to do with the fact that these are two of the only fantasy books in recent years to have been chosen as Newbury Honor books.
The Thief has a very typical gang of characters, albeit with no girls tagging along at all. It has a quest. But the twist? The main character is the captive of his mentor and supporters. For most of the story, his team is made up of antagonists. Only at the end is some other menacing personality substituted in as the ultimate villain.
Princess Academy belongs to an entirely different fantasy trope: Cinderella. This entire trope deserves its own essay, but suffice it to say, the protagonist of Princess Academy has a very different idea about what she wants in life, and she’s not about to let a trope get in her way.
As a way to combat the overuse of the three-character group and the quest, we could do worse than to see what writers have done with the Cinderella trope.
What the two Newbury books have in common, and what they share with the dystopian books I mentioned is that the protagonist spends a significant slice of the story alone, or in the company of hostile, indifferent, or otherwise unsupportive companions. Trope characters do appear at times, but their roles overlap, and rarely are they all united and traipsing together across the landscape on their way to Oz.
Much of this brings back memories of a particularly dark and adult sci-fi novel from a couple of decades back: the Real Story, by Stephan R. Donaldson. I recall in the preface of the book, the author spoke of his desire to write a trio of characters who change roles: the kidnapped female victim, who becomes the hero. The hero, who becomes the villain. And the villain, who becomes the victim. I believe it is this sort of focused use of tropes that makes an action story rise above its cookie-cutter brethren, and gives women and minorities more of a chance to be the lead character. While the movie industry may not be ready to think outside of the trope box, as a writer, I certainly should.
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