Week 6 Lab: TV Tropes

(Image Information: The Beautiful Cast of Buffy, 20 Years Later, Flickr)

Today's TV Trope was What Would X Do? Because Buffy is my hero, I thought of her immediately, however, I tried to put her out of my head. I clicked on the link and started reading about this trope when, what do you know, Buffy was mentioned. Apparently, I am not the only person who often asks themselves "what would Buffy do?". Okay, I don't really have proof of that, but I did read that a character from Supernatural uses this line. Honestly, though, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this phrase; Buffy is the baddest superhero around. Anyway, it turns out, Buffy was a pretty influential show (duh) and contains a lot of tv tropes. The show is also referenced countless times in books, tv, music, everything pop culture, and other creators have definitely been inspired by it. 

It is truly a brilliant show but I did not come here to fangirl about Buffy, despite what it may seem. 

Aside from Buffy stuff, I found quite a few interesting pages. This site is a total wonderland for nerds! I'm very thankful to have been introduced to it. While all of the content on the site was very entertaining for me, I tried to focus on things that I thought would best improve or inspire my writing. Something interesting I stumbled across was The Seven Basic Plots in Literature. A book by Christopher Booker, it contains seven plots that are commonly found in literature. It was a highly interesting read that I suggest everyone check out. I also read about the Emergency Transformation trope in which a dying character is saved by the main character transforming them into something else, something less than fully human. An example of this would be vampires. Reading about vampires led me back to the Buffyverse (it was an accident, I swear) and that got me reading about Plot Armour/Character Shield. This refers to when an important character keeps getting lucky and not dying and it starts to seem unrealistic, or like he has someone watching over him (the writers, perhaps?). However, this trope contrasts with another trope, Anyone Can Die. This trope basically describes shows or books where no character is exempt from death. An example of this would be Game of Thrones since George R.R. Martin seems to have no qualms about killing off important characters. On that happy note, I will be wrapping up this post by saying, "Go check out the website! It's rad!". This was a super fun assignment and I hope my classmates will check out the website if they haven't already.