Cliches that make you squirm

After reading this question, I realized something might not have been super clear in my original post. I didn’t mean to imply I’d seen, like, a ton of racist or sexist stuff in Choice of Games games (or Hosted). I was referring to video games and media in general.

And I was thinking about things like the damsel in distress (mentioned by many above), all the active plot-driving characters being white men, minorities being represented as solely caricatures or stereotypes, women’s bodies used as set decorations, glorification of violence against women and minorities, etc.

I hope that gives some idea. Also include ableism, homophobia, etc. on my list of stuff I’m done seeing.

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While i agree most of those are problematic, and tend to alienate most readers. I don’t necessarily see why everyone seems to take issue with the damsel in distress cliche depending on the context in which it is used. On the one hand if the woman is just some cardboard cut out who needs to be constantly saved by the male hero and has no real personality of her own besides being a generic stereotype that’s clearly a problem (This can apply to the standard Action girls or damsels in distress, it’s not even about gender roles or stereotypes for me it’s just a complete character writing copout)
On the other hand this problem can be offset by doing a few things, first of which make the character your own, make them human, engaging not just some extremely shapely mannequin constantly getting herself in trouble and shrieking for the hero to save her from dragons and evil sorcerers who believe they are entitled to sex with her whereupon he is clearly entitled to sex.
I suppose what i’m getting at is i’m not convinced a damsel in distress should be some kind of taboo after all doesn’t need a little help sometimes, i mean so long as they’re not a useless ball and chain constantly getting kidnapped and such, and even that i’m ok with if it’s not the books standard attitude towards women and is used as a foil to a more human female character.

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I agree with much of this. Many men are wired to protect women, especially women they care about, in real life. It’s just the way things are. It’s not a trope in a story if done correctly. Men are generally physically stronger and more likely to engage in, or risk, physical confrontations.

Now this all assumes that the woman isn’t depicted as a moron who stupidly blunders into danger every chapter. And obviously the reader will care more about the safety and welfare of a kidnapped/ in peril character if she (or he) has been fully developed with strengths and weaknesses.

It can be done but should be done intelligently and with a purpose.

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I think this is the crux of it. If you have a character with agency who is subjective often, with a strong established personality, goals and plans who needs help… they’re only damseled if the way that they need the help undermines the established character.

If you have a smart-but-weak friend of the protagonist who helps out with being smart who is physically overpowered by a bad guy and needs help… that’s reasonable. If the same friend gets outsmarted… that’s more likely a problem. To make a, you know, shallow and reductive example.

The real problem is that this so commonly happens to female characters as opposed to male ones that, together, it sends the message that women aren’t capable, competent people who can get things done. It becomes something not connected to the character as an individual, but connected to the gender of the character. This is also the core problem with a lot of sexist tropes: a thing is happening to this character because she’s a woman, not because it makes sense for her character.

I don’t want to go on at any more length and risk derailing this thread, though. If anyone’s interested in reading more about this stuff, DM me and I’ll dig up some links.

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Now I want to write a scene with a really smart female character getting outsmarted by the villain and needing rescue and see how many people view it as a sexist damsel in distress trope, how many people view it as perfectly acceptable and normal, and how many people view it as an establishment of just how dangerous the villain actually is and a character development moment for the female character who’s never been beaten so soundly before at her own game.

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I am with you in that the fact a clever guy girl falls into a trap is not sexist at all. It makes sense in heroics tales or video games. Bioware has used that in many of their games from Kotor to DAO in places where your hero could be from both sexes. So I can’t get the sexism in that matter.
Also a stupid question what is the meaning of the word cliche in English? In Spanish means something similar to stereotypes.

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Your question is actually spot on, cliche’ in English means almost exactly that but particularly for Overused stereotypes, situations, and phrases.

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Oh, thanks In Spanish doesn’t have that meaning of overused stuff. I could understand better this thread now . I must look like silly for asking that :frowning:

Not really, anyone trying to understand a language better has at some point most likely asked a similar question. For future reference though, if you ever have a question about a word (at least I know they do this for English words) you can go to google and type in “define” + the word you want defined and google should auto populate the definition of that word as the search result as well as that word’s roots and other information about it.

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One of the things that just makes me cringe is when things just happen and theres apparently a book or whatever about it and then its just accepted and passed over like its not a big deal, I’ve recently watch that in a movie, which is just full of clichés.

It’s not so much that clichés are inherently bad, it’s that the more clichéd it is, the more you have to justify it; ground it in character (which is harder to do admittedly in the IF format where many characters have to be written flexibly and scenarios equivocated to save code) or in theme and concept.

You could probably still make “The Chosen One” trope work if your work is deeply grounded in examining the issues of fate/predestination or a deconstruction of myth or a multitude of other themes and angles that I haven’t thought of yet.

@From_Beginnings
It’s not so much that “it was all a dream” is inherently bad, it’s just used to nullify all the stakes pre-existing in the story.

For instance, I think Inception’s ending of ambiguity, “was it all a dream” tone was actually incredibly powerful in a film about the blurring of the lines between reality and imagination and the addictiveness of fantasised worlds.

Yeah, I agree – if you’re using a trope that has degenerated into a cliche through overuse (or unreflective use, just being taken for granted), you need to “earn your cliche.” Inception does that with the “it was all a dream.” Many of Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novels use tropes that verge on cliche… but he tends to invest in exploring/subverting them.

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One could argue that because sexism exists it very well may be happening because she is a woman, not because the woman is inferior but because she is viewed as inferior, as a trophy, or as something to be owned. Because your standard fantasy setting (how’s that phrase for irony lol) seems to take a high level influence from feudal Europe in which women were pretty much considered property

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I’m not sure whether female competency is really the issue here? I’d say that a cardboard cutout girl-who-kicks-ass-anytime-anywhere is nearly as bad, if not just as bad, as a cardboard cutout damsel-in-distress. I’d even say that a well-developed damsel in distress is better than a shallow “action chick”. They’re both bad in terms of character writing anyway, and the first sends the message that females are merely out there to kick ass and look hot without actually giving them human aspirations. They’re turned into more competent objects-of-desire that can do high kicks in high heels, but they’re still objectified.

E.g. that other spy chick from the relatively recent movie Kingsman, I’d say has little character agency at all, though I guess they sort of managed to shoehorn in a weak “overcoming fear of heights” arc, which is better than others.

Which is not to say I have anything against well-rounded action chicks, or high heels or kicking ass, just that they’re “feminist” frills without meaning if the character herself has no narrative agency, goal, or meaning.

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Seriously, y’all, this is not a thread (exclusively) about feminism or representation of women in media. If y’all want to talk about that, I’m happy to, but we can start another thread or DM me. People are also projecting a lot of stuff onto my words that I didn’t say or assert. This is not the place for it. This is becoming seriously derailing from the original topic.

i agree,the recent comments have gone way off topic.

That’s actually a really reductive (and inaccurate) view of women in medieval European society. In a time and place where every pair of able hands was needed, women worked alongside men in labour-intensive jobs like farming, as well as skilled crafting jobs (there was even a specific type of armourer’s mark to show that a piece of armour had not been made by a particular armourer, but his widow).

Of course, when we start talking about noble women, born to great power and privilege, we start seeing women who not only leveraged their marriages to garner great political power (Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, Isabella of Castille and Anne Boleyn) but were able to use the resources of their absent or dead husbands to great effect in times of war and crisis (Katharine of Aragon, J’eanne de Clisson).

Which, incidentally brings me to one of my pet peeves: using a commonly accepted “grade school” version of history as basis for your setting, and saying something to the effect of “this actually happened”, or “this was the way things were” when no, they really weren’t. Women as non-entities in Medieval Europe serves as a good example, same thing with say, black people in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (General Ganibal, Alexander Pushkin’s grandfather, and mentor to the great Field Marshal Suvorov is a fantastic example of a prominent black figure in 18th century Europe). There’s a certain version of history which we’re taught as children, which is easy to teach, correct within very broad boundaries, but ultimately leads to a very flawed interpretation of the societies and people who came before us.

It’s that sort of interpretation that builds what we now see as “standard western european medieval fantasy” or the national myth which the American rendition of their war of independence has become, and the sort of thing that results is the sort of shoddy, overused framework which sets my teeth on edge.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

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Right but that is kind of irrelevant in this discussion. The truth about what people are borrowing from does not reflect itself in the work. What does is their interpretations of what they borrow from. obviously the most prevalent in this context (as you said yourself) is the “grade school version”

On the contrary: imperfect understanding leads to imperfect interpretations. One of the most egregious examples I can think are, for example, settings where full plate armour is commonplace, but the weapons and tactics which render it necessary (massed longbows, crossbows, and handguns) aren’t. From the idea that it was the gun that ended the age of the knight in shining armour comes the ludicrous convention of “no guns in my fantasy setting”, even when gunpowder weapons co-existed with, and pre-dated some of the weapons and armour which those same authors include as due course, and non-military (or even non-small arms) applications of technology that required the widespread use of gunpowder weaponry to develop are made widespread.

The end result of such an imperfect understanding is a setting that doesn’t make sense, and not in the way which fantasy isn’t supposed to make sense, but in terms of internal consistency: setting feature A directly contradicts setting feature B, and that’s bad, especially to people who are trained to look at history as trends and chains of causation, as opposed to dates and singular events.

The only way that gets worse is when that imperfect understanding is applied to non-western cultures, especially by western authors. What is academically referred to as “Orientalism” or “Cultural Appropriation” can often more commonly be described as “not doing the bloody research”: creating cultures and cultural analogues of real-life cultures with an imperfect understanding of what those cultures were, usually using western folkloric interpretations of those cultures with roots past colonialist interactions. That is a terrible thing to do, even by accident, and underpins a lot of the subtly racist tropes we see in fantasy.

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Again i agree completely, but also again is doesn’t really contradict my original point, if anything it supports it