A commonly recurring storytelling pattern, character type, or plot device that audiences recognize across many works.
A trope is a recognizable convention or pattern in storytelling - the chosen one, enemies to lovers, the mentor's death, the training montage. Tropes aren't good or bad on their own. They're the shared vocabulary of narrative, the building blocks readers have internalized from consuming thousands of stories. The word gets thrown around as an insult sometimes, but every story uses tropes. What matters is whether you use them with intention and bring something fresh to the pattern.
Knowing your tropes is like knowing the rules of grammar - you need to understand them before you can break them effectively. When you recognize the tropes in your own writing, you can decide whether to lean into reader expectations, subvert them, or combine familiar patterns in unexpected ways. Trope awareness also helps you identify when your story feels derivative versus when it feels like a fresh take on something familiar.
Uses and lovingly subverts nearly every fairy-tale trope in existence - the damsel, the hero, the villain, the wise man - while remaining genuinely moving.
Characters who are aware of horror tropes and try to use that knowledge to survive, pioneering the 'meta' approach to genre tropes.
Takes the 'chosen one' trope and complicates it by making Katniss a reluctant symbol who is constantly being manipulated by people wielding that trope.
Tropes are tools. The goal isn't to eliminate them but to use them with awareness and bring your own perspective to familiar patterns.
A subversion needs to serve the story. Flipping expectations is only satisfying if the new direction is more interesting than the expected one.
Pick a trope you love (enemies to lovers, the chosen one, found family, etc.) and write a one-page scene that sets up the trope in its most recognizable form. Then rewrite the same scene with one major subversion - change who holds the power, flip the expected outcome, or combine it with a conflicting trope.