Haven’t I seen this plot before?
One website that I always get way too much enjoyment out of researching examines the ideas behind some of the most popular works of fiction and takes them apart.
The site tvtropes.org is a wormhole you can get easily sucked into.
Hitting the ‘Random Trope’ button is a sure way to kill an afternoon. “Cursed with Awesome” is a good place to start.
If your work of fiction has a character with special powers saying any variation of the phrase “I just want to be normal”, you’ll need to get that character in line. Everyone with special powers, from Spider-Man to Arrow to Supergirl to the Big Bang Theory’s Leonard to Buffy the Vampire Slayer all has long story arcs about them just wanting to be normal. You want to yell through your television that “You guys wouldn’t have a show if you were normal because normal people like us don’t sell DVDs and action figures!”
And Batman? Please. I consider myself a fan of Batman but my goodness for an ultra rich guy with his own assortment of vehicles and toys, he sure does complain about wanting revenge a lot.
It’s the same in any movie. And the Clark Kent character on Smallville is worse. My goodness, dude, you’re Superman. Stop whining about it.
TV Tropes presents the idea that everything you’ve seen on television, theatre, films, comic books and other fiction has already been presented before, to the point where just about every idea you’ve thought of as a brilliant and original thing is suddenly reduced to a plot used countless times in other forms of entertainment. Sometimes it’s a mildly depressing look at our entertainment but it’s also important to realize that maybe that brilliant idea isn’t so brilliant after all.
Once you recognize tropes, you can’t unsee them. If you see someone coughing blood into a handkerchief and telling you they’re alright, you can be sure that they’ll be dead in less than 10 minutes of show time. If you see a villain making a “Brand New Era” type of speech broadcast over all public forms of communication, you know things are very soon going to go horribly wrong by the end.
Cat people, for example, are all over science fiction, from Babylon 5, to the many different kinds of cat people on Doctor Who, Grimm and Red Dwarf.
It’s rare to have an overweight person in animated television or live action TV and movies who isn’t portrayed as a blundering idiot. From Fred Flintstone of yesteryear to Hurley from Lost, Chumlee from (the partly fictional) Pawn Stars, Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies, Homer Simpson, Cleveland Jr. and Peter Griffin from Family Guy and Cartman on South Park, being overweight and a complete blundering fool is an easy and all-too common way for comic relief.
Have a racist grandparent in your work of fiction? Sadly it’s been done before. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall had one, Randall’s grandmother in Clerk’s II, an unknown woman in Blazing Saddles, there are a couple of them each in Parks and Recreation and Community (I always got those shows confused and thought for years they were the same show), and of course, Sophia Petrillo in the Golden Girls (sometimes).
Finally, one of my favourite frequently used plotlines is having a smart person play chess, sometimes a few games at the same time, to show the audience exactly how smart they are. Professor X and Magneto from the X-Men film series play chess, R2D2 and Chewbacca play a Star Wars-y version of it and Spock plays a three-dimensional version of it on Star Trek IV: A Voyage Home and a few episodes of the original TV series.
That 3D chess is also used in Star Trek: The Next Generation and 3D Go is used in Andromeda. The chess has even crossed over into other fictional universes. Sheldon and Leonard in The Big Bang Theory played it, for goodness sake.
The Avengers play the regular version of chess in their 1998 movie, it’s in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, it’s in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, one of Alan Turing’s team on The Imitation Game is a chess champion and HAL plays it in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Basically, if your ultragenius character doesn’t have a solid background in chess it’s apparently like a big red flag that they might not be that smart.
Before unleashing your work of creative fiction on the world, it might be worth going through these commonly used plots or characters to see exactly how you can make it better, or, at least different.
