Sounds like a female version of Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’. Or I should say, A version of it. No reason the hero’s journey should typically be a male thing.
Interesting theory, but not sure I buy it. What supervillains do you think are directly based on Moriarty?
There’s definitely elements of that, but I think it’s a slightly different and more specific trope. In the Alice/Dorothy trope, there’s generally no father’s (or mother’s) sword, and in fact the Hero doesn’t use weapons at all. Martial valor tends to be conspicuously absent. The older mentor tends to play a minimal role or be entirely absent. The hero tends to return home wiser a bit older, but not as a conquering hero - while they may remain a Hero in the Otherworld, at home they’re still an ordinary girl. And the trope is very specifically about a contemporary girl/young woman from the mundane real world entering a magical Otherworld (the “Hero’s Journey” is often set in its entirety “long ago and far away”, and the Otherworld is often metaphorical).
Also note that Campbell didn’t publish The Hero With a Thousand Faces until 1949, decades after Alice and Dorothy were created, and modern folklorists tend to think claims of a “monomyth” are exaggerated.
Tarzan.
Yes; excellent example.
I mean all the bond villains, which then became their own, almost universal, trope.
Romeo and Juliet. An interesting example because, while you might have a Holmes without a Watson I’m thinking of Columbo,) Romeo and Juliet simply don’t exist without each other.
A LOT of action/cop/spy TV shows lately have the good guys up against “The Brilliant Criminal Mastermind”. After the fifth or sixth one I kiddingly said “We could make a drinking game. Take a shot every time the good guys say ‘He’s been two steps ahead of us every time!’”
Great analysis, but Campbell was writing about a “monomyth” that already existed, however exaggerated it may have been. So Alice / Dorothy may have been part of the myth he wrote about.
But can they be traced to Moriarity? There are plenty of comic book super villains. Is Lex Luther, for example, inspired by Moriarity? Maybe…?
R&J are a great example, there have been plenty of star-crossed lovers from warring families. But, minor quibble with Columbo…yes he was a brilliant detective but he was based on a detective in Fyodor Dosteyevsky’s novel ‘Crime and Punishment’. In both cases they pretended to be dumber than they really were to lull the suspect into a sense of complacency. A trope in itself, but slightly different than the Shelock Holmes trope, in which the detective is actually emotionally or mentally different than the rest of society, but has a savant-like ability to solve crime.
Isn’t that just Pilgrims Progress analysed?
I Married a Witch was based on the novel The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith; he died with it unfinished and it was completed by Norman Matson.
Ok, I’m a little tipsy… watching NCIS:LosAngeles and they JUST said “We’ll never catch her. She’s been outmaneuvering us at every turn, planning for every one of our moves.”
Not even an hour after I posted the above. Another mastermind, another shot of Tullamore DEW.
But I don’t think a trope needs to be directly inspired by the thing that started it. In fact I’d say if is directly inspired by something in another work, that’s allusion or a satire, not a trope. A trope is where something gets so ingrained into the culture it becomes part of the storytelling language. That’s why I’d say Holmes is less of a trope than Moriarty. There are plenty of heroes (particularly in crime dramas) that are obvious Sherlock Holmes tropes but most supervillains are Morarity tropes to some degree IMO.
Though it it that much of a trope? What aspect of Romeo and Juliet has become a standard plotline in modern romances? With the exception of romances that are just R+J set in a different era, which isn’t a trope really. They don’t tend to end in both parties dying. I guess there are a couple of modern romances where the lovers are from opposing sides of some big societal divide but its not so common as to be a trope IMO (and even if they are the general theme is not that they are doomed because of coming from opposing sides, which is the point of R+J).
mostly you see the trope in like street gangs or religions … … i think west side story is more of a trope than anything …
The Flash Gordon serials set the scene for Star Wars and every other space and space battle show.
I’m not so sure. Admittedly that’s not my genre of choice but I can’t think of many examples of that from romantic movies that aren’t (like West Side Story) trying to be a literal version of Romeo and Juliet.
The part of the Romeo & Juilet trope I see a lot is “two young lovers from different backgrounds” or “two young lovers kept apart by their families”. Even if there are fewer sword fights and suicides.
I’ve been thinking more about Alice. Like Dorothy, she stumbles into a series of worlds that are far from her norm. But that’s a description of Gulliver’s Travels, a satire with outrageously outlandish (literally) characters. Alice is sort of a granddaughter to Gulliver. And a sort of grand-niece to Don Quixote, who imagines his worlds. Remember that both Alice and Dorothy are dreaming theirs.
The real trope is the stranger in a strange land. That fits A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Beverly Hillbillies as well as science fiction like Lost in Space (and a novel that doesn’t need mentioning). The notion has ancient roots. Much of the Odyssey fits that description. So does Lucian’s A True Story, which satirized works like the Odyssey.
I wonder if the all-powerful criminal mastermind might owe more to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu than to Moriarty, at least most directly. One thing about Moriarty is that we really don’t see him in action all that much. He shows up in “The Final Problem” for the sole purpose of killing off Holmes, and though we are told that he is “The Napoleon of Crime,” we don’t see it. We only meet him after Holmes has brought down his criminal enterprise, and he’s essentially been defeated. He dies in that story, taking Holmes with him. And as we find out later, he didn’t even manage to do that!
Racist as they are, the Fu Manchu novels actually showed us an evil genius who was constantly three steps ahead of his adversaries. We didn’t just hear about how brilliant he was, we saw him doing stuff: stealing government secrets, killing closely guarded victims with impunity, outwitting his pursuers at every turn. Time and again, our heroes Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie (who bore more than a passing resemblance to Holmes and Watson) would fall into his traps, and find themselves locked in a fiendish death trap from which there was no escape! Until they found one, of course.
There’s probably some line from Moriarty to Fu Manchu, of course. As I say, Rohmer’s heroes were clearly based on Holmes and Watson. But it’s in Rohmer that we see the various Evil Mastermind tropes actually presented, rather than just talked about.
That is really broadening it beyond the ideas of the OP–he didn’t want “detective”, he wanted “detective who is hyper observant but weird and has a sidekick”. In the same vein, I very much do not mean “stranger in a strange land”, I mean “young-to-very-young girl transported alone to weird fantasy land where she has growth-experience adventures along with one or more helpful companions picked up along the way”. If you are going to broaden it to the point of meaninglessness, you might as well say that it is really the trope “person doing stuff”.