I was curious about character types who have become so common that the character has become a trope, either as the original character itself or as a thinly-disguised knockoff. I’m fine with keeping definitions loose, but yeah, “stranger in a strange land” is a little too open and general. Also seems like more of a situational trope than a character trope.
Man, I see that trope all the time! I was just watching a show last night where a person was doing stuff.
Meh. First, I continue to disagree with you about Alice being a trope. There are too few examples. Second, I was responding to gdave. Third, he like others had already veered away from the narrow meaning of the OP. (A Hero’s Journey - does it get broader than that?) Broadening happens in around 110% of these threads. I’ve given up trying to fight it.
Yeah, I find that a more interesting question, which is why I addressed it directly in my first post. But Alice is a tiny subset of a much larger and far more important theme and needs to be relegated there and removed from the discussion.
Did I miss a mention of Robinson Crusoe?
Maybe you should leave choosing what should be “removed from the discussion” to the OP or the mods?
The original Dorothy, from the books, was very much not dreaming.
Except that I explicitly pointed out that the Alice/Dorothy trope character (and I personally think Dorothy is closer to the ur-trope in this case) isn’t just someone on a Hero’s Journey. As @Darren_Garrison points out, and I absolutely agree with them, there are a lot of more specific elements to this particular character that has become its own trope.
That seems a lot more specific to me than “The Hero’s Journey” or “Stranger in a Strange Land”, and it gets used a lot, in however many re-tellings and re-imaginings and pastiches of The Wizard of Oz, but also other works, some of which @Darren_Garrison listed, to which I’d also add just off the top of my head, Labyrinth and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, as well as scads of YA fiction.
As with Romeo and Juliet its clearly hugely influential but not particular the origin of many tropes. Other than films (like Castaway) that are just direct remakes of Robinson Crusoe, what plotlines from RC have become common as to become a trope? Ship wrecks (terrestrial or space) are a common plotline but they tend to be groups of people not a single sailor, who then has to survive alone, and that is a The Tempest trope not a RC trope (possibly thats the most widespread Shakespeare trope?).
Neil Gaiman really likes the trope. Along with Mirrormask and Coraline (which I already mentioned) he has done at least one more book that hasn’t had a movie version yet-- Un-Lun-Don.
Robinson Crusoe lent his name to a whole genre, so yeah, I think it has become common enough.
The part that’s debatable is whether it’s the character that is the trope, as opposed to the situation.
I’m making an argument. It was not a command.
I never said or implied that it was. My only reference to the Hero’s Journey was that it was broad.
The 1939 movie Dorothy is dominant in popular culture. And I’d argue gdave’s list of characteristics apply more to the movie Dorothy than the Dorothy of the series of Oz books. Not to mention that books with boy heroes abound with just about every one of those traits, except possibly the fighting skills. And Heinlein wrote several YA books about non-fighters.
Here’s what you actually wrote:
That sure read to me as saying that I had “veered” away from the narrow meaning of the OP by including a prototypical Hero’s Journey character. Is that not what you meant? If it is, then I stand by my contention that Dorothy Gale is a more specific character that has become a trope. If it’s not, what did you mean and why did you bring up the Hero’s Journey?
I may be wrong about the gender component. I personally can’t think of any stories off the top of my head with a boy character that otherwise fulfills the trope, while I could readily think of a half-dozen with girl characters, but of course that’s hardly definitive. What boy examples are there?
I think that’s actually a key element of the trope, that the character doesn’t triumph through violence, but through friendship, as well as cleverness and moral courage.
I’ll admit I’m not terribly familiar with Heinlein’s YA output. Do his boy heroes fulfill the Dorothy trope other than gender?
If there are a significant number of boy characters that otherwise fulfill the trope, then gender clearly isn’t actually a key element of the character trope. But even if that’s the case, I still think the rest of the character and story traits have become a recognizable trope.
I think Moriarty was the first super-villain, but that he was engineered so specifically as a worthy foil to Holmes- sort of an anti-Holmes if you will.
I’d argue that while Moriarty introduced the concept of the super-villain and Fu Manchu fleshed it out some, the contemporary super-villain trope is based squarely on Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Dr. No is basically Fu Manchu rewritten into the Bond universe, but Blofeld is kind of like the archetypical modern supervillain.
Along the same lines, a fictionalized young Thomas Edison became a trope and lent his name to a whole genre:
Although it’s been decades since the trope was particularly popular. Are we only looking for characters who have become current pop culture tropes?
Although not well known today I think the popularity of E E Doc Smith’s Skylark and Lensmen series lead to Flash Gordon and other space heroes.
I was thinking current when I started the thread, but the “Robinsonade” and “Edisonade” genres are interesting and were the first I had heard of them.
Also (as much as I love Flash Gordon) Flash was a knock-off of John Carter and “that Buck Rogers space stuff”.
As a spinoff of Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple became the archetype for the cozy mystery – an amateur sleuth (Holmes was a professional), often an elderly woman, who tracks down murderers. There is very little violence in the stories (even the murders are quick and often bloodless). They often end with a gathering of suspects. The killer, when confronted with the facts of the crime, confesses and goes quietly with the police. Often the detective concentrates on the personality of the killer – the clues only make sense in the context of their personality.
Obviously, Murder She Wrote is based on this, as is Father Brown.
Except that Father Brown (in his literary form) preceded Miss Marple.
Count me in as among those who see that in Dorothy more than in Alice. Alice’s adventures are more of a sequential satire, as Exapno_Mapcase mentioned.
(Which BTW that is one critique I do have of reinterpretations such as Burton’s that try to “give her agency” by turning her into a straight out Fantasy Action Heroine. Sometimes it’s OK to do a story about Everyman (or Everygirl) ending the day shaking their heads at how stupid is the world they find themselves in, not saving it. )
Missed that, but I think Miss Marple is more the ur-text of the trope, since the amateur detective in this trope is usually a woman.