When you watch a narrative unfold on the screen, you’re going to see some recurring tropes in action. It’s a fact of fiction – tropes make stories and stories need to use tropes to create tension, drama, and (hopefully) a satisfying ending! And sure, some tropes are overplayed and downright boring by now, but some are fun and enjoyable and keep us coming back for more. Indeed, we’ve listed three such tropes below; these story elements have stood the test of time and still pull in massive audiences to this day.
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The Leads are Total Opposites
We’re often told in real life that ‘opposites attract’, but never is that more true than in fiction. Most commonly found in holiday movies and romantic comedies, when the lead characters are total opposites of each other but can’t help being drawn together, audiences eat the story up every single time!
It’s a good way to fire up chemistry between the characters (and occasionally the lead actors), and it can be very entertaining to watch them clash over the course of the story as they come to understand each other.
It’s a classic conflict that’s fun to see picked apart and unravelled as the narrative marches on, and seeing as human beings can have a thousand different problems with each other, there’s a chance for a fresh take on this trope every single time.
Training Montage
A classic element of the standard martial art film you’ll see in every era of cinema, a training montage takes us from A to B in terms of a character’s progression from amateur to professional.
Training montages are a great way to keep the story moving and maintain a good pace, without losing out on the context of a character’s actions. We get to see the effort involved, usually accompanied by an entertaining musical score, but we don’t have to sit through hours of back and forth to prove that the character has changed and grown.
Genius Detective
We all love a genius detective character, no matter what form they come in. Sherlock Holmes is the classic detective genius – the kind who helps to solve classic crime mysteries in the Victorian era – but characters like Beniot Blanc, who’s more of a modern take on this archetype, fit the bill perfectly as well.
We all love to see puzzles being solved, if only for the satisfaction of having our own theories confirmed, but the intricacy involved in writing these stories has impressed audiences for centuries. It takes a clever writer to truly fool the audience, but when clues are hidden in plain sight from the moment the film began, the watcher gets to put themselves in the genius detective’s shoes. That’s always a nice feeling!
Movie tropes can be fun to identify and pick apart, and they’re always going to be at the core of story writing. The next time you sit down to watch a movie, see if you can spot the tropes at play.
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