: Re: What does it mean to subvert a trope? Recently, I've been seeing a lot of discussions about works that subvert a given trope. I think I have an understanding of what this means (from context)

@Megan928

Vote Up Vote Down

Here's a good example of subverting a trope and then subverting the subversion: in the original Mass Effect game trilogy, one of the alien species you encounter is the asari. Asari are the stereotypical beautiful all-female humanoid alien species that have long been a cliché in science fiction, especially when one of the ones you first encounter on one of the first side-missions is, for all the talking around about it, a glorified prostitute, and soon you find more as strippers at a low-life bar. So that's following the standard hypersexual Green Skinned Alien Space Babe (although they're mostly blue, but you get the idea), just like the portrayals of the Orion women in the original Star Trek.

Okay, now subversion: although you see asari as stereotypical initially, as the games go on, most of the asari you meet subvert that stereotype. Liara is a shy, geeky archeologist and a virgin. You meet asari commandos, who are deadly opponents, and asari politicians and diplomats and business people and scientists, and so on and so forth. The Green Skinned Alien Space Babe trope is subverted and although the player can still encounter asari strippers in bars, that's not what you think of the asari as. Now there's several new tropes in play, one of which is that you shouldn't think of the asari as just sexy aliens who will have sex with anyone of any species.

Then they subvert the subversion: you meet one asari matriarch who complains that young asari spend too much time whoring it up around the galaxy. You meet another asari who is a ruthless crime boss who seized control of a space station by having her subordinates sleep their way into the confidence of her rivals before she took them out. And you find out there's a quirk of asari biology and reproduction that makes it desirable for them to mate outside their species. In short, the stereotypes people have about the asari are somewhat justified, as the asari themselves admit (and some take advantage of).

So there is an example of subverting a trope: the game set up the player to believe the asari were following a standard SF trope, then subverted it, then went and subverted that by justifying the original trope.

Note that the original Green Skinned Alien Space Babes, the Orions, likewise subverted their own trope on Enterprise when it was revealed that the females emitted pheromones that controlled their males and could affect other species. They intentionally played up their role as simple sex objects in order to manipulate others.

(0)

Login to post a comment!