Of Tropes and Homages

Do you ever sneak little homages to other works into your writing?

What about playing with tropes?

While these can often be subtle, other times they might be blatant.

Almost to the point of parody. When something is done in jest, it usually isn’t infringing intellectual property.

But we should remain careful of these things as we write more and more books.

My Orchestrylus Odyssey series has a mythology behind the world, and part of that mythology involves taking some common mythological tropes from our world and shifting them around. Or even turning common terms from musical fandom into something else in that world.

One example is boots called “Swifties.” In our world, these are rabid fans of Taylor Swift. In the novels, they are winged boots that allow people more dexterity in a combat role, such as that of a symphonist.

The god of death in this world is called the Grim Bassist. Of course, we don’t want to be infringing copyright, so it stays an homage subtly.

What we don’t want to happen is having less originality in favor of homages.

I put some Metal Gear references into Auminous, for example. But they’re so subtle you might not pick them up.

However, if I were to have a group of terrorists hijack an island in an Alaskan archipelago, and there was a special combat unit that wanted a famous soldier’s remains, that would infringe Kojima’s work to the point of asking to get sued.

I believe in paying tribute to amazing works of fiction. But I do not believe in taking plot threads from other works. I suppose sometimes these could be coincidental, such as FFXII and Star Wars.

Where the line blurs a bit is in works of parody, such as Hot Shots! The movie is supposed to spoof Top Gun, thus infringing nothing.

That’s part of the fun of being a writer, though. We can put little nuggets of our biggest influences without losing our creativity.

This is also why there are tropes I love and why some people hate certain tropes. But tropes are necessary to make the stories we want to tell have substance to them when we subvert the tropes.

A wise mentor figure is a trope. Wise mentor figures who are raging alcoholics because they lost their favorite trinket from their dead lover in a gambling game and are on a quest to regain it by playing a fictional card game with other minor characters (that only exists in the story) is the spin.

Things like that make for interesting side plots.

When used correctly, tropes are the gateway to more original stories.

The airship pilot is a trope we’ve seen time and time again. Especially in steampunk.

A cowardly airship pilot who only flies the airship because a magical bomb strapped to his chest will explode if he doesn’t perpetually fly it during certain times of the day, is the spin.

There are many ways to play with our stories. Using tropes and homages is simply a tool in the author’s belt.

Happy writing!