The word 'trope' has many meanings, but the one that is most relevant here is defined as "a significant or recurrent theme, a motif" which in this case can be used to describe recurring narrative structures. I've mentioned a website before called TV Tropes which is essentially an encyclopaedia of tropes detailing their history, their structure and characteristics, and listing works that incorporate that trope such as TV Shows, Music, Games, and Movies amongst others.
One of my favourite tropes is the 'Four-Temperament Ensemble' not in terms of its application but simply because of its ubiquity which makes it a prime example of the prevalence of recurring narrative tropes. There are a number of examples listed at the bottom of the article linked above. I won't go into details of the actual trope here as it's not relevant, you can click through and explore it for yourself if you have never heard of it before.
What this trope demonstrates however, through its ubiquity, is the fact that most forms of entertainment are derivative or they can at least be considered somewhat generic. In this case you can single out situational comedy (sitcom) TV shows and see that essentially the same story is retold countless times but with different characters and different settings - all sitcoms are essentially chicken soup, you can flavour it in many different ways, and incorporate many different ingredients, and try and add variety, but at the end of the day it is still chicken soup you are serving. Go beyond this and you can even argue that most scripted TV shows in general are essentially regurgitating story-lines, taking the leftover soup of previous shows and reheating it to see how much more you can get out of it.
The longer you've been around or the more you have consumed, the more apparent this becomes, if a hotel only serves chicken soup and you stay a few days you probably won't notice the limitation, but the longer you stay the more likely you will be to get bored of being served the same thing. I've written about the limitations of creativity before and how each person's experience of life is not as unique as they would like to think. In many ways these tropes demonstrate that not only are writers of these shows aware of the reality of this limitation, they actively reinforce it, like someone else coming along and opening another hotel the first thing they get their chefs to cook up is chicken soup. There are rarely TV shows that push the boundaries and go beyond what is known, and what is safe, and venture into completely uncharted territory.
This holds true across many different forms of entertainment. The games industry is another prime example of the limitation of creativity and the reuse of existing narrative tropes. There are even games like The Stanley Parable that take this concept to the extreme and break the fourth wall and tell the player directly, that yes, they're fully aware of this regurgitation so why not turn that in and of itself into a game? The Stanley Parable did this quite well, perhaps because it was so unapologetic and actively criticised itself, not trying to hide any of its flaws, instead throwing everything out there for the player to the point where arguably you don't actually "play" the game at all, instead you do everything but play the actual game, you are actively encouraged to deviate and distract yourself.
I don't watch soaps, the last time I sat down to watch an episode of a soap was well over two decades ago. When I did watch them, it was mostly because someone else was watching them and I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Even then at such a young age I was able to recognise that the same stories were being told over and over again, to the point where you could see a storyline appear in one show, then weeks later, almost verbatim, the same storyline would appear in another. One of the limitations I recognised even then was that choosing to write about real people and real lives was very restricting when it comes to imagination, it has to be believable and it has to be possible or at least plausible for the viewer to get absorbed into the fictional world that is being portrayed.
I find myself increasingly asking for something new. As I grow older I find myself getting bored much more easily. The same tired storylines do not entertain me any longer, the same applies to games, and to movies etc. and even to a point the same concept can be applied to any part of our lives that incorporates variety and diversity - food for example eventually becomes boring and mundane when you find yourself craving something you have never seen before as opposed to everything that is on offer. You get to the point where you are hungry but you have no idea for what, and everything you think of does not appeal. This leaves you asking the question, when was the last time "new" really meant something completely new?
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