What Is a Trope? | Definitions & Examples

Melchior Antoine
Jun 20
7 min read

Updated: Jul 5

Tropes have one or two meanings. The first meaning of a trope is related to its function as a literary device. This definition is as follows:

A figure of speech that carries a deeper meaning beyond its literal meaning. A trope defined in this way can refer to a metaphor, simile, irony, synecdoche, or metonymy.

However, this is not the definition of trope that we will focus on here. Instead, we are going to look at the second definition of trope. Here is a formal description of this other definition:

A trope refers to storytelling conventions that take the form of recurring ideas, patterns, or motifs in literature or popular media.

Tropes can take various forms. They can be fresh and new or tired and cliched. In addition, they may be defined strictly in relation to literary, artistic, or entertainment concepts, or they can extend to include social concerns.

For example, the concept of the hero’s journey is a cinematic concept, which defines a formulaic set of stages that a main character has to go through to realize their true self. This is strictly an artistic or cinematic concept.

However, there are tropes that bleed into the real world with social implications. For example, the trope of the Noble Indian Savage is related to how a real and contemporary population of individuals were treated historically and even in the present.

In this article, we look at examples of tropes from both literature and cinema, including the trope of the damsel in distress and others.

Image of the prince kissing Snow White, a classic damsel in distress trope. — Image of the prince rescuing Snow White, a damsel in distress, from eternal sleep with a kiss from the 1937 Disney film.

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Common tropes in literature and popular media

As mentioned earlier, tropes can be either fresh or stale and cliched, depending on how they are handled by the author. There are also tropes that can be harmful and stereotypical. There are numerous tropes and obviously not all can be covered. The table below provides a list of common tropes found in literature and popular media:

Trope	Definition	Example
The Chosen One	A seemingly ordinary person destined to save the world from some great evil.	Harry Potter in Harry Potter series – destined to defeat Voldemort.
Enemies to Lovers	Characters who start off hating each others guts but who eventually fall in love.	Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
The Mentor	A wise guide who helps the protagonist grow or understand their purpose.	Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.
Love Triangle	One character is romantically torn between two others.	Katniss, Peeta, and Gale in The Hunger Games.
Reluctant Hero	A hero who does not seek adventure or responsibility but takes it on anyway.	Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.
The Sidekick	A supportive secondary character who assists the hero.	Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings.
Fish Out of Water	A character placed in an unfamiliar or strange environment.	Buddy in Elf (raised by elves, lives in New York City).
Evil Twin	A character has an identical but morally opposite counterpart.	The Man in the Iron Mask and Jacob in Lost.
Redemption Arc	A flawed or villainous character seeks or finds redemption.	Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Break the Cutie	A sweet, innocent character undergoes traumatic experiences.	Eleven in Stranger Things.
Mary Sue	An idealized character who is unrealistically perfect and universally loved.	Rey in Star Wars (as perceived by some fans); often used as a critique.

However, in this article, we will only look at five of them:

The Damsel in Distress
The Hero's Journey
Subverted Expectations
Traumatized Africa
The unscrupulous or evil Jew

The first trope we look at is that of "the damsel in distress." This is a trope about a helpless young lady who needs to be saved. It's an ancient trope that can be traced as far back as classicc Greek literature and even older.

1. The damsel in distress

One of the oldest tropes in both literature and popular media is that of the damsel in distress. This describes a woman who is in danger from either an evil knight, monster, or dragon and who has to be rescued.

It can be traced to ancient myths and epics, as well as the beginning of modern cinema. In the case of the classics, we have the story of Andromeda, who was offered as a sacrifice to a beast ravaging the land, a punishment from Poseidon, who felt offended by her mother. She was chained to a rock in the process before being rescued by the hero Perseus.

Fairy tales are also ripe with stories of the damsel in distress. For example, after being trapped in a tower by an evil witch, Rapunzel is rescued by a prince. Cinderella is saved from a life of drudgery and almost slavery by a prince as well, and so on.

The hero is typically male and White, and the lady being rescued is portrayed as helpless and weak. This trope has been criticized for portraying women as lacking agency. Today, it is typically seen as backward, stale, and even slightly misogynistic.

2. The hero’s journey

The hero’s journey is a common trope in modern cinema. It is also known as the monomyth. So what is it exactly? It is a narrative structure that describes a common structure for stories found in various cultures and mythologies.

It begins with a hero who sets off on an adventure, encounters a number of trials and challenges, achieves a major victory, and returns home transformed. A classical example of this is the story of Odysseus in the classic Greek epic tale, The Odyssey.

The concept of the hero’s journey is illustrated in the diagram below, courtesy of Wikipedia:

An illustration of the various stages in the hero's journey.

This concept was popularized and modernized by Joseph Campbell, with a massive influence on modern cinema. A good example of this influence would be the character Luke in the original Star Wars trilogy. He begins as a whiny and immature youth. With the help of mentors, he eventually becomes a fully developed hero who ends up saving the universe from evil and tyranny.

This trope may have given us some good movies. However, it has been criticized as being too formulaic and stale. Other tropes have arisen to challenge it. For example, subverted expectations.

3. Subverting expectations

This is another trope, which has gained attraction and controversy recently. Subverted expectations is a misdirection in literature or cinema that is withheld from the viewer or reader till the last minute for dramatic effect.

Subverted expectations began as an attempt to challenge other common tropes in popular media and literature. These tropes include things like “the damsel in distress” or “the hero’s journey,” which are typically seen as old and worn out.

For example, in the hero’s journey or in stories of the “damsel in distress,” the hero is portrayed as male, White, and hetrosexual. Stories that rely on the subverted expectations trope tend to subvert this ideal. Heroes are typically portrayed as females with agency and the obvious White male hero is presented as either lacking or the outright villain of the story.

We see this in the most recent Star Wars Trilogy, where the main White character Luke is portrayed as a disillusioned loser who has lost all faith in the Jedi, and the hero of the film is Rey — a female Jedi.

Other common means of executing subverted expectations include:

Killing off main characters suddenly
Revealing the killer as the one least expected in murder mysteries
Letting the villain win

However, subverting expectations, too, has been criticized for becoming a predictable and tired trope. An example of this is the HBO series Game of Thrones. One of the most common tropes used in that show is killing off main characters without warning.

We saw this in Season 1, where the season ends with Ned Stark, the main character, unceremoniously having his head chopped off. We had been seeing much of the story through his perspective. And he seemed like an honest and honorable character who we expected to be involved in the denouement of the story.

However, him being killed off was able to shock readers, making the story more interesting and exciting. However, this trope is used so frequently in the series that it ends up losing its potency.

Main characters are needed to resolve plots. As of today, the novel series on which the HBO show is based, remains unfinished, probably because there are no main characters left to properly resolve the story's plot. Lastly, the ending of the HBO series similarly ended in what appeared to be universal audience disappointment.

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4. Helpless and traumatized Africa

Another trope common in literature and cinema is that of the traumatized Africa. This is a pattern where Africa and Africans are portrayed as being traumatized by poverty, war, natural disasters, hunger, and so on. This is typical of African portrayals in news media. However, it has bled into both popular media and literature.

A good example of this is the novel, Who Fears Death (published in 2010). In this novel, dark-skinned Africans are portrayed as the victim of a tribe of a lighter race, who are oppressing them. They can only be rescued by a main character — Onyesonwu — who is not even fully African, but the byproduct of her African mother being raped by oppressors.

The story is based on the political crisis in Darfur, Sudan at the time, which was heavily reported on by the Western media. The majority of the characters come across as unlikable, and the story ends up portraying Africa as a traumatized victim of war and oppression.

5. The unscrupulous Jew trope

The evil or unscrupulous Jew occurs as a trope throughout Western European literature. They are often portrayed as evil, scheming, and deserving of blame for the killing of Christ. In modernist literature, this can be a rather acute problem.

Our first example of this trope is from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion (published in 1920). It features rather undignified images of jews.

a. Eliot, Gerontion:

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

Here, the common anti-semitic trope of Jews controlling and owning other people’s property through trickery features. The description of this Jewish persona as squatting “on the window sill” and being prepared like a diseased commodity throughout cities in Europe further adds to the demonization.

b. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:

Our second example is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The villain in the movie is the Jewish money lender Shylock, who is presented as being usurious. He is portrayed as being bloodthirsty enough to demand a pound of flesh from Antonio, a Christian merchant after Antonio defaults on a debt.

Shakespeare puts compelling speeches in the mouth of Shylock. Antonio is an anti-Jewish racist who has wronged and abused him several times in the past. And his hatred towards Antonio is fully justified. However, the play ends with Shylock losing everything to Antonio and being forced to convert from a Jew to a Christian.