Category:Sturgeon's Tropes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
(Redirected from Sturgeon's Tropes)


Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." Oddly enough, tropes are largely an exception, at least when it comes to the examples. Most examples are in fact neutral, neither being quite good or bad examples. Or some tropes have a roughly even mixture of good and bad examples. Then some tropes seem to be good or bad by their natures (such as those on the Bad Writing Index).

Then we have these tropes.

Let's make it clear these tropes are not necessarily bad. They often leave plenty of room for adaptation, and a skilled storyteller can play them well. However, they are seldom if ever used to build a good story. Hence they are the tropes most likely to demonstrate Sturgeon's Law; i.e. 90% of the examples are crud.

But like the corollary, the remaining ten percent can be worth dying for.