Brandon Sanderson turned classic fantasy tropes on their heads... really?

I know this isn't the most timely topic, but it's something I've been wrestling with lately. Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson's work. I find his characters to be engaging and believable, his stories fun. I, for one, actually appreciate his transparent (I've heard it called skeletal) prose that gets out of its own way and lets me enjoy the story. I also appreciate his work on Writing Excuses and his creative writing classes he's uploaded to youtube. However, he's made a claim that I am having trouble with.

Sanderson said that after Mistborn came out he was pigeonholed as the guy who turns classic fantasy tropes on their heads. Now I'm not the most widely read guy but do you know what he's talking about?

From tvtropes.org: Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.

This give us starting points: plots, stock characters, creatures, settings, whatever, so that we can just jump in and start an adventure without having to build a whole back story. I say someone lives in a castle? You instantly know the technology level we're dealing with. I say someone is an elf? You know dude has some mad archery skills. I mention a spinning space station, you know it's in the future, but probably not too far into the future, whereas if I say artificial gravity you know that we're well beyond current technology.

So from this I think a "classic fantasy trope" would be a quest to find a sword or to rescue the princess. Overthrow an evil queen. Right? So I Google "Sanderson turns fantasy tropes on their heads"

Lots and lots of crap out there. And I know not everybody has read the Mistborn books, but you don't need to have to understand what I'm about to say. So by the tiny bit of actual content available on the Interwebs, apparently they're talking about:

1. 1. Vin, 16 year old street girl. She SHOULD play the role of rescued princess, but instead she's the rescuer.
2. 2. They never really take the "hero's journey" by which they mean Vin doesn't set off to do something heroic.
3. 3. Overly complex worlds instead of actual plotting
4. 4. Limited character development,
5. 5. Characters bending to the plot instead of vise versa.
6. 6. The true hero has already lost, leaving them with an evil ruler to contend with.

But the vast majority of people seem to say "Sanderson isn't one to rest on clichéd fantasy tropes" or "Sanderson turns all the fantasy tropes on their heads" without a SINGLE follow-up sentence to illustrate wtf they mean by that!

#1. Ok, so he reversed the gender roles. I can take that, though there is certainly enough precedent for that that I think it's a coin toss whether your hero is a dude rescuing a chick, or a chick rescuing a dude. I'll leave it to better-versed people on whether that's an important distinction, but as far as SF & Fantasy tropes go, I think it's pretty trivial. Read The Hunger Games or Divergent. Read much of the Wheel of Time books. Read the earlier Sword of Truth books. There are tons of examples where women are just as heroic as men and truly bad-ass. Admittedly in the overall pantheon of Fantasy, I'm quite sure the dominant theme is men rescuing women, but in recent years, I think it's evened out quite a bit.

#2. If you read The Hero's Journey, you'll see that virtually all stories, minus very VERY deliberate literary experiments, follow the hero's journey, even if it's because Campbell carefully worded the Journey to include the widest set of circumstances possible. So just because Vin isn't doing something altruistic, she still acts heroically by embarking on a journey that seems unlikely to end in success, and while self-serving, she isn't ENTIRELY self-serving, and we learn fairly early on that there are better, deeper motivations behind the plan.

#'s 3, 4 & 5 are basically the same complaint. Yes he's very very good at plotting an engaging story that keeps you reading, crafting three-dimensional characters you care about and who have genuine emotions and motivations. I would hope, though, that that's just considered good writing. I submit that bad plotting happens across all genres, and if it happens more with fantasy, it's still not an "accepted feature" that most readers can rely on to help get them into the story

#6. Oh and people brag on how original it is that the true hero came before the story started and lost. But isn't that kind of how MOST stories with evil empires begin? Very few evil overlords start out saying "I'm going to rule with an iron fist and eviscerate everyone who opposes me. Oh and killing babies is totally my thing". They evolve into that over time because absolute power corrupts absolutely. As I recall, Sauron was working with the good guys and created The Ring to help out. Darth Vader was pretty decent until he got lured to the dark side - his conversion was aided rather handily by the good guys chopping him up. The computers didn't activate the Matrix until we humans tried to kill them, and the Master Rahl fetish started as a means of saving his people from Dreamwalkers.

I truly believe that Sanderson is a fantastic author, but I'm still having trouble with the tropes claim. To me, he was just writing a damn good story. Am I wrong? I focus on this because I worry that I've missed something here. I too want to write something original, heralded as a pioneer, but if I can't figure out what the buzz is about, then what business do I have trying to create works of my own? Is this just some brilliant marketing move by Sanderson to get people talking about him, like a model saying, "everyone keeps saying I'm too pretty to be in Victoria's Secret, darn it!"?

 

I totally agree that trope twisting isn't the only way to create a fresh story - or in fact a guaranteed way at all. I don't feel like I'm obsessing over trying to twist a trope myself, I was really just trying to understand what everyone else is saying about it. In the examples I gave, which were the only concrete examples I could find on the Internet, I simply couldn't see how those were tropes, and if they were, I couldn't see how he'd turned them on their heads. Even in the responses to my original post, I'm hearing a general theme of "sure he reversed tropes, but that's nothing new or impressive" and yet I'm not seeing any mention of WHAT tropes are being reversed. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it's a brilliant publicity move - even those who dismiss him as being skeletal or empty first must acknowledge that he's turned the genre on its head.

 

I guess that was actually kind of my point. I enjoyed the books a great deal for all of the reasons you listed, skeletal prose be damned. But the trope subversion was something that everyone talked about - even Sanderson himself! And I just wasn't seeing it. I sure hope I didn't come across as saying "that's what I want to do!" I was just concerned that I couldn't understand what people were saying. I'm glad to hear the dissenting view that trope-turning isn't all it's cracked up to be, because I too couldn't really care about cleverness if the story's no good. There are lots of things that can be really fun for a writer to play with that don't add to the reading experience, and in that case, you should probably save them for your big literary fiction masterpiece.

I want to thank everyone for helping to educate me a little.