LogFAQs > #908075317

Zeus posted...

is how I wonder if I'm better at spotting twists these days (or, at the very least, identifying foreshadowing) or whether my mind just instinctively hunts for twists and tries to predict what's coming next (based at least partly on prior experience).

I've watched my nephew play video games with heavy narrative, and he's pretty damned good at predicting SHOCKING TWISTS before they happen, which has on multiple occasions prompted me to go "You play too many video games."

It's definitely a thing, though. Tropes exist, and we as a culture are more tuned in to tropes in general, so we start noticing trends and predicting them almost by reflex. Doubly so for tropes that get endlessly repeated and copied, because we see enough examples to build a predictive model around very quickly.

Which reminds me of an occasion about 15 years ago or so, when I was talking to a girl I know about LotR, and she mentioned that the moment she heard them mention that there was a prophecy that no man would ever kill the Witch-King, she instantly knew he was going to get killed by a woman, and mentioned that it was a super-cliche premise in a lot of fantasy. I pointed out that it was only really a common cliche because most of the stories that used the idea stole the idea from Tolkien in the first place. A lot of LotR feels super-cliched, because 50+ years of fantasy writers stole nearly every idea and concept he ever had and used it in their stories, even before D&D got into the mix, and in turn basically passed most of those cliches on into video game RPGs.

Of course, Tolkien himself may have stolen the idea from Macbeth, with the Weird Sisters and their prophecy to Macbeth about how no man could kill him, even if the "GOTCHA!" moment was different there.

I also pointed out to her that part of why she was so quick to assume a woman would kill him was because a) she was a woman, and b) because more modern fantasy tends to push a more gender-balanced view where women can be just as skilled warriors as men can. But when Tolkien was writing, and when the original audience was reading the books, it was a lot more culturally unthinkable that a woman could be bad-ass enough to kill an evil ghost monster. Even if shieldmaidens already DID exist in the Norse/Germanic myths he was stealing a lot of his ideas from.

Which also perhaps made it telling that she DIDN'T really notice that Eowyn had help - from Merry, who ALSO wasn't a "Man", because he was a Hobbit.


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