This definition by Lakota Girl is from urbandictionary.com, which is a lot more useful than Merriam-Webster if you’re hip and smart. (There is a conventional literary definition of a “trope” as a literary device.)
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TROPE on the interwebs really refers to an often overused plot device. It can also be described as another variation on the same theme. TV shows, movies, comics, games, anime', & books are full of tropes & many rabid fan-sites now name & track said tropes with a self-explanatory title for each one.
Q: Did you see "Brokeback Mountain"?
A: That film just used the "Bury Your Gays" trope to make it dramatic. You know, where a gay character has to always die in the story.
Girl: When is Hollywood gonna get tired of the "Friendly Neighborhood Vampire" trope?
Guy: I blame Angel & Spike.
Girl: I blame the Count on Sesame Street.
Guy: Nah, Count Chocula totally invented that scene.
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I want to talk about two “tropes” relevant to the recent sexual antics of politicians, who deal in tropes all the time as persuasive rhetoric, not usually sexual at least overtly. In the case of these two, they are actions but I don’t know what a fan site might call them in order to track them.
One is the moment in films when the man grabs the woman’s head and deep-kisses her. She almost invariably is taken by surprise, then pleased, and sometimes this trope is the beginning of an extended scene of heavy necking or even coitus. But there are sometimes mockeries of this basic trope when it’s absurd: grabbing the head of and deep kissing a robot or another species (“never kiss anything with three lips” — you know sheep jokes?) or an alien. (Imagine deep kissing the Alien !! She IS female and we don’t know how she gets inseminated or even needs to be, other than by the bodies of her victims, but she has “deep teeth.”) I would like to see a montage of these “grabbing the head” moments over the decades.
The fairy tale version of this, of course, is the prince kissing the Sleeping Beauty, which a Freudian would explain was a euphemized version of being initiated into penetrative sex, which is supposed to awake the princess to a life of delight. It’s not explained how the prince learned to kiss like that. Or what could ever have given Roy Moore the idea that he was a prince.
An on-going twitter thread is investigating the trace elements of this photo code for the jpeg.
Fascinating tell-tales.
Al Franken used this trope to “fool around” in comedy skit mode where people are quite likely to go over the edge. He also used the “grabbing the breasts” trope which comes from the American obsession with fetishized breasts which means they must be covered at all times — at least the nipples, the milk-extruders. I knew an old cop who had to often arrest militant street-walkers and said he could bring them into line by threatening to “twist their tits” and maybe even doing it. After all, they stick right out there in front and are often decorated to attract attention.
A common expression is “getting her tit caught in a wringer.” The sensitivity of the part is the key to the trope, as well as the sexual nature of how we treat nipples, though no one is inseminated or reproduces through their nipples and even men have them. (Last night the version of the new “Hawaii 5-0” that I watched used the nipple trope when the hero’s mother, played by the usual genteel and poised Christine Lahti using battery jumper cables on the nipples of the bad guy to torture him. Worse than clothespins.) I do not recall seeing anyone’s tits get caught in a wringer in a movie. It often refers to pushing into a situation with insufficient caution. (Ahem.) Or the idea that being "outstanding" is risky.
Part of comedy is unexpectedness, also cruelty, being taboo, rude/vulgar, out-of-character and the other elements that make people laugh, maybe because of nervousness and not being comfortable. We speak of totally unsexual things being “sexy” as a recommendation, a promised arousal. We speak of “giving good head” as a skill that is satisfying even when it has nothing to do with sex — maybe even something like a business plan. Cars and money, of course.
The usefulness of these tropes is constructed by the conventional and enforced values of the culture of the time. Part of the major problem we have is that the main culture has been so eroded and muddied in the search for the shocking edge that it’s pretty hard to find a trope that is funny. I take the new shock and revulsion of so many people in regard to these unwanted intimacies to be both a re-establishment of community standards and a defense of individual dignity in a world that wants us to march like North Korean troops in unison, computer by computer.
Sexual relationship has a lot to do with individual dignity, so these lock-step cultures are quite prudish. It’s hard to imagine Kim Jong-Un grabbing someone by the head and deep-kissing them. (For one thing, he’d need to stand on a box. “Little” is a bit of a sexual insult, as Trump well-knows. Trump is never funny because he has no sense of standard propriety, only locker room talk. To an American Kim Jong-Un seems already funny, like a chubby child, sort of nasty cute. "Rocket man" misses.
Politics has suddenly become accepting of the sexual insult, but since no one comes in on a horse anymore (The NA joke is “fuck Custer and the horse he came in on" usually with gestures), vulgar people fall back on insulting the wives (a variation on “your mother wears army boots” which is not about boots. Or “low” dialogue in ghetto crime movies that say “I screwed your mother last night. She wasn’t any good.”) I’ve just heard the accusation that Melania Trump was a prostitute (documented with a nude photo) countered by the accusation that Michelle Obama is a “tranny.” No one can imagine (I hope) this sort of accusation about Mamie Eisenhower or Bess Truman.
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