III. Tropes and Paratropes - and what they mean to the community

Expanding on Jenny Yau’s article, and in order to explain how Serenoid is a true child of fandom space, I will briefly explain the practice in these spaces to create alternative tropes for their communities. I will explain the prevailing tropes and the alternative tropes as well as possible connections to perspectives on artistic practice in Western classical music. 

Paratropes as alternative narratives to popular media tropes

We all know the common media tropes. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. There is an obstacle they need to overcome. Happily ever after. From fairytale to romcom, there is no one in the world who hasn’t encountered this particular trope. Another one is maybe the straight, white male science fiction hero who battles the evil and wins in the end. The popular tropes may be endless, but they are narrow in terms of the people they apply to and who are meant to see themselves mirrored. (A comprehensive description of each of these tropes with a myriad of examples in pop culture film and TV can be found on The Take, Youtube.

Online fan spaces are spaces where everyone who doesn’t relate to these tropes finds and creates their own. I like to call them “paratropes”. Parallel tropes to the ones we know. We all dream of the same thing. Connection, overcoming things, being the hero in our own story. But not everybody has the same things to overcome or overcomes things in the same way. Not everyone connects in the same way and being the hero or main character means different things to different people. Ever since the beginnings of online communities, fan fiction communities have provided the spaces in which we could tell our own stories through the characters we love. These spaces were made by us, for us. If there are any white male heroes in those spaces, they’re queer. In her book “Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures”, Nicholle Lamerichs writes: “(…) fandom itself and is not without political or subversive implications. Such critical perspectives also emerge in fandom where the source text is not only copied but also subverted, in terms of gender, for instance. Fans actively work with the blanks in the source text that spark their imagination and give way to oppositional readings.” These oppositional readings are not created to criticise the source material or profit off one’s own version of it. They are a celebration of it by expressing oneself through it. Plenty of tropes or popular narratives can be found in fan culture. 

Queercoding and queer romance 

Whilst the “Kill your gays” and the “gay best friend” tropes are luckily becoming more and more unacceptable, queer romance is still being portrayed as difficult, fragile and full of trauma – and thus, doomed to fail eventually. Maybe we’re now allowed to exist, don’t die anymore, but we also don’t get a happy ending – at least not an easy one. Most recent examples are the celebrated Netflix series Heartstopper based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novels, which started out like the queer fairytale we all needed, but in later seasons turns darker as the relationship between protagonists Nick and Charlie begins to suffer from Charlie’s eating disorder and Nick’s homophobic brother. BBC drama Fairies and Lost Boys is an uphill battle of a gay couple in adopting a child. Whilst these portrayals are surely realistic and homophobia and mental illness are real struggles, we also need the fairytales that help us believe that we can overcome these real world things. The fan fiction community helpfully invented the tag “tooth rotting fluff”. What sounds like an overdose of cotton candy describes fan-written stories that are just helplessly romantic and wholesome scenes between two characters, mostly queer couples – with the premise that there will be a Happy End. We can trust this narrative here, when we can’t trust mainstream media. In the absence of a whole market of cheesy romance novels that aren’t consumed for intellectual stimulation but often simply because sometimes we need to dream of a happy ending, we make our own. 

The white male hero and the 19^th Century ideal of the composer-genius

The white male hero trope is something that not only fantasy and science fiction but also the classical music world is deeply steeped in. More specifically, we are talking about the notion of the lone genius, that cannot be anything other than a white, European and mostly heterosexual (but mostly unattached) man, maybe a composer, rather than a performer. Putting the figure of the sole creator or composer on a pedestal is a dangerous game to play, not only for the artist made into the protagonist, but also for (in this case) his followers. It stylises one person into a kind of superhuman, and as such, he is not part of a community – also not the one that forms his audience. He doesn’t create for them, he creates by some kind of God-given inception, and the mere mortals can but marvel at him. Nowadays, this works out for a lot of the Western classical canon composers only because they have long decomposed. They are no longer in active dialogue with their audiences, except through their interpreters, be it performers, conductors or directors. 

Bringing this trope into the present and attempting to emulate it or being introduced to these glorified ideas of how a composer “should be”, is problematic when you’re still alive, especially when you’re only starting out. In a conversation my composition teacher Martijn Padding told me that he still has a lot of students who feel that they can’t compose “under the weight of history”. Thus, it teaches one to separate oneself from not only one’s audience but also one’s own process of creation, and it never mentions the community around the artist, their support network that they are in exchange with. Creation, in the myth that is the Western classical composer, is something reclusive and in communion with a higher power that singles out an individual. The fact that most of us sit in front of our computer with a cup of coffee in our pyjamas at 3 in the afternoon swearing at notation software when we’re composing, or that it includes a lot of staring into the void, appearing to do nothing, instead of obsessive writing-down-with-a-feather-what-the-gods-are-imparting, is something that still surprises people when they learn of our existence. 

Whilst the genius cult has been replaced with celebrity worship in pop culture, fandom and fan culture is about the work itself. It’s about the characters, the lore, the world we come into when immersing ourselves in a story and how we relate to it. Rather than singling out a person, it’s a community of people finding themselves in the work. This can be combined with celebrity worship, but it doesn’t have to be. 

The genius in Western art music seems to have this status because he created something sublime and superhuman that touches its audience by being removed from them. The “work” is still in the centre, but instead of being something for the audience to actively share in, it elevates the creator above them. The celebrity status in fandom, often ascribed to an author or actor, comes from creating something relatable that provides a surface for a broad variety of people to see themselves in and engage with. One inspires worship, the other one inspires co-creation. 

This also implies a separation in the “high arts” (i.e. Western classical music or visual arts) between the narrative of the art and its audience. The audience may be intellectually stimulated or deeply moved, but the settings of concert halls and museums alone with their demand for silent absorption rather than participation speak to this mindset of separation between the art and the audience. Making the material your own is entirely out of the question – seeing as it has been forged by a god-like genius. Composer turned critic turned researcher and teacher Greg Sandow even ironically compares this hierarchy to the Great Chain of Beings in the Bible with the composer at the top and the audience at the bottom, whose only role is to consume and appreciate. Contemporary classical music and its creators, however, often seek to distance themselves from this narrative, which is still deeply connected to the Western patriarchal culture of genius worship of the 19th century and the assorted absurdities that come with it.

The trope glorifies isolation: '“(…) they cherished the idea of a lonely, isolated suffering ‘martyr’ who is “a law unto himself”, as Modest Musorgski once remarked (author’s quotation marks)"'. The status of the loner is worn as a badge of honour, the isolation seen as a direct result of the superhuman status: “The isolation, the not always self-undertaken distancing from society, became a kind of bitter source of solace in the 19^thCentury, a kind of privilege that an artist could cherish.” He’s alone because no one can keep up. Wild whirlwind romances that end tragically are accepted in this context, but a steady, loving, healthy relationship would make him too human. The genius is ostracised, but by making him “more than” instead of “less than”: “Composers knew they were expected to alienate themselves from ordinary citizens (…)"

In contrast, the world or universe of fan fiction narratives is an inclusive one that allows everybody of every background, colour, ability, gender or sexuality to exist and create in it. Fandom makes sure that it is. 

One of its popular paratropes is overcoming isolation and becoming part of the community. Of allowing oneself to let go, to be less tight wound. And example for this are the many stories written by fans of Star Trek Deep Space 9 about Garak, the Cardassian. Garak is a queer coded tailor on the space station who owns a clothing shop on what is a type of “intergalactic shopping mall meets diplomatic hot spot” setting. He continually places himself outside of the social circle of the bridge crew, even though he nurtures a growing friendship with the station’s chief medical officer Dr. Julian Bashir. It transpires throughout the series, that he is in fact a highly trained but exiled secret service operative with a brutal and tragic backstory that he hides behind a cynical, quipping, reptilian façade. If one were to attempt to read all the fan-written stories about how the cold, calculating lizard-shaped alien works through his trauma, becomes part of the family and even finds love with the good Doctor Bashir, one lifetime would probably hardly be enough. 

Disability and neurodivergence tropes

There is an existing trope in mainstream media, that when disabled or neurodivergent people are included – and not the villain of the story - they must be “redeemed” by some sort of superhuman capability that makes up for their “lacking”. Notable examples of this trope as far as physical disabilities go are Professor X in Marvel’s X-Men, who may be a wheelchair user but is the world’s most powerful telepath and in a leading position amongst the mutant community around which the story revolves. Or blind superhero Daredevil, who has honed his other perception skills, specifically aural and tactile ones, to a superhuman level to “make up” for his lacking visual sense. This is also probably the reason why Beethoven isn’t as of yet celebrated as a disability icon or that J.S. Bach’s blindness towards the end of his life is very little known. Their genius status is perceived as a neutraliser. In the case of Beethoven, it’s even exacerbated by his disability and plays into the glorified isolation of the genius and the martyr trope. When portraying neurodivergence, specifically autistic coded characters, both The Big Bang Theory’s (2007-2019) Dr. Sheldon Cooper and Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler and Bones’ (2005-2017) Dr. Temperance Brennan (as examples) “make up” for the lack of their social skills by being at the top of their respective scientific field. The latter, although in many ways a beautiful and sensitive portrayal of a clearly autistic woman, is very vehemently using her outstanding intellectual capabilities for the good of humanity to “make up” for her lack of likability – a trope still prevalent in mainstream female characters. The former, however, often just plays Amy’s and Sheldon’s social shortcomings for laughs through a neurotypical lens. It’s no surprise that the misinformation perpetuated through this trope is harmful. 

In fan fiction, the characters don’t need to be perceived through an able bodied or neurotypical lense because they aren’t written by able bodied or neurotypical people. In fact, sometimes, able bodied characters are written disabled, maybe through an accident they suffered or a disease, to accommodate the perspective of the writer who probably lives their life with this condition and to increase the identification the writer already feels with the character. YouTube Essayist Jessica Kellgren-Fozard describes this phenomenon when she touches on how she became addicted to queer Buffy, the Vampire Slayer fan fiction when she was bedbound due to her own chronical illness: “Occasionally, stories would drop in some great disability representation – in this one she’s lost her hearing, in this one she’s lost the use of her legs (…) and she’s still lovable. She still gets a happy ending.” Kellgren-Fozard, as a chronically ill, queer woman, would never have gotten a happy ending in mainstream media. The stories she read online, written probably by people like her, gave her the fairytales she needed. The real fairytales that aren’t about “healing” her disability to be loved or “finding a prince”. The ones about being loved exactly as she is by the kind of person she dreams of, instead of being perceived as faulty or a charity cause. Today, Kellgren-Fozard is married with two children -she was able to create her own happy ending. One of the central tropes in fanfiction writing is to find connection as who we are, without being punished for gender, queerness, colour or disabilities. 

Android tropes

Commonly, the evil unfeeling robots that take over the world, is probably the first thing we think about, when we think of robot and android tropes. In Japanese comic culture, we come across the mecha (short for mechanical) trope, which implies an oversized robot steered by a human sitting inside it. Often, a type of symbiotic mythical connection exists between the machine and its guide, or the machine has some eerie qualities implying it would make its own decisions or is not completely subjected to the will of the human. Examples of this trope and the eerie, almost spiritual forms it can take, are Yoshiyuki Sadamoto/Gainax’ Neon Genesis Evangelion or the Yoshiyuki Tomino/Sunrise’s Gundam series. Another form it will take are cyborgs and cybernetic beings – maybe most notably Masamune Shirow’s iconic Ghost in the Shell (1989).

There is a whole genre that veers off into possibly fathomless pits of pornography featuring hypersexualised, female shaped androids. One only needs to google “android girlfriend” to be utterly disturbed. (Interestingly but somewhat unsurprisingly, googling “android boyfriend” brings up mostly quirky anecdotes of human males using android phones.) Two more recent exploration of the sexy robot girl, or at least feminised A.I. as romantic interest in Western cinema were Spike Jonze’s movie her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex machina (2014). Prof. Lisa Yaszek  describes this archetype as “This is someone who might do your house cleaning, sexual labor and then back you up in a bar fight.”

Whilst there is plenty of bizarreness going around in the fan fiction community when it comes to encounters with synthetic beings, there are also those stories who distinctly explore a sensitive approach to each other’s “otherness” or differences. Serenoid Co-librettist Wyatt Gaer whom I asked to participate in this project because of the sensitive explorations of relationships between organic and synthetic beings in her fan fiction work tells me in her interview: “I put a lot of thought to how a human-shaped but non-human person might engage with the world (...)." The human character is exploring an unfamiliar being’s way of perceiving itself and the world whilst also, through the lens of the android, becoming the “other”, the unfamiliar. Contrary to the preexisting tropes, in this context the android character isn’t something created to fulfil every need, provide sexual favours or boast superhuman strength and act as a protector. They’re simply a different form of being that can be explored and connected with despite differences. More often than not, fan fiction puts them at eye level instead of above as threatening force or protective super soldiers, or below as operating systems and oppressed servants and in any case as a projection surface. Their otherness is respected and encountered with curiosity, rather than defining their place in a hierarchy a priori. A lot of times, fictional android or synthetic sexuality is explored like any queer sexuality, as something that needs to slowly be found out because there is no normative precedence for it. 

In the following chapter, I want to explain how Serenoid’s characters and narrative are built on these paratropes and consciously subvert existing tropes in the hope that the people who invented them may see themselves reflected, even if the genre of opera is foreign and alien to them.