It feels like not long ago that everyone was talking about Tears of the Kingdom.

As a development of Breath of the Wild’s open-world Zelda model, TotK had a lot of interesting ideas, a fascinating physics system, and generally struck a chord with a wide audience. But the more I played it, the more disillusioned I became at its narrative, especially in its use - and attempted subversion - of tropes.

So let’s talk about careful application of harmful tropes in videogame narratives.

First off, tropes!

Literally, they’re recurring motifs or themes. In terms of fiction writing the term is usually used with a genre-level scope, and there’s also often a negative connotation to the term - especially in beginner writing advice. Used too much, a trope can become cliche, but fundamentally tropes are tools like any other.

Used right, a trope can be a familiar comfort, a grounding for the story you wish to tell. Used poorly, they can undermine your narrative and suggest an unfamiliarity with your chosen genre and its existing forms. Or worse, a lack of awareness of the ongoing conversations within your community.

Let’s also touch briefly on trope subversion.

Personally, I love a good subversion. It’s the jazz of fiction writing, the well-told joke filled with surprise and delight. You’re all comfortable in your well-worn rut, your familiar landscape, and with a flick of the wrist the writer up-ends your expectations and lands you in a narrative place that you weren’t expecting, and crucially, is more interesting than you anticipated.

But subversion requires a level of trust in the writer and their use of tropes, and doubly-so when the tropes they’re using are fundamentally problematic. We all know these tropes, the punching-down humour of 20th Century comedy clubs: the nagging housewife, the black guy dies first, bury your gays. Tropes so steeped in sexism, racism, homophobia that it’s widely understood that reinforcing them through fiction is a Bad Idea.

Ah, says the Writer, but I’m only using that trope to subvert it!

Done well, it can be transformative. But it’s a risky gambit with a couple of obvious pitfalls: First, it takes skill and a great deal of care to stick that landing. And if you stumble, if your subversion doesn’t land, your narrative is now reinforcing negative stereotypes or punching down at marginalised communities who could really use a break.

Second - and this is one I don’t see talked about enough - you risk spending so long in the pre-subversion stage of your trope that it starts to feel like the subversion’s not coming. That you’re not intending to resolve a shitty, damaging trope, just to live in it.

Which is a good segue back to Zelda.

Fair warning: from this point on, this essay will contain major narrative spoilers for Tears of the Kingdom.

TotK opens with what a lot of fans have been crying out for: Link and Zelda, exploring archaeological ruins together. It’s chill, it’s nice, it gives Zelda depth and character and something to do beyond being rescued all the time.  And of course, it doesn’t last. Dehydrated Ganon is disturbed, Zelda is cast into the distant past, and Link gets his stats mystically reset, Metroid-style.

The narrative makes one thing clear, through flashbacks and visions: Zelda’s got stuff going on. No no, she’s not just Waiting Around to be Rescued this time. She’s doing cool and interesting things in the past to pave the way for your victory.  Can you see those cool and interesting things? Uh, no, aside from brief cutscenes. But be assured, she’s definitely not just waiting for Link to rescue her! She’s politicking with royalty, and becoming a Sage, and choosing to sacrifice her very humanity to become a divine incubator for Link’s next big weapon upgrade.

At which point, in this open-world game where you can very reasonably spend two hundred hours wandering the widest reaches of Hyrule, you would be fully justified in thinking that the developers

1. are aware of the ongoing discourse about Zelda not being playable in the series of games which bear her name, and

2. have decided they don’t care.

Instead they’ve chosen to commit to an extensive sleight-of-hand, smoke and mirrors to make it look like Zelda is a character with meaningful agency, when in fact she’s perpetually confined to the princess-needing-rescue and ultimate-sacrifice-so-the-protagonist-gets-a-shiny-new-sword tropes, both of which are highly problematic.

And because the game is so vast, that’s the narrative space that you, the player, get to spend an awful long time in.

There’s an attempted subversion on the way, of course.

Dragon Zelda shows up at the last, when Ganon assumes a similarly draconic form, and surely after all her sacrifices and a thousand years of waiting she gets to be awesome? Uhh, no. She gets to be a literal support system for Link, lifting him up so he can skydive to battle. Oh, and then she gets a happy ending, but only after reverting to human form in midair and having to be rescued by Link one more time.

However, I’d argue that even if they had landed the subversion successfully, TotK would remain fundamentally problematic due to that requirement for the player to sit in those shitty tropes for a significant number of hours (not helped by the fact that Zelda games have shown little awareness of problematic tropes in the past and so there’s no in-built trust that a successful subversion is on the way).

And from a gamedev perspective, this isn’t just a storytelling issue. From the point where TotK makes it clear that the narrative will require Zelda to sacrifice herself, I stopped enjoying the otherwise-compelling gameplay loops because I could tell where the narrative was heading. I dissociated from the game to the point where I pushed through to the end as quickly as possible, to know for sure how badly they screwed up the subversion.

Screwing up your tropes is an excellent way to leave a negative lasting impression.

Curiously enough, one of the same tropes shows up in Final Fantasy 15, whose narrative was already a mess after a troubled decade-long development.

I spent 50+ hours of enjoyable time as Noctis hanging out with my choco-bros - while the narrative made a big deal about Lunafreya doing Important Shit off-camera - but what I took away from the game was Lunafreya showing up again exclusively to sacrifice her life to give Noctis an even shinier sword to add to his existing metaphysical wardrobe of magical swords.

And in FF15’s case, there is no subversion. Luna’s dead, and the narrative moves on without her. The player has to sit in that shitty trope while the story comes to its somewhat-garbled conclusion, and personally I’ve never forgiven the game for that. But there was supposed to be a subversion. The final DLC - one which was never finished and ended up being released as a novel instead - was to end with Lunafreya’s resurrection and Happy Ever After with Noctis.

Both of these games attempted subversions; one failed the execution while struggling to reconcile its open-world game design vs the ongoing reality of existing in the un-subverted trope, while the other never even reached its subversion due to the pressures of the videogame development cycle.

Tropes are tools, but if a job half-done - or done badly - is actively harmful, you better be sure you can finish it.