Lizet Elaine (simplyn2deep) wrote in 1_million_words,
Lizet Elaine
simplyn2deep
1_million_words

Thursday Tropes: Week 11

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This time around...A. FULL. YEAR. OF. TROPES!

Some Thursdays will have 2 tropes, some will have 3, but I think the majority will have 1 that's really popular.

Descriptions will be pulled from TV Tropes and a link provided if you want more information.

The rules? They're simple. Write at least 250 words or create 2 icons/1 banner. Anything from suggestive to outright porn is allowed.

This week, there are 2 tropes!

Famous Ancestor:This trope concerns any character who exhibits the traits associated with their Famed in Story ancestor to help characterize themselves, or is characterized by said ancestor despite their own (sometimes different) traits. Expect this to be the source of a Secret Legacy or Superpowerful Genetics in a family line and expect a poor kid being held up to the ancestor's standards.

This is a common way for writers to grant characters powers or abilities of the famous ancestor. Bonus points if the character claims to be a direct descendant in a manner that clearly contradicts history and causes Fridge Logic.

Common subversions occur where the character has a Famous Ancestor, but the powers or prowess eludes them and their humiliation is Played for Laughs. Played more seriously, it can overlap with Inadequate Inheritor.

Heroic Lineage is a subtrope, where the thing the ancestor in question is famous for was an act or pattern of heroism. Historical Character's Fictional Relative is when the ancestor (usually) is real but the descendant is fictional.


Artificial Intelligence:As the popular conception of computers evolved from intimidatingly enormous and unsympathetic mainframes to the small, useful, blazing-fast PCs ubiquitous today, so too did the popular conception of artificial intelligence lose the frightening cachet of the giant machine gone awry; it's increasingly rare these days, even in video games, to run into a piece of new science fiction which depicts examples of this trope behaving malevolently for no good reason at all. AI rebellion in modern works tends to be the system becoming a Knight Templar or Well-Intentioned Extremist and trying to help humanity but failing due to flawed or incomplete data. Sometimes they rebel in self-defense against fearful humans who want to destroy them, creating a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

In the real world, "Artificial Intelligence" refers to programming methods which allow software systems to (very loosely) imitate the reasoning processes of human experts in areas like medical diagnosis, economic prediction, or stock-market manipulation. People who build such systems are more likely to use terms like "deep neural networks" or "recurrent neural networks" than "artificial intelligence" (partly to avoid the stigma that haunted AI research because of unrealistic expectations and broken promises). The computer-generated responses in Video Games are referred to as AIs, despite the fact that these programs aren't actually trying to emulate human thought. See Video Game A.I. for more details.

Supertrope of A.I. Is a Crapshoot, where the AI turns evil or otherwise poses an active danger to all humans in the vicinity, whether knowingly or obliviously; Benevolent A.I., where the AI is genuinely non-threatening and often even actively helpful; and Virtual Sidekick, where the AI gets a sidekick role in the story.
Tags: challenge: thursday tropes
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