I think that the reason why tropes exist, is because it provides a base bridge to go between the artist and the reader. It's a way of saying "Hello, here's what's going on." in less than a paragraph, and forms the initial.. grab, I guess, into the material. For example, when I first began reading Umlaut House, the foremost thing that came to my mind was "Comedy". I was reading the comic long before I became involved in anything engineering, so that side didn't appeal to me, and I wasn't really interested in the "Gay" part of it, so much as the romance in general.. and sappy romance stories don't do it for me either. It's the funny melded with the cute, described in the basest of terms, that initially attracted me to the comic.

.. Wandering train of thought aside, if you'd dropped the trope and gone simply for off the wall humor based entirely off of the quirks of the characters and concept, it wouldn't have pulled me in. Because, for comics, if you can't read a strip and understand it, it's unlikely to keep your attention. You're not writing an epic series of novels or a 5000 page documentary, you're encapsulating a laugh into 4 panels 3 times a week, and sowing in a little piece of yourself each time, until it becomes something else. Forcing yourself out of what has worked for you, and out of what you actually want to do, in the name of being 100% unadulteratedly unique, more often than not, backfires. It's like those paintings that are nothing more than a collection of random dots.. there's no rhyme or reason to them, and even if you can draw out or divine some kind of emotion from them, they still don't.. depict anything, or tell a story. Their only appeal is simply that they're not something else.

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I think that the reason why tropes exist, is because it provides a base bridge to go between the artist and the reader. It's a way of saying "Hello, here's what's going on." in less than a paragraph, and forms the initial.. grab, I guess, into the material. For example, when I first began reading Umlaut House, the foremost thing that came to my mind was "Comedy". I was reading the comic long before I became involved in anything engineering, so that side didn't appeal to me, and I wasn't really interested in the "Gay" part of it, so much as the romance in general.. and sappy romance stories don't do it for me either. It's the funny melded with the cute, described in the basest of terms, that initially attracted me to the comic.

.. Wandering train of thought aside, if you'd dropped the trope and gone simply for off the wall humor based entirely off of the quirks of the characters and concept, it wouldn't have pulled me in. Because, for comics, if you can't read a strip and understand it, it's unlikely to keep your attention. You're not writing an epic series of novels or a 5000 page documentary, you're encapsulating a laugh into 4 panels 3 times a week, and sowing in a little piece of yourself each time, until it becomes something else. Forcing yourself out of what has worked for you, and out of what you actually want to do, in the name of being 100% unadulteratedly unique, more often than not, backfires. It's like those paintings that are nothing more than a collection of random dots.. there's no rhyme or reason to them, and even if you can draw out or divine some kind of emotion from them, they still don't.. depict anything, or tell a story. Their only appeal is simply that they're not something else.

--Cyril Dran

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Stop gnawing on yourself, its a terrible habit ;)

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"It would be a parody of Mahou Shojo, and [...] and one of the heroes would be a Hot-Blood Cute Shotaro Boy with a British accent who dual-wields BFS's that can turn into shields, thematically named Wootz and Damascus, whose finishing technique would be traveling back in time, shrinking, and going on a Fantastic Voyage into his opponent's mother's womb and delivering a Single (or maybe double) Diagonal Slash to the zygote that will eventually be his opponent, causing them to fall apart years later, right after he travels back in time..."

Trust me, you're fine.

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