How to subvert literary tropes
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé on the subversion and extension of tropes in Joelle Wellington’s Their Vicious Games and Helen Comerford’s The Love Interest
Review by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
The Chosen One. The Reluctant Hero. The Final Girl. Genre fiction is full of tropes, storytelling patterns that draw the reader into a recognisable structure and reflect the world of the audience.
Tropes serve an important purpose in genre fiction. They inform the audience what kind of journey the main heroes will venture on and they affirm the significant relationship between the reader and writer. On a cognitive level, our minds enjoy the predictability and the satisfactory payoff that comes from a well-told story.
So what happens when a trope is subverted? And why might a trope be subverted in the first place? In the YA thriller Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington, the choice to distance the narrative from any one trope is, in part, for the purpose of creating a great twist, as well as an attempt to keep the genre fresh. In Helen Comerford’s 2024 YA genre-bending debut The Love Interest, the subversion of a trope serves to counter the way it has been historically employed; the trope itself is updated to meet the needs of a more contemporary audience.
The Love Interest and Their Vicious Games both centre black girls as the protagonists. They employ the popular tropes of the romantic lead and the deconstruction of ‘the final girl’ which have historically excluded Black girlhood.
Both novels deliver satirical takedowns of tired literary conventions.
Their Vicious Games combines the high-stakes of Netflix’s Squid Game and the romantic allure of the reality show The Bachelor as we follow high school senior Adina Walker in a deadly game called The Finish. Wellington successfully dismantles the popular ‘Final Girl’ trope, whereby the female protagonist makes it to the end of the horror film alive against all odds, and manages to confront the threat head on.
The defining image of the Final Girl is usually that of a young white woman in distress, oftentimes covered in blood and grime, and/or clutching a deadly weapon. It is meant to be an empowering image, one that demonstrates to audiences everywhere, particularly girls, that adversity can be faced and defeated. But every time I come across these tropes, questions arise: Who has been left out of this world? Who is this really empowering? Through Adina, a young black girl, we see a character whose adversity does not match the rise and fall of the antagonist as it so often does in traditional Final Girl stories. Instead, Adina’s troubles predate the first chapter and will most likely follow her long after the story’s conclusion. The Final Girl trope is closely related to ‘the black person dies first’ trope recurrent in familiar horror stories. Thus in centering a black girl protagonist, Wellington disrupts damaging literary conventions.
Comerford also tackles these questions head on in her YA speculative romance novel, The Love Interest. After being saved by a new superhero in town, 17 year old Jenna Ray is pressured by the powers that be (the Heroics and Power Authority) to accept her role as the hero’s love interest. Comerford tackles and subverts the trope of ‘the chosen one’ as well as ‘the ideal love interest’, and her approaches to dismantling literary conventions are similar to Wellington’s. In centering a black girl as both the love interest and the chosen one, Comerford rejects the literary tradition that is relegating black girls to the role of second fiddle in the story. She goes further too by also rejecting the notion that being chosen or forcibly having a role put onto you is something a protagonist should willingly accept. Not only does Helen Comerford twist narrative expectations in order to remedy problematic tropes, she creates a more compelling and innovative story.
To some extent, both books are also about who the narrative allows to lead full lives and who the narrative kills off. This brings us to yet another trope that can be directly tied to the ‘Final Girl’, ‘The Chosen One’ and the ‘Love Interest’ tropes: The happily-ever-after.
The presentation of who is afforded a happy ending is a political one, as the unspoken question being asked alongside this trope is also, who deserves to have a happy ending in the first place? Witnessing a black character surviving and thriving and having agency in the narrative should not be a radical act, but frankly it is. Outside of the world of the narrative, black people currently exist in a perpetual state of recovery from historical and present-day atrocities, and so our happiness and survival are, for me, always radical.
The gaze of the readership and the history of their biases determine who is cast as the leading heroine within any given story. Both Wellington and Comerford have written immensely entertaining and well-crafted stories that thwart literary archetypes and in doing so deliver a searing indictment of harmful genre conventions.
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé is the bestselling author of Ace of Spades and Where Sleeping Girls Lie. Her latest book is Four Eids and a Funeral, co-written with Adiba Jaigirdar.
