I can’t believe Christmas is here already. Well, Merry Christmas and all that crap. Happy Holidays. Hanukkah Sameach. None of the above. Pick your greeting; I don’t care. Why? Because I’m spending the holidays writing this crap.

Today, I’m writing a special Christmas message for Frienemy for Life Mendel. Yeah, that dude. Honestly, it’s more of a rant than a message, but it’s what he asked for. Well, technically, he didn’t ask for a rant. He asked me to address a question, but it’s the sort of question I can only answer with a rant and so that’s what I’m shoving up his mismatched Christmas stockings.

The rest of you are just along for the ride.

How to Deconstruct Your Game

Angry, I know you think tropes and cliches are good, but how might one design a good scenario that deconstructs and subverts tropes if they were so inclined?

That’s the dumbass question Frienemy for Life Mendel asked while we were talking about G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series — my absolute favorite modern fantasy series — and the way Martin very effectively deconstructs and subverts fantasy adventure and fairy tail tropes. Which I complimented.

Now, before I get into the discussion about tropes and cliches and why Mendel’s dumbass question is stupid and wrong, I’m going to take the opportunity to address something with you, Entire Frigging Internet Gaming Community. So buckle up. This ain’t just a rant for Mendel; it’s for everyone.

I Know It’s Been Thirteen Years

I love Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. He’s an amazing writer and it’s one of the best-written fantasy series in the modern age. But whenever I — or anyone — express a positive opinion of G.R.R. Martin’s work online, people always appear out of absolutely frigging nowhere to remind me that Martin has not completed an entry in the mainline series in thirteen years and that there’s no reason to think he’s ever going to finish the series. They go on to explain their bullshit hypothesis as to why the series is totally unfinishable, at least by Martin, and that my best or only hope is that Brandon Sanderson will take a break from writing his magical-fantasy-textbooks-disguised-as-novels to finish the series for me. More than a few also feel the need to point out that really, A Song of Ice and Fire is a terrible series and that G.R.R. Tolkien is actually the only person who has ever written a good fantasy series ever and I should read his books over and over again forever.

It always happens. If I was stranded on a desert island, I would look to sky and say, “I love A Song of Ice and Fire and I hope Winds of Winter comes out soon,” because some asshole will always appear out of nowhere to tell me Martin’s never going to finish the book and Tolkien is better and then I can kill them and take their speedboat.

I know it’s been thirteen years. Every fan knows it’s been thirteen years. We’re not happy about that. But I love the books I got and if I never got another, I still got five amazing books, three novellas, two excellent history books, and four seasons of excellent television out of the whole thing. Nothing’s going to take that away. Martin also isn’t dead yet; he might finish the next book someday. There’s no knowing. Sanderson has no interest in finishing the series if Martin doesn’t and Martin doesn’t want anyone else finishing it and I’d be happier for it to go unended anyway than to have any author try to finish it because Martin is great. I’ve learned a lot of great Game Mastering from Martin’s writing.

Pointing this shit out doesn’t change my mind about the things I like and it doesn’t make you look smarter than me. It doesn’t look like you have better taste. If someone’s expressing joy for something they love and you shit all over that, it just makes you a giant shitbag. If you were an ice cream flavor, you’d be praline and dick. Don’t bother commenting. No one gives a shit. Least of all me.

Meanwhile, opinions aren’t zero-sum games. You can like more than one thing. I love Martin but I also very much like Tolkien. Granted, I’d much rather watch Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy than read the books, but that’s just me and if you were talking about how much Tolkien’s books meant to you, I wouldn’t come out of nowhere to say that, actually, “Jackson’s films had much more emotional weight than Tolkien’s dry-ass writing and his obtuse, emotionless characters who should have spent more time acting on their feelings than giving speeches about them.” Do you disagree? No one gives a shit. Least of all me. Don’t comment.

My point is, I like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and I was talking to someone else who also liked them, despite the efforts of several asshats in my Discord server to derail the conversation by pointing out he’d never finish his thirteen-year late book, when that person, Mendel, asked me a terrible question that I now how to be a total dickbag about.

Sorry, Mendel.

Tropes are Good

I’ve written a lot about how I think tropes and cliché are totally awesome and they absolutely belong in stories and games. I’ve gleefully bragged that I start all my fantasy adventure roleplaying games in or near a tavern. It got to the point almost exactly one year ago, when the exact same instigator, Mendel, asked me why I love tropes a whole huggy bunch. That led to a thousand-ish word essay in an Ask Angry column about why Game Masters shouldn’t avoid tropes at all, but should totally embrace them.

See, Game Masters have an aversion to tropes. Some of that’s just down to a misguided belief that anything that isn’t original isn’t creative and therefore isn’t good. If you think that’s true and you catch yourself using a trope or a cliché, you change that shit immediately for fear that you’re making derivative schlock your players will mock and hate.

Some Game Masters take it a step further. They’re elitists with their heads so far up their own assess they could lick their own medulla oblongatas. They’re above pedestrian fantasy crap about pretend elves killing orcs for treasure and rescuing princesses from dragons and so they’ve got to avoid tropes and cliché because they’re just too good for that kind of peasant shit. There are even Game Masters who think fantasy stories and games are founded on problematic istaphobic ideas and have to destroy any nod to any gaming tradition at all.

Now, I wasn’t talking to the elitists and the postmodernist assholes because there’s no hope for them. They’ve chosen to be assholes and to produce nothing but an endless stream of utter shit — as assholes will do — and nothing I say is going to change that. It was the misguided but well-intentioned pursuers of creative originality I was worried about. I wanted to show them that tropes are tropes precisely because they make satisfying stories and games. Moreover, they’re really just narrative ingredients. It’s just stuff you throw in the bowl to make a narrative cake. You wouldn’t say, “I can’t make a cake with chocolate because that’s unoriginal; people don’t want more chocolate.” No, you’d say, “People love chocolate and I want to make cake people love so where’s my box of Cocoa Krispies?”

But What If You Want to Deconstruct…

While talking with Mendel about G.R.R. Martin’s works, I made a dumbass mistake. I praised Martin for deconstructing a couple of fantasy tropes in a way that I found interesting. Given my stance on tropes and cliché, that was an odd thing to say. I shouldn’t be praising any kind of deconstruction at all, especially since I’ve also said, often, that I hold deconstruction in extremely low esteem. Often using swearwords. But, again, it’s like chocolate. I like chocolate and I think chocolate improves a lot of dishes, but I can also enjoy well-made desserts that aren’t chocolate. Like I said above, you can like lots of different things.

Obviously, then, I think there’s space for deconstruction and subversion and other metanarrative tomfoolery in legitimate narratives and games, right? So it’s totally reasonable, then, for Mendel to ask me how I think someone might do it right as it were. Except, it’s not reasonable and Mendel can’t do it right. He missed something really important in my spiel about tropes and cliché. Hell, he actually missed the most important point. And if he missed it, probably lots of you did too.

But before I explain why Mendel’s a dumbass for asking the question — and why you are too — let me make sure we all know exactly what I’m talking about here.

Deconstruction, Subversion, and Other Crappy Metanarrative Parlor Tricks

If you’ve been paying any attention to pop culture media in the past decade or two, you’ve heard some obnoxious asshole or another prattling on about deconstruction or poststructuralism or subverting expectations or some other similar crap. Especially subverting expectations. Holy shit but everything’s about subverting expectations these days.

Mostly, you hear this crap from elitist creators trying to explain why their latest steaming pile of media flopped. It was just too smart or too challenging for the dumbass audience. You’ll also hear it from media critics yelling at audiences for not liking the right things. That’s assuming they’re not just running the, “If you criticize this for any reason, you’re an istaphobe” playbook. But that’s a story for another time.

All this crap has to do with something called the metanarrative. That is, it’s all to do with the rules that stories follow. It’s also got a bunch to do with postmodernism, but I don’t want to get too deep into those weeds. Just know that postmodernism is like reverse King Midas: everything it touches turns to shit. Usually intentionally.

But back to the metanarrative. That means screwing around with the rules that make stories stories. One example of a metanarrative trick is deconstruction. That’s where you tell a story in such a way as to show people how the story — and all similar stories — are basically hot garbage. I shit you not.

Consider Watchmen. At least, consider the original Alan Moore graphic novel and the 2009 Zak Snyder film anyway. I have no interest in experiencing any more adaptations of Watchmen. Watchmen deconstructed superhero stories. It started with all the usual tropes and cliché that power superhero stories and then carried them to their logical conclusion to show that, if you’re actually intellectually honest, such stories would lead to utter crapsack narratives. At least, that’s what deconstructionists will claim.

Note, also, I’m not being inflammatory. Well, not too inflammatory anyway. Deconstructionism is based on the writing of French asshat Jacques Derrida and the movement isn’t about taking narratives apart but rather about showing audiences how narratives have already fallen apart and we just need to be shown that in the right way. The end result is the same though: it takes a genre or story construction people love, tears it apart, makes it miserable, and then claims the intellectual high ground.

Kind of like the dickbags who endlessly remind me that George Martin will never finish…

Never mind. I already made that point.

The point here is that literary deconstruction is an attempt to show how a certain kind of story — say fantasy adventure — totally falls apart if you apply basic logic and reason and follow the story threads to their natural conclusions. That’s the kindest, most objective definition I can provide.

Why Destroy What You Can Subvert?

You can play with the metanarrative in less destructive ways. One metanarrative parlor trick that got very popular in Hollywood in the late twentyteens is called subverting expectations. Basically, if you know — as a creator — how stories tend to fit together and so you know what audiences expect from them, you can build a game or story that leads the audience to expect one thing and then deliver another, different thing instead. Often — for some batshit insane reason — creators think the best way to subvert expectations is to deliver a payoff that’s completely and utterly disappointing. It’s not enough to surprise the audience, you have to surprise them with something objectively worse than what they expected.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Consider — for a good example of subverted expectations — the ending of the 2011 film The Muppets written by and starring Jason Siegel. The titular Muppets have come out of forced retirement and are putting on a benefit variety show so they can buy their theater back from a rich industrialist who plans to demolish it. Meanwhile, the newest Muppet, Walter, is struggling to find the courage he needs to take his place on stage with the rest of the Muppets.

The midnight deadline is fast approaching, and the donation counter is ticking up, but it’s not enough, and finally, Walter takes the stage. He gives an amazing performance and draws a landslide of donations and just before the industrialist can sabotage the show, the audience has pledged enough money to save the theater… is what you expect to happen. But, actually, before enough donations come in, the industrialist cuts power to the theater. The deadline hits and the Muppets end just shy of their goal. Except, when the power comes back on and the donation counter restarts, it turns out it’s been malfunctioning the whole time and the donations weren’t even close. They didn’t miss by pennies but by thousands of dollars. They were never going to get their theater back.

That’s subverting expectations. But that’s an example that worked. Why? First, because it was really funny. The reaction to the malfunctioning donation clock was comedy gold. Second, because it’s the Muppets. The Muppets are the felt-covered kings and queens of trampling all over the metanarrative. That’s their stock-in-trade. Third, because in the epilogue, the Muppets realize the theater is just a building. What mattered is they got back together and they’re doing what they love. They’ve got a new member too. They can keep performing; they can go on tour. It ends on a hopeful note. The story doesn’t leave you feeling like shit for getting invested.

Moreover, it’s the frigging Muppets. They’ve earned their ability to play metanarrative games by providing seven decades of heartwarming, hilarious art. They ain’t doing it to make fun of you, the audience, but to share the joke — and the joy — with you.

Compare that to professional shitbag Rian Johnson. Remember what he tried to pull with his turn at the helm of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. See, it got retconned in Rise of the Skywalker, but Rian Johnson tried to establish in The Last Jedi that Rey was a complete and total nobody whose parents just dumped her on a desert world and disappeared. See, it had been set up in The Force Awakens that Rey’s heritage was super important and it would connect her to the previous Star Wars in an important way. But Rian Johnson — like his bestest buddy Kathleen Kennedy — hates Star Wars and especially hates Star Wars fans. He wanted a revelation that would make everyone miserable. So, when he got to do the second film, he said, “No, screw you all, she’s not connected to the old, dead, crappy cannon. She’s just absolutely nobody but she’s still better than everything you ever loved. Suck it losers.”

I am not, by the way, putting words in his mouth. He said this shit. In interviews. That was his plan. But I digress…

The point is that subverting expectations is a metanarrative trick whereby you construct your story to lead your audience to expect something and then surprise them by doing something else. Or nothing else. Done well, you give them a meaningful and emotional surprise. If done poorly, you make them feel like crap. Which is usually the point.

Pick a Trope; Any Trope

Deconstruction and subversion are the major ways creators play with the metanarrative in modern works, but they ain’t the only ways. People who love to discuss metanarrative crap — yeah, I admit I’m one of them — have lists upon lists of tropes and cliché and all the different ways they can be played with. The Mecca of Tropedom — TV Tropes — has an entire page dedicated to screwing with tropes. Check it out but do note that the Surgeon General of the United States has found TV Tropes to be highly addicting and suggests it should not be consumed by anyone ever.

As with all things, execution is key. The Muppets can play with tropes. They’re good at it and their tone allows for it. Before it started taking itself too seriously, The Order of the Stick played a lot with tropes, even going so far as to one time hang a literal lampshade on their lampshade hanging. If it’s done lovingly and artfully and tonally appropriately and respectfully and moderationally, it can work. But few people get it right.

The problem is, this metanarrative crap is inherently destructive.

Ruining a Story By Talking About The Story

At their absolute best — done perfectly — metanarrative tricks are an attempt to comment on the stories people love. To poke a little fun at those stories. But that’s when it’s done absolutely perfectly. The vast majority of the time, it’s not done perfectly. In those cases, metanarrative tomfoolery just wrecks stories. Deconstructions are deconstructions. They rip shit apart. When you’re done deconstructing, all you’ve got is a broken thing. If that thing is something you love, you ain’t gonna be happy about it. Subversion is literally about setting you up for disappointment. It’s about making you expect something and giving you something else. If that something else isn’t objectively, substantially better than what was built up, you’re just disappointed. Moreover, you feel misled by the creator who set you up for that disappointment.

Meanwhile, toying with tropes — zigzagging and lampshade hanging and all that crap — isn’t usually destructive, but it does amount to the author trying to share a knowing joke and a nod and wink with the audience. It’s the author saying, “Hey, isn’t this a funny thing about these stories?” However funny and clever it might be, it still amounts to pulling the audience out of the story to comment on it. If it’s the Muppets or Rick and Morty and that’s what the audience signed up for, fine and dandy, but if the audience is emotionally engaged with the work itself, commenting on it is just reminding them this is just a silly little story. It doesn’t matter.

Now, personally, I’ve got enough trouble keeping my players fully invested in my world when I’m giving it my all. I really don’t need to pull the players aside every few minutes to offer clever commentary on how silly fantasy adventure stories are when you think about it. Unless I’m already doing a tongue-in-cheek game, I’m not exactly inclined to tapdance across the fourth wall to impress my players with my metanarrative cleverness.

Why Do You Need To Comment?

So you want to know how to subvert expectations and deconstruct tropes in your games and to do it well, huh? Let me ask you a simple question: why? Why is that a thing you want to do? What is it you’re trying to accomplish with that crap?

I talked above about Game Masters who are constantly trying to show off how clever and creative they are, right? Well, I wasn’t being hyperbolic. Some Game Masters really do need that kind of validation. They’re drawn to metanarrative tomfoolery because they think it shows people how smart they are. Or how artistic. Whatever. The problem is that shit doesn’t work because such Game Masters can’t stop at a subtle wink every now and then. They need to brag and they need their players to react.

There are also Game Masters — and artists of every kind — who have a Message. They want their games to teach their players a lesson about something. Often it’s political or social, but there are all kinds of messages you can work into a game. The problem is, once you’re trying to convey a message, you’re not running a game anymore, you’re providing propaganda. People do not get emotionally invested in propaganda. Propaganda you agree with flatters you and so you consume it, but you’re not engaged with it. Propaganda you disagree with just infuriates you. It’s just an artist or Game Master lecturing you.

I’m not saying that art can’t be used to tackle important themes and analyze issues, but this ain’t the place for that discussion and your game table isn’t the place for that garbage anyway, so I don’t feel good about helping you.

Finally, there are Game Masters who genuinely dislike the medium. They’ve got an axe to grind against traditional fantasy stories or games or whatever. They think there’s something wrong with the things people have loved for years and so they’ve got to be taken apart and then replaced by something else. Those are the Rian Johnson Game Masters.

The problem is that there’s only one reason to play metanarrative games intentionally and that is because you want to make a comment about the narrative. You’ve got something to say about how stories and games are put together. What is it you want to say? Why is it worth interrupting your game or story? Is the message about the narrative going to add to the game or will it just be a destructive distraction? Is that what you want? If it isn’t, then skip the commentary. If it is, skip the game. Don’t run or play games you want to destroy; that’s just a terrible use of your time.

Go Genuine or Go Home

I mentioned that G.R.R. Martin effectively deconstructs certain aspects of romantic fantasy stories and fairy tales. But that’s not what he set out to do. He loves fantasy literature. He famously rereads Tolkien every year or two. He loves Arthurian legends and chivalric knights and his books are loaded with loving references to his favorite tales and characters. He loves a lot of the same stories I do and it shows.

When he started writing A Game of Thrones, it was because he was inspired to write a scene about a kid finding some abandoned dire wolf puppies in a summer snowstorm. Seriously. He had a story in his heart and he started writing. The story took on a life of its own from there. That’s true of most authors, but Mr. Gardener Writer is obsessed with the idea of letting the story rewrite itself over and over. Ned Stark didn’t die because Martin wanted to tell people how terrible honor and duty are; Ned Stark died because that’s what happened in the story in his heart. It’s a genuine story. Sometimes it leads to places that other fantasy stories don’t go; other times it’s totally tropey.

Consider his treatment of prophecy. He’s so frigging proud about how prophecy is misleading in his stories and how it always comes true in ways that screw you over and how chasing prophecy leads to doom. Just like every fantasy story about prophecy ever. That’s the same take on prophecy as Harry Frigging Potter. Lots of Martin’s characters come straight off the pages of TV Tropes completely unchanged. He plays cliché straight as much as he subverts it. Do you know why?

It’s because he’s telling a story. That’s it. He’s not trying to take things apart, tear things down, or provide a message. That shit just happens.

Remember how I wrapped up my love letter to tropes last year?

So use the tropes that feel good to use. Use them because they feel right. And if they don’t feel right, don’t use them. That’s all. Don’t purposely use them. Don’t subvert them or destroy them. If you just do what feels right and good, you’ll probably end up being tropey because tropes feel right and good.

I joke that I purposely start all my campaigns in taverns purely to stick it to the trope-haters. And to prove I can run a better game that’s tropes all the way down than the most original post-modern Game Masters can conjure from pure creativity. But, really, I do it because it feels right. The chance meeting in a tavern feels contrived, sure, but a story that starts with a chance meeting is a story that could have started with anyone. It just happened to start with you. You’re nobody special, just someone passing on the road, but by putting yourself out there and taking action, you can make yourself someone special. Isn’t that amazing? And it’s all just by chance. Or is it? Maybe it’s not. Maybe a greater power did put in this room at this time with these people. But does it matter? Whether by fate or fortune, you’re here, and you chose to talk to that stranger and team up with the peasant girl with the stolen sword and the mysterious elf diplomat and the refugee dwarf and the wandering abbot. Maybe a hero is just someone who lives their life assuming they’re always in the right place at the right time and asks themselves what they’re meant to do there and then.

I wasn’t telling you to embrace tropes and cliché because they’re the bestest. I wasn’t even telling you not to avoid them because you think they’re bad. I was telling you to write the game that’s in your heart and not sweat the metanarrative bullshit. Write a genuine game and if it’s loaded with tropes and cliché, let it be. You can’t write a good story or game if you’re obsessed with metanarrative bullshit. Stop doing that.

Above, I compared tropes and cliché to the ingredients from which stories are mixed, but that’s actually a terrible analogy. They’re not like ingredients and you shouldn’t think about them at all. Just write your story or build or run your game. Tropes and cliché will find their way in because all of your own narrative experiences will flavor everything you write. It’s the same with themes and values and virtues and all that other high-minded crap. You can’t help but weave a part of yourself into the story. If you do that as part of telling a story — or building a game — you believe in, it’ll probably turn out good. But if you try to force that shit, you’re going to end up with hot garbage.

So, Mendel, and everyone, there’s your answer. “How can you effectively deconstruct and subvert tropes and cliché and pull off clever metanarrative tricks in your tabletop roleplaying game adventures?” You can’t. Not because it can’t be done, but because the minute you try to do it, you’ve already failed.

And also because you’re just running a game of pretend elves around a dinner table for your friends. Holy mother of shit, get over yourself.

And Merry Christmas.