{"id":8842,"date":"2013-09-03T17:17:20","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T23:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8842"},"modified":"2013-09-03T17:17:54","modified_gmt":"2013-09-03T23:17:54","slug":"trope-tuesday-forbidden-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-forbidden-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart some of the tropes I’m playing with in my latest WIP, Sons of the Starfarers.<\/strong>\u00a0 One of the things I love to do when brainstorming a new story is to use tvtropes like a menu, finding the tropes that best fit my story ideas and combining them with other tropes to get even more ideas.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It’s not often hard to spot the forbidden zone<\/a> in a fantastical world.\u00a0 Perhaps it has an ominous name<\/a> (bonus points if it has the word “doom” in it<\/a>), or perhaps there’s some sort of sign<\/a> saying “do not enter.<\/a>” Either way, this is definitely a place where no one goes, and no one is supposed to go.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can pretty much guarantee that the main characters are going to go there.\u00a0 It’s like the forbidden fruit<\/a>: the very fact that it’s off limits makes it more alluring.\u00a0 If genre blindness<\/a> is in effect, someone will probably make the mistake of saying “what could possibly go wrong?<\/a>”<\/p>\n

There are many reasons why the zone may be forbidden.\u00a0 Perhaps it’s a death world<\/a>, where the characters will soon find themselves running for their lives<\/a>.\u00a0 Perhaps it’s not quite so dangerous, but once you go, you can never come back<\/a>.\u00a0 Or perhaps all the warnings were lies, and the so-called forbidden zone is actually the place that the characters needed to get to all along.\u00a0 If that’s the case, then the mentor was probably a broken pedestal<\/a> or the Svengali<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In any case, the forbidden zone<\/a> definitely lies in the realm of adventure<\/a>.\u00a0 Depending on how soon or how late in the story the characters go there, it may lie just on the other side of the threshold<\/a>, at the bottom of the belly of the whale<\/a>, or at the very heart of the character’s nadir<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Mines of Moria, the Toxic Jungle, Area 51, the Elephant Graveyard, and the Fire Swamp are all classic examples.\u00a0 In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Earth itself is a forbidden zone to all the other inhabitants of the solar system, which is why it’s called the silent planet.<\/p>\n

In real life, there are plenty of these as well.\u00a0 Just look at the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula, or the fallout zone around Chernobyl.\u00a0 When I was living in Georgia, Abkhazia was off limits to the TLG volunteers, meaning that if you went there (and the Ministry of Education found out about it<\/a>) it was grounds for immediate firing.\u00a0 Of course, that only encouraged some of my TLG friends to go there even more–remember the forbidden fruit<\/a>?\u00a0 Others waited until their contracts were over and practically made a tour of the many forbidden zones of the Caucasus, including Nagorny Karabakh, which one friend described as safer than Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

I’ve toyed with this trope in my own work, but never too explicitly.\u00a0 The best example is probably the alien ghost ship from Genesis Earth.<\/strong>\u00a0 It’s not exactly forbidden, since there’s no one around to tell Mike not to go there, but Terra definitely doesn’t want him to go.\u00a0 Earlier in the same book, she forbids him from entering her workspace in the observatory, which leads to some complications and a major reveal when he inevitably does.\u00a0 In the Gaia Nova series, the Outer Reaches qualify as a forbidden zone, since the only people who live out there are murderous barbarians like the Hameji.<\/p>\n

In my new series, Sons of the Starfarers,<\/strong> the first book starts out with a forbidden zone–a derelict space colony, where everyone has died of an unknown cause.\u00a0 Since the nearest settlement is light-years away (and because Aaron is perhaps too curious for his own good), that’s where Isaac and Aaron go.\u00a0 What they find there propels the rest of the book–and quite possibly the rest of the series.<\/p>\n

Check back next week for more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart some of the tropes I’m playing with in my latest WIP, Sons of the Starfarers.\u00a0 One of the things I love to do when brainstorming a new story is to use tvtropes like a menu, finding the tropes that best fit my story… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"This week's Trope Tuesday: the Forbidden Zone, or the place where every self-respecting protagonist invariably goes.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[862,32,855],"tags":[335,1007,705,835,763,100,380,641,565,626],"class_list":["post-8842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ssf-i","category-ge","category-ssf","tag-adventure","tag-gaia-nova","tag-georgia","tag-mentors","tag-the-caucasus","tag-the-hameji","tag-the-heros-journey","tag-trope-tuesday","tag-tropes-and-cliches","tag-tvtropes","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2iC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8842"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8846,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8842\/revisions\/8846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}