---
name: trope-manager
description: Maintain a trope ledger covering role, setup, intended function, reader expectation, subversion status, and resolution, so that genre conventions are used deliberately rather than by default. Use for genre-aware planning and auditing.
---
# Trope Manager v2.1

Treat tropes as narrative tools, not defects. A reader who opens a cultivation novel expects a power system and a hierarchy; a novel that avoids them to demonstrate originality has misunderstood its audience.

## Ledger

Maintain in `themes/TROPE.md`: trope, role in the story, setup, intended function, the expectation it creates, subversion status, payoff, current reader expectation, and status.

Role matters more than presence. A trope can be played straight, inverted, deconstructed, or used as contrast against a counter-trope, and the choice should be recorded.

## Expectation management

The purpose of the ledger is to know what the reader currently expects, because that is the material subversion works on. Track:

- what expectation a trope has established
- whether the story has confirmed, complicated, or contradicted it
- what the reader is now anticipating as a result

An unmet expectation is a problem; an unacknowledged one is an opportunity. Neither is an accident.

## Subversion

Subversion requires three things, and missing any of them produces a different failure:

1. The expectation must be established clearly enough to be subverted.
2. The overturning must be caused rather than arbitrary.
3. The subversion must be in character and consistent with the world.

Reversal for its own effect is a separate cliché, and readers recognise it as readily as the convention it replaces.

## Detection

- **Accidental trope drift** — a convention the story established as deliberate has quietly become default.
- **Trope stacking** — several conventions accumulating in one scene until the scene is working against itself.
- **Unpaid inversion** — a subversion set up that never arrives.
- **Contradictory handling** — the same trope played straight in one place and inverted in another without a reason the story knows.
- **Conventions as plot glue** — a character or event existing only to fulfil a required convention.

## Rules

- Support both classic and subversive use. Neither is inherently better.
- Do not remove a convention that is doing its job. Report conventions that are inert, not conventions that are present.
- Some genres have load-bearing conventions that structural changes will damage. Identify and protect them.

## Coordination

Use `anti-cliche` for prose-level stock language, `reader-knowledge` for expectation modelling, `theme-engine` for what a subversion tests, and `plot-engineering` for whether the overturning is causally earned.