Quote from: esterHow do you keep familiar tropes fresh?

Don't use them all the time.

A fridge was what I thought too; personally I try to avoid clichés, because they are tired, but usually what happens is that you are only going to keep them to a minimum. You will never get rid of them entirely, which even player's will fall back to them, so often I try to interject humor with them.

I think its much more challenging to do a familiar trope really really well.

Anyone can pull off a "superman is really a fascist" thing; its hard to do a "superman is really as great as he seems" and do it in a way that's worthwhile.

I think the other thing you can do with a familiar trope is kind of deconstruct it - forget all you "know" about the trope, and re-approach it as if it were a new idea.  *Not* building on the familiar way in which it's usually presented can be a great way to keep it fresh without subverting it.

Subversion is good, but in a jaded time (where we have hundreds of tv channels and thousands of of competing sources to entertain you) it has become its own tired trope. Whenever you pull "the blue is really red!" it has to be something that draws little suspicion to itself for quite awhile. And in this modern age of explicit and NOW! and Xtreme! it is like a lost art. Not my first recommendation due to its current challenging nature.

An easier way to maintain interest is minor variations, such as shades, tints, hues, and sharpness. Minor variations, little details that breathe life, adjusts the trope into the setting framework more believably. Basically you are adjusting on a minor scale the object's brightness (tints and shades), hues (bold or muddy), and focus (crisp or blurry) amid its surrounding context. And you can do lots of neat tricks with that, such as an impressionistic setting with a Tragic Figure within done up in baroque realism.

And then there's always tupperware. Remember to save some for later. Often times I'll see a thread of a trope start, and it'll only last two or so sessions. Time really is the great equalizer, as Ravenwing said. All that deconstructive focus our culture has honed becomes weakened in the face of taxing our short attention spans.