Sydney is far from the first person to suggest that Wolverine is actually a terrible fighter because he relies so heavily on his regeneration – of course, the same thing could be said of anyone who has armored skin. Next time you see a hero in a comic charging into a room with bullets dramatically bouncing off him, think about how much better heroes that can’t afford to get hit have to be than him.

The conversation is skirting dangerously close to becoming meta at this point, but I figure if there were real superheros, they’d sit down and have a conversation about superhero tropes at some point. They’re not going to run through them all right now of course, as there are a killion of them, but it’s a fair bet this isn’t the last time they’ll come up in the story.

If you’re not familiar with the term “trope,” it basically means a writing convention that an audience will recognize. I think the best way to explain it is if you remember the scene in True Lies were the Bad Guy is giving his speech about America Bad, etc, and the henchman’s camera runs out of battery? Everyone in the audience figured the henchman was going to get shot by the Bad Guy. That’s a trope because everyone knows that Bad Guys off failed henchmen. Of course, James Cameron subverted the trope by having the Bad Guy just tell the henchman to go get another battery. It’s easy to confuse trope with cliché, as some tropes are so common they actually are clichés, but mostly they’re just useful terms to describe recurring elements in storytelling.

I’m going to do something dangerous here and link TVTropes, but first a warning. Remember when you discovered Wikipedia the first time, and you went to read up on the Moon Landing, and 4 hours later you had 32 tabs open and were reading about Pavlova? Well, TVTropes is an order of magnitude worse than Wikipedia, so don’t click the link if you have any plans for the rest of the day. BTW thanks to whoever is updating the Grrl Power tropes page. For some reason I can’t log in to do any editing. Click with caution my friends. TVTropes.org