BW Media Spotlight

Let’s see, what was tonight’s topic…oh, right.

Amnesia is one of those things writers have never understood, like computers or the hueh-mans. I’m pretty sure any doctor will tell you that the solution for losing your memory after being bonked on the head is not to do a second time, accidental or otherwise. I don’t know a lot about actual amnesia so I don’t know what causes it or how you actually cure it, if ever. In Hollywood, that’s the typical cure. I decided to look up “amnesia” on Tropopedia, Fandom’s wiki for tropes. It led me to a collection of “memory tropes“, which listed among all the tropes over twenty types of amnesia types, not counting faking it.

So what I’m going to is just list all of these types of tropes with a short summary and link to their full articles on the subject, then go over some examples of how this can and can’t work. I may end up grouping things together so this isn’t a superlong list, but I’m writing this before going in blind just to see what I get out of this. I didn’t think there were that many types of uses for amnesia in stories, but I bet the cure in stories is not the right cure. It can be an amnesia episode of a story, or the plot of the movie/game/series concept. I’ve seen it done to explore the inner goodness or evil of a character, to cause a trip down memory lane for clip shows and the like, to flip the good/evil switch, and even meeting the character as an amnesiac either to set-up a mystery or to forget they set-up a mystery and just make it part of their personality.

Since “Trope Shark” is about simplifying the pile o’ trope names I’ll group things together where I can. The goal is not to overwhelm but give a basic overview of how amnesia is used in fiction. Basically, I looked it up so you don’t have to and bring you the cliff notes on this one. Even then, you can scroll to the divider if you get bored and just want to get to the point. I fell down this rabbit hole and while you get the jetpack, you’re still coming on this ride. At least this short-ish version will be easier to absorb. This is one trope with a lot of divisions.

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