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"After Y2K, the end of the world became another cliché. But who am I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger, out to right a grave injustice, alone against an empire of evil. Everything was subjective. There are only personal apocalypses. Nothing's a cliché when it's happening to you." - So sayeth the wise Detective Max Payne
Every now and then, it helps to at least acknowledge when you're doing something that's been done before.
It's not every day, but often enough I wander across a particular plot line or bit of dialogue that makes me wonder whether the participants have ever in
their lives cracked open a book. You know the ones: the guys who wanted to play god, the guy made by the guys who played god that wanted to BECOME god, the
villain that spares the hero with the thought that they are of no consequence, the hero mindlessly out for revenge, and so on, and so forth. Clichés are a
part of storytelling, and they become such for a reason; often, they work. Yet at the same time, some of them are implemented so poorly, with characters so
monumentally oblivious or short-sighted, that the whole shebang is cheapened by the process.
This is not to rail against clichés, so much as to suggest what can help make them more palatable. As the good detective so kindly points out, nothing is a cliché when it's you and yours on the line. So it went, throughout the game of the same name, where Max both lamented his predicament and felt fit to comment on the irony. Shadowy conspiracies, massive, Matrix-ey gunfights, femme fatales, and cardboard cut-out bad guys - all the stuff that frequents action cinema today. Much of the game's writing felt self-aware, as if both the writers and the characters knew that they weren't doing anything new.
Whatever one may have to say about the dialogue, it is virtually beyond argument that the game would've suffered all the more if Max never stopped to notice his own clichés.
It would be nice to think that, upon finding out about the cabal of evildoers who plotted to unleash a nigh-Biblical plague upon the Earth, at least one or two of them had read some fiction before and was vaguely familiar with the idea that good tends to trump evil when evil comes up with ridiculously convoluted plans. Of course, none of them are supposed to think they're in the movies or the books or the games, even though they are. Still, I like the idea that the psychotic nutballs that my band of merry men are after put at least some critical thought into their plan, or at least had a passing familiarity with the typical result of wacky doomsday escapades.
Basically, I acknowledge that clichés are a part of the game, and again I have no desire to see that change. What can help those clichés become better
written or easier to swallow is to have at least a few people aware of how it all must sound on paper. As with any fault, the first step is overcoming
denial; admitting that those who went down a similar path aren't that different, and that there's something to be learned from even fictional mistakes and
behavior. If a good guy is willing to acknowledge that he's doing what many have done before, then I'm willing to take him seriously when he decides to wax
poetic. Similarly, if a bad guy is willing to admit that they are, in fact, awash in hubris, then I won't wish so hard that I could shoot them in the head
to interrupt their dramatic monologue.
A little self-awareness goes a long way, that's all I'm saying.
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