The Evolutionary Force of Tropes

Image by Dresden codak, showing principles of posthumanism

One of the greatest sources of human suffering in history has arguably been the debate over what is and is not natural and who can or cannot be defined as human.
While the scientific method has helped in some ways, refining the ideas of humanism and relativism, in another sense it has only exacerbated the tendency of humans to want to define all things in their own neat categories.

These categories, while essential in the realm of the real, are less helpful when studying the realms of symbolism and imagination.
This point is made abundantly clear when using the “dichotomies” of natural and unnatural, after all when someone says that something is unnatural it is rarely if ever complementary.
Equally it is telling that the word inhuman has a primary definition of “lacking human qualities of compassion and mercy, the secondary (and more literal) definition of being “not human in nature or character” is rarely used.
Equally the inverse have a positive association as if nature is a universally positive force and humanity a consistently beneficent one.

These positive and negative associations with words are tropes in action, and (as counterproductive as they often are) are also just as useful an evolutionary aid as any other artificial construct ever made.
In the original iteration of TV Tropes, the site focused exclusively on tropes found in TV shows (hence the name).
Over time however the bailiwick of the site grew to cover other forms of media and even real life, but how is this possible?
Why are patterns of behaviour applied to fictional characters so easily applied to people in the real?
Obviously fiction imitates fact but there is so much more than that, people create characters with symbolic value in their imagination that can then mimetically spread to the imaginations of others who then apply value to the construct.
In applying value to an idea is to give it power however, in this case it is potentially the power to alter behaviour, “self improvement through narrative” (McNeill, 2012, pp. 68).
Just as natural selection is a tool of physical evolution, the concepts of TV Tropes is a tool for the evolution of the mind.

References

McNeill, L., 2012, There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman

Auto/Biography, University of Hawaii Press, pp. 68

Codak, D., Evolution, Source: TV Tropes: The Singularity, Main Page.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSingularity