The Tropes of “Guardians of the Galaxy”

So, I saw the film Guardians of the Galaxy recently and noticed at once that it was a hotbed of tropes. I mentioned tropes in my last two blog posts, if you have not read them yet, I highly recommend them (because I will get more views on my blog). I wanted to investigate these tropes in more detail to fully understand how the equation works.

I am, of course, not going to go into the dozens of sub-tropes and minor tropes that are baked into the film’s composition, but I thought I might take a stab at crafting a series of equations explaining the overall and basic structure of the film.

Let’s start with the characters.

In the film, you have the following:

[The Leader (Star Lord) + The Opposite (Drax) + The Brains  (Rocket) + The Brawn (Groot) + The Chick (Gamora) = 5-man Band]

(I’m willing to concede if you want to switch Groot and Drax. They fulfill a very similar role.)

There, you have your protagonist cast. The 5-man Band is a classical trope defining a rag-tag group of individuals who work off each other’s strengths and weaknesses to form a dynamic team. Guardians provides a classical example of this. You’ve got your sarcastic, but beloved hero; your “lancer,” or opposite of the hero; your brains that provides a certain level of snarky commentary; your muscle that provides the necessary blunt force; and your chick, who provides the romantic entanglement for one or more of the main cast—albeit reluctantly or confusingly.

Bingo.

Now, you have to put the 5-man Band in a situation—provide them with adversity and a quest.

So, you take the Unlikely Companions trope and add it into the 5-man Band trope. Then, you consider their individual motives (money and revenge), and you have:

(5-man Band + Unlikely companions) + Anti-Hero quest = “Hook” plot.

The hook plot, (a term I use loosely), is the initial reason for the characters to become intertwined in each others stories. Star Lord, Rocket and (to a lesser extent) Groot and Gamora are seeking money and Drax and (to a lesser extent) Gamora is seeking revenge. Though they are initially at odds (“Old enemies become reluctant allies” trope), they decide to work together to achieve all of their individual goals simultaneously.

This is born in the “Alcatraz” scene where they pull the old “Prison riot + Elaborate plan = Prison break trope combo”

This allows them to escape without a hitch and begin their mismatched alliance.

But then, we learn that they are carting around an “Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power;” that being that troublesome little orb. This is your One Ring, or your Sword of Destiny; basically, anything that has massive appeal, but massive destructive capabilities, and features a connection to the Dark Lord character in some fashion. This item compels the “Dark Lord” (in this case a combo of the Sub-Villain Ronin and the Ultra-Villain Thanos) to pursue and otherwise oppose the protagonists in search of this item.  

Now, you have the 5-man Band + Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power – Villain’s Plot = X

Where “X” represents the unknown outcome of the various potential scenarios. Here, we experience the “what ifs.” What if Ronin destroys everything with the power of the orb? What if Thanos gets his hands on it? What if Star Lord is defeated?

Of course, that “X” becomes resolved at the end of the film, but ultimately, it just opens many more variables for potential sequels because… you know, that’s what Marvel does.

Essentially, the entire film boils down to this rough equation:

Unlikely Heroes + Item of Wonderfully Disastrous Power – Villain’s ostentatious and purely evil plot = Guardians of the Galaxy.

When broken down into these component parts, this film resembles that Lord of the Rings’s, the Star Wars’s and the Avengers’s of the last 40 years of film and storytelling.

Of course, they are not the same film, but the tropes that they use are very much the same.

The point here is that tropes, at their core, are just story-telling devices. They can be mixed and matched, revised, distorted, augmented, and otherwise moved around to make an infinite number of stories, characters, plots, concepts, and settings.

There are no new stories, only new ways to tell old ones.