The Redundancy Twins
Hello loyal readers! Phil here again and yes, I know it’s been a while.
So, I just saw this amazing video on the internet in the past day…and as one might expect, it comes from the land of truly wild content—Australia. Have a look, it's worth your time.
https://x.com/7newsbrisbane/status/1914212517506949137?s=46&t=k6Ef9qEIZWaMQ90QaWrNVg
These sisters are incredible and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if booking agents from every late night talk show are scrambling to get them on Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon as I write this.
So, part of being a writer is knowing what the tropes of any genre are. It’s something I’m definitely sensitive to. I watch a LOT of media and get a ton of exposure to all the tropes. Some are more overused than others. And if you’ve seen one too many times, it just gets annoying and destroys the immersion of your story. There’s one in particular this brought to mind as I saw it. And that’s of the Single Minded Twin. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleMindedTwins
In short, it's when a set of identical twins seem to share a brain, much like in the Australian news video. The reason why it jumped out at me was that it feels like one of the most overused and noticeable tropes. It’s often done as a shorthand to comedy. “Oh isn’t that funny, the look the same and finish each other’s sentences!” I’ve actually been reading the very popular fantasy novel The Lies of Locke Lamora and while I do enjoy the book so far, it does have characters, Galdo and Calo Sanza, who are twins and fall hard into this trope. They’re constantly riffing off of one another with their single-mindedness, but instead of charming, I find it grating. The only reason I can explain for this annoyance, is because they’re so perfectly in sync with what they’re saying, I can only imagine they’ve spent time rehearsing this routine in private. Whereas the Australian sisters seem like they spend so much time together, they’ve adapted to speak the same words, but they’re not reading each other’s minds.
(At least with the Stabbington bros, one had an eye patch)
Quite frankly, The Single Minded Twin trope feels like lazy writing to me. If I see twins in a show, before they even say a word, I just expect they’re going to talk that way. Although identical twins in real life share the same DNA, (surprise, surprise) they actually do have their own separate and distinct personality. But instead of two well-rounded characters, writers just give us one character, doubled.
I think my first instinct would be to write twins as being completely original, with very little overlap. Just avoid the trope as much as possible. But seeing this news video was something rather eye-opening for me. Not only was it a real set of twins, their cadence was syncopated at times, but drifted off or switched to different word choices. It was mesmerizing to watch. And a good reference if you’re wanting to have characters that borrow a common trope, but taking a unique approach.
Happy writing,
~P
