Hi! I have no idea what Black Ice is, but to answer your question: tropes are definitely portable!
Tropes are memes. They form the building blocks of a culture’s literary tradition. The details may change from one story to the next, but trope can be found repeated over and over again from one character or story to another. For example, ‘wants to save everyone’ is so common that it is almost the trademark of any hero in comic books.
So go ahead and use whatever tropes you like! However, make sure you understand the difference between a trope (a generalized concept) and a plot or character (which are individual examples of the concept). The details are what turns a trope into a story or a character, and the details are the unique creative part. ‘Wants to save everyone’ belongs to almost every hero in comics. But each hero will have a unique way of expressing that: a unique combination of how insistent they are about trying, how naive they are about it, what event forces them to confront the possibility of failure, how they react to that, what they do when they actually fail.
For example, I’ve always thought that what makes Superman so fascinating is that he has always known it’s impossible to save everyone. He hears people dying and suffering all the time, and has to live with his inability to help. Maybe he’s stopping a disaster somewhere else. Maybe it’s a situation that the law forces him to let play out. Maybe it’s something that he just doesn’t dare interrupt, because people have to make their own choices and deal with the consequences, or maybe it’s something even he doesn’t have the power to stop. Even Superman can’t defeat cancer. So he is a character who knows he can never solve every problem, but he will never stop trying to do what he can anyway.
On the other hand, if you see Jack Morrison as a character who ‘wants to save everybody,’ then you could argue that his ultimate failure to do that is what broke him. In this case, his confrontation with the fact that he can’t save everyone might be what made him lose the hope that drove him, making that the dividing line between Jack Morrison and Soldier: 76.
Two very different characters based on the same trope, who react to it in different ways.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2oqn6V4