What are some overrated tropes that you, as a reader, are so sick of? Meanwhile, as a writer, what are some of the tropes you are aware are overused but still use anyway?
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May '22last reply
Jun '22- 27
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As a reader, I hate, hate, hate reverse harems. I haven't seen it much here but it's SUPER popular in ebooks. Instead of one alpha douche borderline abusing the bland as flour female lead, you have 3+. The trope is sexist. The relationships are almost always unhealthy even if you are monogamous or poly am.
As a writer, I think insta-love is overdone but I still use it. I choose to use it as "insta-feelings" instead of insta-"love". The couple doesn't have to jump into bed together within the first twenty pages but they have feelings. Feelings are fun to work with as a writer.
As a writer, I feel like a have sort of abused the missing parent trope. I am trying to push myself to at least have some parents that are present, or if a parent is missing, they aren't dead. I think it came from knowing a lot of people growing up who did not have a dad (either being dead or just absent) and me just writing what I know.
Funnily enough, love triangles come immediately to mind. I like to think any trope could be pulled off successfully, but the back-and-forth game of "which one are they going to choose?" is frustrating to me as the reader in 99% of cases and has soured several once-favorite stories of mine. Especially when the center of the triangle doesn't end up with the character I was rooting for- or worse, I didn't like either love interest to begin with (ex: disliked all three love interests Chaol, Dorian, and Rowan from Throne of Glass- and, actually, Celaena herself too :p).
I can't think of any love triangles off the top of my head that I didn't loathe with burning passion... However, I preface all this with "funnily enough" because I actually have something in my story that sorta unintentionally resembles one ahaha 
It doesn't include any sense of competition or rivalry, and no one "likes" more than one person at a time. It's actually more of an unrequited love trope, and the 'triangle' is more of a 'line'.. with one relationship ending before the next begins. Nonetheless, ever since I realized "aw crap, this looks like a damn love triangle" I've been thinking hard about how to handle it thoughtfully and avoid all the things I hate about these.
Though it makes a lot of sense within my story's setting, I'm definitely guilty of the missing parent trope though. Actually kept my protagonists' parents alive at the beginning of the story to avoid falling into this completely, but it's established early on that they don't have much time left due to a deteriorating illness.
I think love triangles work well if you show the two love interests as symbols of "phases of life" for the MC. Two of my favorite books have them. In one, the MC becomes a single mom. One boyfriend represented her old life and what she "thought" she wanted, while the other was happy to accept her during every step of her growth process.
I don't think I have a problem with any trope. Two of my favorite franchises (The Macross and Dragon Quest series) have this thing where they keep a select set of tropes and find new angles to tell stories. Just to keep things simple.
What I find interesting is they never go off route, nudge you and be like "BETCHA DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING! HUH?!? HUH?!? HUH?!? GOD WE'RE SO META!" (cough cough Encanto cough cough).
It's just so cool for a franchise to be have this formula and always make it work.
The only love polygons I know IRL are many guys interested in one girl. And that girl keeping all of them so she can pick and choose.
Overrated trope?
F- you anything introverts! Omg she's an antisocial bookworm shut in who moans that her friend just HAD to drag her to that party!" So relatable!
Meanwhile I know three big introverts. One is a college professor, always in the center of attention, the other one lives and breathes hospitality and crowded bars, and the last one, my crush, exists only to find party events and travel everywhere.
Meanwhile extroverts have this amazing power called "I want to sleep, leave me alone, call me for the next one."
That's true! I'm hoping to pull mine off in a similar way- with one love interest representing 'security' and the other 'freedom'.
The character at the center of the triangle tends to sacrifice their own happiness for security, but learns over the course of the story that anything worth having inevitably involves risk and loss. In summary, the only way to avoid pain and loss is to not live at all. It's better to be brave and embrace life in its totality, the ugly and the good.
It's a major story theme, so I feel that the love triangle- as much as I dislike love triangles- serves an important purpose for this, at least. The progression of the romance parallels the characters' growth.
And at the very least, a love triangle can show that your MC is human. In another of my favorite books, the MC creates a love triangle between herself, her main love interest and a high school boyfriend. She feels foolish later on in the story when she learns that her exboyfriend had become a Catholic priest. They don't have to be overcomplicated and dramatic to be enjoyable.
This one came up for me a few days ago when I tried reading a comic I borrowed from the library:
- So there's a super sekret organization that only recruits women, and the women are $uper Bada$$ and are totally as awesome as the boys - except there's LITERALLY no men in sight in this world. All of the characters of any importance? Women. All of the antagonists? Women. All of the problems? Women. There may be male-shaped cutouts in the background but they aren't people, they're cannon fodder. Look I am ALL FOR creating stories about kickass women and how they can do kickass things as well as men, but you sorta shoot yourself in the foot when you then proceed to place them in a world where the only other characters and competitors are women, because you circle right back to "women can only exist and compete with other women."
I've seen this trope executed well in settings where that sort of environment was done consciously (like in Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion, which are set on a biopunk generation ship sci-fi world where all of the characters are of the female sex because they literally give birth to space ship parts to continue to maintain their weird fleshy generation ships), but half of the time it just reads like the author felt uncomfortable with the idea of male characters doing stuff and just... opted not to write them. Just like the often-missing women in other media, it feels weird and forced.
Isekai is definitely an overdone trope but I don't think people will really stop writing about it because in all truth it plays a big role in human history. You have classic stories like Coraline and Alice in Wonderland (to name a few from the west). Asia is the most influenced when it comes to isekai. This idea most likely rooted from religious beliefs of other worlds and in a way, I have respect for it's niche in this world as more and more people move away from religious beliefs.
So yeah, I do think isekai's an overused trope but I use it anyway because wanted to put my two cents into this transition in human history.
One trope I'm tired of as a reader is when a character gets teased about romance, the teasers are always right and the target always get flustered and go 'i-it's not like that', 'we're just friends!' etc.
For a change, I'd like to see situations where:
- the teasers are totally off the mark and the target is like "LOL you think we're an item?"
- the target (whether or not the teasing is accurate) actually sees the teasing coming and
-- gives a confident 'nope' or
-- straight-up tease the teasers back: 'ohhh yes, I'm totally into them, I dream of smooching them every night while I lie in bed and ...'
- or, you know, the target just admits they like the person XD
As a writer, an overused trope I nonetheless have a thing for is the 'well-intentioned extremist'. I think at some point we should just let villains be villains and write someone unequivocally hateable, and I also think the most impressive feats of writing is when you can make a villain feel 3-dimensional and human without making them in any way sympathetic.
But looking through my notes, I realized I have at least one character of this type in every story I have planned. (Yes, even my slice-of-life with no far-reaching stakes of any sort :P)
I know this is a little off topic, but I'm just so curious I have to ask: what about Encanto was...well, ^that?? ^^; You do mean the recent Disney movie, right...?
The only aspect of its story I can think of that might provoke such a reaction was the end of Isabela's character arc...but even that was pretty easy to see coming; it clearly wasn't meant to be a 'gotcha' moment.
I guess maybe there's Bruno...but again, I feel like his reveal was played far too straight to feel like a 'gotcha' moment. =/ To be honest, of all the animated content I've seen in the past few years, I feel like Encanto was one of the least obnoxious about its plot twists.
I'm not sure if I'm really sick of any popular tropes.
But I have seen miscommunication thrown in for no real reason.
I'll never forget when I went to a movie and this little kid who had otherwise been quiet the whole time groaned "they do this every movie!" when the big misunderstanding happened. If a child is tired of it, maybe it's a little overused.
For overused tropes I still like using, mentors beware because somehow they always die in my stories.
The one where the MC gets amnesia. Even if it’s my favorite manhwa or manga, I will literally stop reading it until they’re past it so I can just skim or skip.
Um, I am also curious what about Encanto is meta. Meta is more like a film making fun of itself, like a character addressing the audience, jokes about bad writing in the script, and making fun of how random people just start singing and dancing in musicals. Think of something like Lego Batman or Space Balls or that scene in Farris Bueller where he tells the audience to go home.
Subversions of Isekai where:
"I got reincarnated in a novel I read, but not as the protagonist! As the main villain / the main villain's kid/ an unimportant supporting character!"
I'm pretty sure these are so common now that there are actually more of them than there are of both isekai where the character becomes the protagonist AND the generic Fantasy Romance novels they rely on as their setting.
The only one of these I've liked so far was "Beware the Villainess", which actually did draw attention to the lazy writing tropes found in mass-produced Fantasy Romance, and to the really toxic nature of a lot of the male lead characters in reverse harem romance stories and the way female villains get disproportionately punished for their relatively minor misdeeds while really terrible male antagonists get easy redemption and forgiveness.
Most of them are just as lazy as the genre they're supposedly subverting, and often rely on basically insisting things are tropes in a genre that I've never actually seen or heard in that genre so that they can then subvert those tropes.
@darthmongoose ouch. haha, jk. If you put it "I got reincarnated in a novel I read, but not as the protagonist! As the main villain / the main villain's kid/ an unimportant supporting character!" then, my story is just like that. My main character has been isekai-d into her own book, but the story has yet to begin. The main characters of Talipandas are "new" and not part of the ogMC/ML "clique of friends and villains". My story is mainly slice of life, slow burn, and can be said as entirely different story than the ogstory where MC got isekai-ed.
@cherrystark @AlydaB
Love triangle. Funnily enough, now that I've seen your convo, I realized that I kinda also have that trope (and btw, I also hate this trope) but not really. Even before the my novel is published there's already two established characters, my MC and my Favorite Character (will now referred to as FC, not to be confused by the usual female lead abbreviation).
Now, the story is slow burn. It started on my MC's birth and goes on as she grows older with a couple of time skips. MC and FC, during childhood, will have a lot of bonding and whatnot. But FC is not MC's endgame, there will be someone else. MC's feelings and etc with FC will be "delivered and resolved" long before MC meets her endgame. But FC will not leave MC's life, but there will be no "secret love affair" between them. What do you think of this?
I honestly believe Isekai is a building block genre. Take this cube here, place the triangle on top, sprinkle some waifu and call it a day.
It's a genre that gathers a lot of either lazy creators (as you said) or people with skill that have no creativity. I feel bad for the second.
I come from the video-game side and there's a lot you can do you with videogame based isekai. My own comic actually falls in this category.
But creators choose to stay in that trash bubble of pay-to-win MMOs with bloated systems, overpowered characters compared to the world and shovelware plot. Hello Lost Ark!
Most of isekai's problems come from the videogames they are inspired by.
But people from other parts of the world lap it up (the stories and that type of videogames) so it might be a culture thing as well.