Overused and Underused Tropes

[CleverGoat]

What are some overused and underused tropes in comics, novels, tv, and movies?

[arxianfall]

Manga:

Overused.
Self cucking, fearing women, fearing relationships or saying "no" to them because you like the girl's attention. The holier than thou attitude of all men in manga. Regardless of the genre.

So few exceptions.

Underused
Reversing/subverting a trope and sticking with it instead of doing it as a parody or as 4th wall breaking commentary.

TV

Overused:

Cretin-fying your characters for the sake of moving your plot fast because "your average user" wouldn't notice. I'm watching that Halo series can you tell?

Yelling. All the yelling. Hey let's yell when trying to say things so we cause a misunderstanding so we can filler two more episodes.

Underused:
Common sense and leaning on the actions that brings you. But that's always the writing team and financial department's common sense anyway.

Webcomics

Overused

Sexuality-first characters and stories. Yes I know business in booming when it comes to BL/GL and in r34 because you get less censorship than in normal media. But there's so little above "Haha, touch butts," I feel like it's dragging down the whole genre.

Isekai worlds for the sake of isekai. At this point I think it's literally an algorithm thing. Just like "stepsister" is for [black and orange] sites.

Underused

Characters that aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel or are the best ever at everything. Socially, professionally, Financially, athletic, or anything else.

[NickRowler]

Overused:
When it comes to webcomics...this weird attempt to make things "relatable". Like jokes designed so readers go "Me too!" or stories designed to be blankslates/self-inserts for readers.

Underused:
Interracial/mixed families. And even more rep beyond just biracial parents. Like adopted kids and step-siblings too. Families like Netflix's adaptation of Umbrella Academy.

[CleverGoat]

Speaking of common sense, I wonder if it is possible for horror characters to have it. Like when they ignore danger signs, split up, or hit the killer once and think they are entirely safe.

[BoomerZ]

Most over used Tropes I can think of.

1: Most, if not all men are weak. They get hit by woman, can't talk to anyone without fumbling around, and generally being door mice. Yes, some men act like this but if you only read manga, specially romance/drama, you would think 50% of males act this way.
2: In action comics, being the best. being OP as hell, male or female, with little to no weaknesses. Or those weaknesses are actually good traits. (she just cares too much, he's just too good of a friend.)
3. Woman in romance absolutely not being able to just say something about the one they like. Nothing made me smile more than in the quintessential quintuplets when Nino says she likes Futaro and he doesn't hear. Does she go away and ponder what to do. NO. She turns around and says it again.
4: Having two people get together because the author thinks they are cute. If the audience doesn't understand why these two should be together, the story is lost.
5: wacky for wacky sake. remember this is your characters reality. Unless its a comedy, meta humour makes no sense to the people in the story.
6: Iseki (all of it. The guilds, the one special power, the harem...)
7:In webcomics, the amount of BL comics that all look and read exactly the same. They haven't matured to show new stories yet.

Underused:
1: Showing that the geeks of the world won. Even the most normie of person knows about Marvel comic characters now. The days of nerds vs jocks is over and have been for decades now.
2: Having normal characters in extraordinary situations. Think of the average person having to deal with something completely beyond their normal abilities.

[powerplantanimations]

Honestly I'm seeing a lot more emphases on biracial parents/families recently in media. Especially on the Disney side of things (Cheaper by the Dozen, Mixed-Ish, Spider-Man, Eternals, Buzz Lightyear). It's gotten to the point where whenever I watch a Disney film with a family member they're like "it's getting overused on their end".

[NickRowler]

Not really, the fact that any representation for mixed race families is seen as "overused" is sort of a bad take.

Honestly I think it could be pushed further...like Umbrella Academy was the first time I felt like I saw a family that was somewhat looks like mine, not exactly but close.

[powerplantanimations]

I dunno, I don't blame my family for thinking that way towards Disney since they haven't been for angels for a hard minute. I wouldn't exactly call it a bad take. They're just suspicious lmao. Like "What's your game here?". Sadly I do think that's probably a healthy mindset to have when consuming media from crooked companies because I don't think there's anything wrong for wanting them to do things the right way. We're talking about the same company who edited out Finn in the posters for China because he was black lmao.

[AlydaB]

I often feel like 99% of webcomics and anime in general are built on the tropes of their genre- especially romance, isekai fantasy, and often action (anime equivalent being shounen). The most noticeable and irritating trope to me right off the bat is how everyone in the story (who the author likes and wants us to like) is perfect and beautiful and the absolute best at whatever it is they do, so the author/readers can insert ourselves into their perfect lives and play out a power fantasy. It gets more annoying when I'm supposed to pity the character or feel any sense of stakes or urgency about their easily-solved "problems".

I tried reading My Gently Raised Beast on Webtoon out of curiosity (thinking: what makes these stories so appealing? there must be a reason why there are so many of them), and main character Blondina is a great example of this. She is inhumanly beautiful, selfless, wise, forgiving, and clever (likely has magic prophecy powers too). She's an orphan elevated to princess status who doesn't fit in because of her background, so we're supposed to pity her.

In reality, she's adored by everyone she meets, never does anything wrong in her life, and has a flawless, utterly devoted love interest who is her pet (he shapeshifts into a cute cat), bodyguard, and a magical king in one- the most powerful person in the world with no limits to what he can do. He isn't bound by the law. He's an arrogant one man army who could walk right into the neighboring kingdom and murder their royal family and they'd have to let him.

Their only enemies either become good when they realize how amazing Blondina is and join her loyal group of followers, or they remain spiteful, evil characters with no redeeming qualities who hate Blondina out of envy and want to kill her. They don't seem at all dangerous because every attempt to hurt Blondina is thwarted by flawless love interest and his godly abilities.

And... oof. Now I'm ranting. :')

I think this comic in particular though is very representative of all the worst tropes that plague Webtoon and Tapas, and if I could attribute them to anything, it'd be the creator's desire to create an entirely self-indulgent fantasy scenario at the cost of the believability and realism of their characters/plot. Bad motivations to create a story = bad characters, bad stories.

Regardless, I think any trope can work well, as there's a reason why they became tropes in the first place; something about each one was initially compelling enough that it inspired widespread imitation. Whether it's good for a story or not just boils down to how and why it's being used.

Personally, I wouldn't mind more underdog heroes, battle couples, childhood-friend love stories, and cross-country adventures to find the Thing. Can't say whether they're 'underused', but I have a soft spot for these. ^^

[AxemanRifflord]

Overused-ish:
I remember there was a moment where webtoon kept promoting baby themed comics. I haven’t actually read any of those but I’ve always been (morbidly) curious about the appeal or the thought process.

Popular thing but scary. I can’t say I’m really bothered by it. Sometimes they’re fun or cool (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1131900/3rd_eye/) and I know a lot of it is tongue and cheek, and I can appreciate some of the “cheaper” for what it is... But a lot of it feels slept walked through. It feels less like something that actually has a high demand and more that it’s... more inevitable than r34 (yeah, I said it).

Underused-ish:
Wildcard hot take: The chosen one isn’t a overused trope. Name a story that actually uses it that isn’t Harry Potter. I’m not exactly thirsty for more chosen one stuff. I just think that writers don’t like them as much as the internet thinks they do.

[BOMB]

I don't think having biracial families is a trope unless it's explicitly being used as a selling point that's constantly being pointed out, or worse, it's the only selling point.

[powerplantanimations]

Yeah exactly. I mentioned that in my other comment lol.

[TheLemmaLlama]

'Underused trope' just seems like a weird concept to me; if it's not used very often, do we really identify it in fiction enough to spot it as a pattern and dub it a trope? In that sense, underused tropes can only be tropes that aren't really used very little but we like and want to see being used even more

Unless you mean 'underused' in the sense that it's not used to its full potential, which really just ends up meaning 'not taken to its logical conclusion (i.e. deconstructed) often enough'. In which case I'd argue that a lot of tropes feel overused precisely because they're underused!

... okay, enough mind screw for one day XD

[system]

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