If you’ve read/watched a bunch of stuffs, I’m sure you know a couple handful of tropes.
The black horse protagonist and their cold, popular prodigious rival; the sweet and kind guy, and the cold but actually nice guy fighting over the protagonist, the total memory loss… There are just a boatload of tropes, and even more franchises that use them. While using tropes doesn’t instantly mean bad writing, it can get boring after reading tens of different books with a similar plot.
There are, however, franchises that use a trope and lead you to believe that it’s going one way, then subvert the results of it.
For instance, My Hero Academia uses the black horse protagonist trope. However, even though the protagonist’s powers are acknowledged by his more skilled peers, he still falls behind them because he hasn’t learned to control it yet. In fact, he was only able fully control it without literally breaking all of his bones around 100 chapters into the manga.
This made My Hero Academia so much more realistic and thrilling to read.
So here’s my question:
What kind of trope subversion do you want to see?