Obligatory romances. Like give me characters who are friends, not potential / obvious love interests.
That’s mostly what kills it for me. I also hate how in YA novels there’s mostly only female protags in the types of stories I’m interested in. That’s why stuff like the Escape From Furnace series was so awesome to me (among other reasons). It’s literally set in an all boys nightmare prison and we don’t even see a female character until like 4 books in I think. There’s friendship and bonding between the boys with quite a bit of creepy and horrifying stuff coming from mostly the Warden and how he straight up has the boys experimented on, Nazi style.
Then the Project Cain / Cain’s Blood books, all about male serial killers and Nature vs Nurture. And of course the main guy, a clone of Jeffery Dahmer, gets attached to Callisto, this badass ex-military guy who was hired to track down the missing clones. Also literally at one point he just swoops in and rescues Jeff while on horseback like some kinda cheesy romance hero and it’s perfect. But as far as the context in the book goes, it’s not romantic. Probably.
I love male bonding stuff, in fantasy / sci-fi settings. There’s not enough of it cuz all anyone cares about is writing sorry excuses for “strong female characters” (which I’m not opposed to of course). Tho I do make exceptions for obligatory romances sometimes like in Monument 14, but that’s because at first they attempt a sexist division of labor for survival. But then the hippy chick becomes the leader, the love interest is way more violent than expected, the main guy LITERALLY gets told the “stay in the kitchen” speech from his younger brother and then spends a good chunk of time jealous that his brother is hanging out with this other guy all the time. It defied my usual expectations, so the obligatory romance is more tolerable.
Basically I tend to hate the prototypical gender dynamics in books. Also attempts to defy the prototypical dynamic usually just results in a hypercompetent female and hapless male, which is boring. I’d rather read about a hypercompent male and hapless female, cuz you almost never see that. Like how about a female chosen one who has to be trained by her male companion even tho he’s way more suited to be the chosen one. I see the reverse a lot, so some variety would be nice. Ohhh or the same thing but with two women, or two men. I’d read that.