Why Do Writer Keep Falling Into This Trap?

@rajillustration Rachel
Sun, 15 Nov 2020 17:01:49 +0000

@rajillustration wrote:

Yes this trope bothers me so much! I think it happens so often because authors see other people do it in their works and are like "Oh so this is acceptable then?" Because like...IRL whenever we see abuse, it's not like that. It's a long road to recovery, and there's some things people will never let go of, trust issues, self esteem issues, etc etc.

And these tropes are a big part of really structured genres, like Shonen, or romance, or high fantasy--so we already have universes that aren't very realistic. We tend to put aside realism because genre expectations are fun, and so they don't want a main character in their Shonen or their Romance with lingering mental issues. They want a self-insert character who always recovers and has a good time, despite what they've been through.

It's also an era thing, so shows and books that are for a little older of a crowd, like YA and up, tend to actually dive into the gray area of "So my MC was abused and will always have lingering problems because of it." It becomes a lot of the central drive of the story. Yet shows that are for a younger crowd, or even shows that are meant to be 'feel-good' and resolved in one pretty package (the hallmark channel type stories for instance) tend to wrap it up in a bow in one singular episode. Their purposes are totally different.