Writing Styles/Cliches You Don't Like?

[Aspie_Gamer]

Hello my fellow tappies. As a writer/artist for my original series, Life of an Aspie, I often find myself critiquing my own story/character ideas and making liberal use of TV Tropes to read up on/study certain tropes. There's certainly nothing new under the sun. The best stories usually find creative ways to expand on clichés we've seen a bajillion times. Other stories...not so much. Some writers either don't know any better or are cutting their writing teeth at the time. Sometimes, maybe the style of the writing isn't your cup of tea. My question is...

What clichés in media or writing styles are your least liked?

Personally, any story where its obvious from the writing the creator is just making shit up as they go i.e the mythos in Kingdom Hearts games annoys me. Making up things that go against previously established lore is a strong sign of poor writing imo.

Cliches:

Dead parents. Ironic I know. In my comic LoaA, Susan's parent's are shown in passing to have died prior to the start of the comic. I honestly at the time I first came up with story ideas for LoaA couldn't think of any other way to justify a white girl living in Japan with her grandmother and being childhood friends with one of the main male characters, Hiroshi. It's not so much that I hate the dead parents cliché as a whole, but rather I hate this cliché when its used carelessly i.e the kids parents are dead for the sake of drama and pity parties,

Stalking is love:

Having watched Jessica Jones recently on Netflix, its made me rethink how I view this writing cliché. Its alright in comedic non serious stories or an episode of a tv show with the Aesop that NO stalking someone is not love, but in stories where the guy gets a girlfriend who won't leave him alone and that's the entire story (and vice versa), it gets annoying if not creepy fast. Yeah some people are lonely and genuinely crave affection from another person, but centering your life around one person who probably doesn't like you all that much isn't the way to fix that.

Main Character is Special/the chosen one:

We have shonen to blame for this one I feel. Whatever happened to a character who won his battles by being a badass normal who's just another statistic? I honestly prefer stories where this trope is deconstructed into the main protagonist simply being in the right place at the right time and nothing more. i.e Harry Potter, Dragon Age: Origins

First Girl/Guy Wins

In real life, the first person you date/have sex with often isn't the person you later marry. This issue seems to be prevalent in harems and romantic stories. Not helping matters is that the main protagonist is either indecisive or suffers from Single Target Sexuality (they will not so much as LOOK at another potential partner when they have someone in their romantic sights)

[carloswebcomic]

Mysterious past.
In the 90's, it seemed that every comic from the USA had a character with a mysterious past. For some reason or another they had no memories of their childhood. Didn't matter if it was a secret agent, cyborg ninja warrior or ice cream truck driver... MYSTERIOUS PAST FOR EVERYONE!

I admit that I didn't read a lot of comics from the USA at the time (specially mainstream ones), but every time I picked one up I would get slapped in the face with a throbbing wet slab of MYSTERIOUS PAST!!

[antibenz]

I hate when a character keeps a secret that, if they told another person, would just solve the problem. Instead they keep quiet. Later it is spoiled by someone else and then the other person goes "why didn't you tell me?", often leading to a storm off without further discussion. Feels like a cheap way to create conflict between two characters.

[rainbowolfe]

Poor Communication Kills and Conflict Balls

I have a lot of tolerance for over used tropes, but these two I just cant stand. Drama for the sake of having drama is just so overused and annoying. It's like, everything will be fine and dandy, but then for no reason it all goes to shit. I actually see this in a lot of things that work with romance. It's like?? Suddenly two people who have decided to spend their life together don't know how to talk about their problems or even partake in basic communication.

Or even in something like Interstellar, where the female lead almost killed herself? In a way that doesn't make sense, and it seemed like it was all for drama.

[laneord]

Unnecessary plot twist
Having a twist for the sake of having a twist, but it doesn't really contribute to the story whatsoever.. It's like oh hey, this fella and that fella is actually related OMG.. But it doesn't affect any part of the story, it's just there for the shock value.. I would love it if the plot twist will link back to the main story and unveil certain secrets... But just having unnecessary plot twist that you can take out entirely without affecting the main story.. That's a no no for me..

[mariusthered]

guilty as charged of the dead parents! ok I did it I wrote them off dead but they had it coming! ....

In truth the characters I am talking about have not yet turned up here on Tapastic,
I have two sisters in Talesfromswipecity who are part of the gang known as the North Side boys. The back story is that the parents were killed in a police raid. I had no use for the parents apart from in back flashes, and I wanted the situation of the older sister who only cares about having a good time, being landed with the smart mouth little sister. Sometimes starting with people dead has it's uses.

[AnnaLandin]

Oh, I've got a few! A lot of these are fantasy-specific, because I've read a LOT of fantasy-fiction, but yeah.

Humble farmboy is secretly a king
This ties into the main-character-is-the-chosen-one cliché, but this one is pretty specifically for high fantasy. If your story starts with your hero being a farmboy, it's a pretty sure bet that he's going to turn out to be the long-lost secret heir to the throne, and he's going to go on a quest that ends with him sitting on that throne again, somehow using the virtues and knowledge he learned on the farm for the proper governance of his kingdom - because we all know that farming rutabagas is totally the best school for learning about international politics and proper taxation-policies!

"It has been foretold in the PROPHECY!"
We all know this one, right? There's a semi-vague-but-in-fact-totally-obvious prophecy about the birth of a hero, or impending doom or the rise of a kingdom or WHATEVER, and everybody's wandering around going "Oooh, I wonder what THIS means?" and then they kind of figure it out and everything happens according to the prophecy. If it has been foretold that some kid is going to be born who is going to be The Chosen One who magically overcomes all trials and defeats the darkness, you can bet your boots that it's going to happen exactly like that.

.... which is just about the most boring thing I can imagine. You're literally giving away the ending right from the start. There's no suspense! You've told us what's going to happen!

Love triangles
Less fantasy-specific, and very much a personal nitpick, but yeah. I cannot stand love triangles, because 99 times out of a 100, they're so badly handled. It's either a.) blindingly obvious who the "right" choice is according to the author, thus removing all suspense, b.) making the central character in the triangle look like an indecisive wet blanket, or c.) cast with a trio of characters who are all exhibiting their worst traits of jealousy, pettiness and aggression.

Specific variants of this that I hate with a passion: 1. Triangles where it's actually two people who are just getting into an established relationship and are still learning how to go about this whole thing - and then BAM! Brand new "love interest" is shoehorned into the story, just to create annoying external conflict, usually exhibited as the hero of a heterosexual relationship going all jealous and overprotective of the heroine, because of course she can't take care of herself. 2. The mini-harem, where it's one main character having to choose between two love interests, but they are SO INDECISIVE about this that it just drags the story out for ever.

Good vs Evil - that's the entire plot.
Most often seen in high fantasy, but present elsewhere as well. The main plot is basically just good vs. evil. No nuances, no doubts, no grey areas - just good vs. evil. The protagonists are all paragons of virtue, children of light, bright and just and all that is good about the world - while the antagonists are sometimes literally just the Dark Lord, with armies of evil backing them up in their pitch-black fortress of evil and darkness.

It's just... so boring. In 99.99% of the cases, we know the good side is going to win. And it's nearly always obvious when a story isn't going to be that 00.01%.

This is the prologue that never ends
You wanna read this story? TOO BAD WE'VE GOT A 20-PAGE PROLOGUE TO WADE THROUGH FIRST! Oh, and it's all about stuff that happened hundreds or thousands of years before the story starts - bonus points if it's about the gods, or includes a prophecy! - that you really don't have any cause to care about because you don't even know who the protagonist is yet. You haven't even seen them yet, because the prologue is getting in the way.

Elves are elves, dwarves are dwarves, and this is Totally Not Clichéd Medieval Europe.
Stop me if you've heard this before - elves are all and graceful and beautiful and love music and live in the woods and live forever and are sad about it. Dwarves are bearded and war-like and way into blacksmithing and live in caves and hate elves. All humans live in towns that look like the backdrop in A Knight's Tale, because "pseudo-medieval Europe" is the only setting possible for fantasy stories.

Oh - and it's a pseudo-medieval Europe where everybody is white, because we all know that people of colour weren't invented until the 1800s - or if they were, absolutely never in pseudo-European settings. At best, people of colour are exotic civilisations that live far away and maybe show up as eccentric merchants to add a bit of flavour - at worst, they are all identical copies of each other, speak with an accent and are all secretly evil on the genetic level.

This one annoys me so much. It's a fantasy story. You have your entire imagination at your disposal, and the best you can come up with is pseudo-medieval Europe? NOTHING is stopping you from putting absolutely anything in your story. Want islands floating in the sky? Do it! Want mountains made of crystals and nomadic civilisations living on the backs of giant hermit-crabs? Go ahead, knock yourself out! Want magical creatures based on obscure Slavic folklore and repurposed pieces of Native American mythology? NOTHING IS STOPPING YOU (except a respect for the people whose culture those things belong to).

[KSlinger]

Don't know about you guys but the whole 'coughing blood means terminal illness' thing got old after the twentieth time I saw it, and it's literally EVERYWHERE.

[Kayke]

@ScampiCub Bonus points if they cough blood into a white handkerchief and another character is spying on them as they do it

[KSlinger]

@Kaykedrawsthings Oh man I was going to write that too! This isn't just a cough of death, it's a secret cough of death.

[Tanisha]

Ohh idk how to explain it/// when the character has a rival that is so much more meaner/less likable than them just to show that our main character is such a good person. Idk I've just found it weird that some series do that like the main character doesn't always need to be perfect. And they certainly don't need a character that's mean to them and everyone else just to show that our main character is someone we should like wholeheartedly.

[nathankschulz]

For me, cliches aren't things I hate. They're pretty much impossible to avoid at this point. Its how they're handled, and how the character deals with them, that I can hate. Right now, I'm tired of the "Chosen One." I"m tired of the character chosen by destiny to do a thing... and then the character either fights against it WAY TOO HARD, or is like "Okay, I am now boring, and have no independent thought of my own. I am Chosen One." We are all in that exact middle between the two, and that is where I want my lead character. We all are "chosen" to become adults. But HOW we do it is what makes it interesting. Give me the angry man who now has to learn to be a loving father. Give me the atheist who has to fight demons, and the ramifications of a truth that is flipped upside down. Give me the woman who trusted in authority, but needs to find freedom. GIVE ME MORE THAN A CHOSEN ONE.
...yeah. So that's one thing I don't like.

[winglesscomic]

I really fucking hate "childhood friends as love interest." If you've loved someone since a child and you're like 20 years old just let it go already dude. How much poontang have you missed out on because you've been waiting for that chick to unfriendzone you.

[mariusthered]

@winglesscomic I can only describe that comment as heartless but Goddam funny! have you never heard of shyness? lol

[Strontium]

This is mainly in YA books, which I read a lot of.

"Oh this character died! I grieved! BUT WAIT THEYRE NOT REALLY DEAD??" Worse if it's a love interest who dies, the triangle collapses, then the love interest returns and suddenly we've got the love triangle AGAIN.

"Im a girl on an awesome and life threading adventure but THIS HOT GUY, SWOON, LETS MAKE OUT and discuss the inevitability of our relationship dissolving BUT THEN THERES SOME LOOPEHOL SO THAT IT DOSENT???"
Farrrttt

Stories about cross dressing where the (inevitably) female MC never feels gender dysphoria dressin as a male, but neither does she feel suddenly comfortable being a man either (like oh hey maybe I'm trans!). As a trans person, I find the lack of verisimilitude in this plot laughable.

I'm not a fan of het romance in general so books with cool premises that turn into romance and lose the setting just tick me off.

[KSlinger]

@Strontium I strongly agree with the fart in this statement.

[Strontium]

Thank you for agreeing with my fart, fraternity of farts

[hushicho]

I have a couple significant pet peeves in terms of writing.

The first is when people change characters to suit a story, rather than change a story to suit the characters better. This is usually more of a problem when characters have been established enough, but I feel like -- outside of a very few, and very special circumstances -- it's a bad approach to disregard the characters in favor of the story one wants to tell. As characters develop and evolve as people, they will contribute to the flow of a narrative and, sometimes, change it significantly.

My second pet peeve, and probably my strongest general "I hate it!" thing is killing characters. Hear me out: it can be done in a way that adds to the story. It almost never is.

Death is almost always used as a cheap shorthand to milk an easy emotional response out of an audience. 99% of the time, it's lazy writing. And there's really nothing that requires that any character be irrefutably killed off, most of the time, either: you could just as easily have them incapacitated in some dramatic way and still have them rejoin the narrative at some later point. Because that's another common problem with killing off characters that could've just been written out -- many writers end up regretting it later, and some even handwave it and return the character anyway, which can kind of diminish the original tragedy...and make readers resentful if other characters aren't so lucky.

Ultimately, every character is someone's favorite, so when you play with writing them out, you're playing with a willing audience. Over the years, I've seriously come to resent how manipulative so many writers are -- these days especially -- in casually offing characters and expecting me to eat it up with a spoon. I don't think it's good writing.

Part of this is probably also me being an older audience than the "young adult" crowd. My experience has tended to be that teenagers get way into angsty, deathy stuff (and I remember I was a fan of more dramatic fare at that age myself) in large part because many of them haven't experienced most of the things written about, so it seems appealing and exotic. However, as I've lost many people dear to me over the years, and have experienced more than enough real-life angst and drama, fictional melodrama and death have lost a lot of appeal.

Still, I think it tends to be handled very badly in fiction, and looking back on some of the things I used to enjoy...they don't age well with an adult perspective.

[winglesscomic]

Ultimately, every character is someone's favorite, so when you play with writing them out, you're playing with a willing audience. Over the years, I've seriously come to resent how manipulative so many writers are -- these days especially -- in casually offing characters and expecting me to eat it up with a spoon. I don't think it's good writing.

game of thrones and its deathtoll is lost on me because of this

[hushicho]

I feel the same way...to me, it puts an obstacle in the way of my immersion in the story and its universe. If I can't count on the character I like or identify with making it through the next page, I'm not going to be willing to believe in it...and willing suspension of disbelief is kind of a huge factor. This combined with the fact that, these days, I tend to find very few characters interesting enough to invest myself in...it doesn't make for a good reading experience if even the few I find compelling are constantly endangered, and mostly by the author.