Five Tropes I HATE
While many might tell you otherwise, tropes aren’t actually inherently bad. Many tropes are tropes because they’re great storytelling mechanisms that are easy for writers to fall back on. However, just because some tropes aren’t necessarily bad all the time doesn’t mean that bad tropes don’t exist. In this post, I’m going to talk about five tropes in storytelling that I absolutely loathe. Some of them I hate because they are fundamentally awful, others because they’re overdone, and still more simply because they run counter to my personal tastes and wants. This is all largely my subjective opinion, so some of these may be tropes that you enjoy!
Disposable Woman
Also referred to as woman in the fridge or fridging a woman, this trope is essentially when you toss a female character aside solely to motivate the protagonist (usually a male). The woman might be given a personality, but usually not, as her entire purpose is to die so that the protagonist has a motivation to do whatever it is that needs doing. Those of you who have seen my Red Rising review probably already know that I hate this trope with a passion since it cropped up in that book.
Any sort of sexism and such aside, this is just lazy. “My wife/girlfriend died, so I have to do this thing” is such a typical, thoughtless approach to motivating the character. I’m not entirely opposed to it being a motivation, but the sole motivation? That’s just dull and overdone.
If you are going to employ something along with this trope and you don’t want it to be as terrible as the trope typically is, my suggestion would be to wait until the plot of the story is well underway to kill off the love interest. When I say well underway, I mean maybe wait until you’re at the climax of the story, or at least a few books into the series, so that our protagonist has multiple other motivations. Additionally, during that time period, you should be establishing the doomed love interest as her own character, not just a plot device that’s going to be tossed away.
Or, if you want to take the really easy way out, have the love interest die before the story even begins.
The Chosen One
I hate hate HATE the chosen one trope. I am so incredibly tired of it. If I see anything that’s newly released, I’m immediately dismissive. Can it still be done in a way that’s unique and meaningful? Maybe. Should it be? I don’t think so. If you aren’t aware of what this is, this is a trope that means there is one individual who is the subject of some sort of prophecy or other revelation. It might be a mystery who it is or we might know right from the beginning. Whatever the case may be, there’s a chosen one who is supposed to fulfill the prophecy, one way or another. The entire plot ultimately revolves around this individual (or, in some cases, a group of individuals) who is pretty much just swept along by the plot.
I despise this and anything close to it. It has become so old and, in my opinion, it should have died with Harry Potter. Instead, we got tons of Harry Potter rip-offs that repeated this trope to a gagworthy degree. Ugh, I’m getting worked up just thinking about them. It’s so immensely boring and lazy. I’m glad that we’re seeing it appear less in newer works, although we kinda have to be forgiving of things like Dune and The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime since it’s adapting a much older series that was around when this trope was just beginning to become unbearable.
The only way that I can suggest that you fix this trope is to subvert it entirely. Make the prophecy false or misunderstood, although even that is probably not enough. You’d have to subvert this trope incredibly well in order to make a story that’s compelling, especially if you want to draw in people who are tired of this trope. My best advice is really to just not even try, but if you’ve got a great idea… I guess just go for it and see what happens.
Love Triangles
Do I need to explain what this one is? A love triangle is when you have two people who are fighting over one other person. Sometimes they’re just all fighting over each other if the work is progressive enough. This is especially common in Young Adult and romance novels, and it’s simply exhausting. It also perpetuates all sorts of ideas that promote jealousy and “ownership” in relationships, which is pretty outdated in today’s day and age. It’s time for us to let the love triangle die.
My suggestion for breathing fresh life into this trope is to simply turn it on its head. Instead of a love triangle, make it abundantly clear that there’s only one person in the triangle who actually thinks it’s a triangle. The others don’t fight over anyone, they just go about their lives and this third wheel is really just a pain in the butt with outdated, entitled ideas. That’s honestly the best I can think of since this trope is just so dull and overdone at this point that it’s hard to think of a good way to improve it beyond nixing it entirely.
Frustratingly High Stakes
The world is about to end! This is it, guys! Someone is trying to destroy the world and bring about armageddon for one reason or another! These stakes can be incredibly dull in a story. I might be a little more forgiving of video games since the point is to make you, the player, feel like a big-time hero, but even in those cases, it can be exhausting. When the stakes are so frustratingly high and we as readers see those same stakes over and over again, we really stop caring or even registering just how high the stakes really are. It’s so far removed from our reality that we just don’t care as much as we would with stakes that hit closer to home, like someone trying to harm loved ones directly.
If you want to feature high, end-of-the-world stakes in your story, you need to give the harbinger of your armageddon a believable reason for trying to end the world. How on earth does this serve your antagonist? Sure, some people just want to watch the world burn, but… we’ve seen that before, many times, and the stakes aren’t going to feel real at all. If your antagonist is trying to end the world, you as the author should try to make me empathize with the antagonist and any followers that the antagonist has. Otherwise… I just can’t really see myself caring all that much about the stakes.
Strong and Shallow, Weak and Wise
Full disclosure, I’m kind of combining two tropes for this last one, but they’re really in the same vein. There’s a common trope when it comes to writing characters that leads to making the tough characters stupid or lacking in depth while the wise or intellectual characters have to be weak. You see this in just about every genre, from contemporary to fantasy to horror. It’s dull, predictable, and prevents characters from standing out. The trope is so overdone that when we see it subverted, we’re surprised and possibly even amused.
If you want to employ this trope but in a way that’s unique, I say go for it. There are probably strong yet shallow characters out there who can stand out from the sea of similar characters, waiting to be written. If you’ve got a good one in your mind that you think won’t blend in with everyone else, I guess you can go for it. There are surely ways to make them unique. However, if you approach the character’s personality design as “this character is strong, so this character has to be stupid”, then I’d be willing to bet money that the character is going to read like everyone else who falls under this trope.
Conclusion
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out this post, I really appreciate it! These have been five of the tropes that I absolutely hate. Don’t worry, though, because I won’t be so negative next week. Next Friday, I’m doing a post about the opposite: tropes that I love, so I hope you’ll stick around for those! If you’d like to make sure that post pops up in your feed when it’s finally released, the best way is to subscribe to my new YouTube channel. You can also follow me on social media; I’m @TLBainter on most platforms, and I’ll have links for all of them at the bottom of this post.
Thanks again for checking out this post. Until next time, bye!