A couple of months back, I released a video about my least favorite tropes. Chief among them was (and is) the Chosen One trope. This trope’s presence in a story is almost guaranteed to put a bad taste in my mouth as soon as I pick up the book, and it’s bound to get at least one star docked. Today, I want to take a closer, more analytical look at this trope. I’ll talk about what it is, what it means for stories, and how I feel about it as a whole.

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!