Tropes I Do/Don't Love

This is supposed to be a fun one, so I'm not going to do the extremely hard work of defining a trope, discerning it from a cliche, and listing them all for you. I don't have the mental bandwidth for that. Therefore, I shall instead send you to the article, Book Tropes: The Ultimate List of 70+ Tropes in Literature by Fija Callaghan. From that list/those definitions, I'm going to give you two lists: tropes that I would die for, and tropes that I would happily stab in the face.

Of course, we're obviously going to start with the ones I like the most. If only because we're weird people that just want someone to trash something so hard that we cry sadistic tears while we laugh. So if I don't start with the good, you'll never read it. Therefore, here's your warning. If you really just want to read me disparaging something, keep scrolling until you hit the next bolded section. Carry on...

Tropes I Love

1. Forced Proximity
   

   I am a sucker for this trope and I don't care that the situation may not make any sense. (Especially the 'only one bed' version of this.) As long as the relationship between the characters has gotten to a place where this "inconvenience" highlights exactly how high the sexual tension is, that's all that matters. Yes, like all tropes, this can be done poorly. That said, I'm going to full on squeeeee when I see it. Period.
   

2. Enemies To Lovers Not to be confused with 'rivals-to-lovers' which I have no interest in. Enemies-to-lovers legitimately means, to me, that two people are absolutely pitted against one another by duty, circumstance, and/or alternate loyalties. They are enemies. Someone should try to kill someone else. And in the midst of this dangerous dance, they should find out they're perfect for one another. This should come with some insanely mixed emotions. Eventually, they should toss their control out the window and say, "what's the worst that can happen?" Then the whole rest of the book/series should absolutely show them what the worst is, and they have to overcome it one way or another. (Can you tell I've thought about this a little bit?)
   

3. Friends To Lovers There's so much history you can offer to readers when you write a friends-to-lovers story. There are all of the inside jokes. Shared memories. Shared trauma. The reality of having someone so much inside your head that they might as well be inside your skin. Like all tropes, this can be done poorly. We should not ever feel like the MCs actually feel like siblings. There should always be a kind of flirty undertone in the banter. That said, when it's done right, the culmination of them coming together is the best feeling. And, if I'm honest, my favorite example of this is in the Prideful Magick Collection. Watching the progression of Nathan and Lex's relationship is still one of the things I feel the most giddy over. (And now I kinda wanna do a reread...)
   

   

   All 5 PMC books

   
   

4. Imbalanced Dynamics Look, I've read a couple 'secretary becomes billionaire's girlfriend' books and I enjoy them. That said, my favorite is always going to be 'bodyguards and the body they're guarding'. It just works for me, and I'm taking no criticism.
   

5. Found Family You give me my merry band of misfits with all of their unique skills, misguided preconceptions, and an unshakeable bond with one another. Let them be cutthroats and theives, as long as they have their own moral code that begins and ends with 'keep MY people safe'. That's all I need.
   

Tropes I Hate

1. Love At First Sight I can't. I just can't take this seriously. Maybe I'm just too pragmatic or logical, but I refuse to believe you can love someone without knowing them. In this same vein, I don't believe in truly 'unconditional' love. My ability and desire to love someone depends 100% on how they treat me. Maybe it's just me and my way of thinking, but I can't buy into someone laying eyes on someone and falling in love then and there. Lust at first sight I can understand. Desire at first sight I find entertaining and can happily continue on with. A crush is perfectly reasonable. But if one character declares (through actions and/or words) their love for another the first time they meet, I can't even. (This is also about 75% of the reason I despise everything to do with Romeo & Juliet except the ending, because they had it coming. They all had it coming.)
   

2. Love Triangles I will admit, I was very much into Twilight in my later teen years. And I never understood the Team Jacob vs Team Edward people because it was so glaringly obvious from the beginning that Bella was going to choose Edward. There wasn't even a fight to be had. I never understood the point of Jacob being in love with Bella to begin with. They literally could have been just friends and had the same emotional attachment (with the same level of conflict about her creepy, obsessive, and controlling boyfriend). I didn't understand it, so I didn't enjoy it. When I read The Hunger Games, I was Team Gale. Only up to a point and only because he actually knew her and her struggles. It didn't seem fair to ship Katniss with Peeta when he didn't really know or understand her. In reality, I never actually bought into her being in love with Peeta. Did she love him? Yes. Was she in love with him? I never saw it. I saw a severe trauma bond grow into emotional codependency. Which, given what they survived, is totally understandable. Was any part of this series about either of these boys? Oh hell no. It was always about Katniss doing what she could to survive. So the love triangle that the media manufactured, once again, made no sense. The point I'm getting to is: they're useless plot devices used to garner fan interaction and almost never do anything to advance or improve the plot. (Case in point: the travesty that occurs in Fourth Wing.) In reality, love triangles are the clickbait of books. They either grab your attention, get you to start reading, and then don't deliver anything they promised, or they repulse you entirely and you look at everything written from that source with a bombastic side-eye.
   

3. The Chosen One/The Ultimate Evil Don't get me wrong, one of my favorite series is The Wheel of Time. It is not for these two reasons. I understand their existence and have paid homage to them myself when I first began writing. But that's just it ... they feel like beginner archetypes. When Tolkien wrote of Sauron, the One Ring, and the end of the age of man, it was all based upon his experiences during wartime. All of it was based upon an actual, known, powerful evil in his world. An evil that he watched everyday people stand up and fight against, no matter how dire the odds. That is what made The Lord of the Rings so profound in the fantasy genre. It has also spawned no end of copycats. Even Robert Jordan declared that the beginning of The Wheel of Time was pointedly similar to LotR in order to garner the same audience. But he didn't have the same experience with great evil that Tolkien had. Therefore, the journey and hardships the Fellowship has to endure inherently shows us the actual destructive nature of Sauron. Whereas, in WoT, the great evil is so far removed from the main characters for so much of the series, that the only real evils we are witness to are those committed by men and women. In this way, I actually learned to appreciate truly well-developed villains rather than some shadowy, power-hungry being set up as the final boss. In a similar vein, Samwise Gamgee was the most Reluctant Hero of them all, and now we all appreciate him more than almost any other character. This is because he's someone that had to choose, over and over and over again, to be the person to keep moving forward. When Frodo faltered, when he thought all was lost, when Gollum was sabotaging him at every step, he kept going. That's courage. That's committment. That's a hero. All because he didn't have to, but he did. VS Rand Al'Thor is a Chosen One. Why? Because prophecies, that's why. Rand is also a reluctant hero when he starts out, but he has the additional burden of being an actual Chosen One. Unlike Sam, he doesn't have a choice. There are hundreds of prophecies detailing things he must do, and he has to contort reality in order to fulfill them because he knows fulfilling them is the only way he can stay alive. Why? Because everyone else knows he's the Chosen One, too, and that makes him the only target that matters. That's the vast difference between a truly relatable MC and a CO. The first is a being we can admire and root for and wish for their every success because they are making the choice to go forward through difficult circumstances. The other is someone who is constantly thrust into crappy situations and somehow has to survive. It's not admirable. It's desperation. Everything that happens in a CO's life is basic reactivity. Something happens and they respond to it. Whereas an actual hero understands what needs to happen and then they become the cause that others have to react to. (Aka: Sam storming the tower after Frodo is taken.) So while I appreciate how The Chosen One and The Ultimate Evil tropes came to be, I also understand that they are best left in books where the reader doesn't want to think too critically about it. For those of us that have been given both kinds of villain, an off-screen "evil" will never stand up to on-page atrocities and real, terrifying, human motivations.
   

4. Second Chance Romance This does not include all second chance romances, but it definitely includes all the ones with cheating or other major betrayals. I am not a forgiving person. If someone does me wrong, I usually desire them dead. Preferably in a very painful way. Therefore, it will take a lot for me to give any second chance romance a try, because if the relationship ended once, it was likely for a good reason, so I often don't feel the desire to watch any more play out. The only type of SCR I would enjoy is if they were separated by outside circumstances (moving across country, going to college, etc.) and if they find each other years later. That would be fun, cute, and interesting because they're relearning who each other is now, whilst still harboring emotions from the past. I get one whiff of a betrayal-ridden history, however, and I will throw the book.
   

5. Miscommunication It's not on the list of tropes in the link I posted, but it should be! This is probably one of the most reviled tropes to ever exist, and I hate to say it, but it's mostly at home in the contemporary romance genre. This trope is exactly what it sounds like: someone does something and doesn't say anything; the other person gets "evidence" about said incident, and instead of confronting their partner, they make up scenarios in their own head and create problems in their own relationship. All because they couldn't freakin' communicate. Honestly, this is the laziest form of conflict-creation ever. The reason it's mostly at home in the romance genre is because of all of the subgenres of romance. In SciFi and Fantasy romances, you can always add conflict via outside sources prepared to kill the MC and LI. Dark Romances, same thing. Historical romances can have this trope, but with the overlayment of scandal, so it squeaks by. However, in contemporary romance, if you have gotten your couple to their Happy For Now, but need something to shake them up in the sequel before the inevitable third book with the baby epilogue, then you need conflict from somewhere. As I said: this is the laziest way to do it. And most readers are fed up with it. Which, thankfully, means that most writers have clocked the disdain and are now steering clear of it. Until it has dug a grave and buried itself in it, however, I will continue to complain.
   

Bonus

Loves:

Assassins as Love Interests

I don't know why. That's a lie. Yes, I do. I'm perfectly content with the idea of someone with a wide range of skills using it to kill whoever they're ordered to. No, they don't have to be morally grey for me to like them. They could absolutely be morally reprehensible. I'm still going to love a character willing/able/and good at killing coming into the picture with crooked smiles and witty banter. The irony of this being how well the skills needed for a proper assassination would translate flawlessly into a romantice relationship. Dedication? No one learned how to make those hundreds of poisons and their antidotes overnight. Imagine what a well-executed date night planned by them would look like. Patience? If they have any kind of sniper experience, then they have enough patience for you to drown yourself in. Control? CONTROL? No, they're not a control freak, but they have absolute mastery over their every thought, action, and deed, meaning they will never say anything they don't mean. However, they could also say the absolute cruelest thing in an argument and you would know they 100% meant it or they wouldn't have said it.

Also, if you ever needed a 'touch her and die' kind of guy, this is absolutely the one you want saying it.

Hates:

The Replacement Love Interest

I've never read a single Maas novel, and even I know this is Tamlin's fault. Picture it, book one: you get invested in a character, they become attached to another character, circumstances occur that make it appear they are truly in love. An HEA/HFN is on the horizon. End book one. Book two: just kidding, that guy is completely wrong for her. But here's his replacement and all the reasons they understand each other better. By the way, we're going to make it more difficult for them to have an HEA, but you will get one at the end of this series. What about the first guy? He's irrelevant now. Unless he betrays us... When I first read this trope, I was invested. I liked the first guy well enough, and he didn't turn into a complete dick, but he wasn't who we thought he was, either. Also, the second guy just fit the MC better. It was great. Then I kept seeing more of the same thing and now I'm just over it. It's not intriguing anymore and is starting to feel rather formulaic.

Alas, the computer has had enough of me and requires charging. So now I shall end this. Bye for now.