Jul. 20th, 2019

dolorosa_12: (queen presh)
A discussion I was having in the comments of a previous post with [personal profile] merit made me realise something I'd never really thought before: just as I have tropes, relationship dynamics, and themes that are like narrative catnip to me, I also have the opposite — tropes whose presence will ruin an otherwise deeply enjoyable story for me. I'm not talking about tropes which are pretty much universally regarded (at least in the circles I hang out in) as dreadful (things like Bury Your Gays, women fridged for manpain, black characters dying first), but rather other common tropes which I dislike not because they reinforce societal inequalities, but simply because they're not to my taste.

These are the big ones for me:

  • A character being pressured by the other characters to forgive an abusive or neglectful family member, and welcome them back into their lives for the sake of 'closure,' 'healing,' or similar. I hate this especially if it's a child having to forgive their father (which is the most common iteration of the trope). The end result is often that the characters — and the narrative — minimises the harm which the forgiven character has done.


  • Heroines with supernatural powers giving up their powers at the end of the story in order to settle down and 'have a normal life'.


  • Immortal characters giving up immortality for love (or even wanting to). I much prefer the rarer alternative where the mortal and immortal stay together, knowing one character will die and the other will not, and accepting that consequence.


  • Love triangles being resolved by suddenly making one love interest a terrible person where they weren't before. This goes doubly so if it's a way to resolve a love triangle that causes a married character to be unfaithful to their spouse — I don't mind if the spouse was always terrible, but if they're suddenly written as horrible, it feels like a cop out.


  • Supernatural/superpowered characters keeping their identity secret from their family and loved ones out of concern for their safety.


  • Sisters who hate each other, especially if this is in a mundane/real-world setting. Oddly, I don't mind it if a story is about antagonistic brothers, or an antagonistic brother-sister set of siblings. (I've not seen this trope in which one or both siblings were nonbinary, so I can't speak as to my like or dislike of it with nonbinary siblings.)


  • Characters whose whole arc has been about finding a family and a sense of home and purpose among other people choosing at the end to give that all up and live alone (or alone with their love interest). (*shakes fist at the Obernewtyn Chronicles*) A related version of this trope has dispossessed/migrant/misfit characters choosing to return home to the land of their birth, after spending the entire narrative finding a family and sense of home in a new land or city. (*shakes fist at the Six of Crows duology)


  • Those are the main ones I can think of at the moment. What about you? Do you all have similar narrative dealbreakers? Is this something you've also thought about before?

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