Fuck my phone, it deleted my whole message without saving... REWRITE IT ALL
Most tropes are bad because they are overused. Not to say that they aren’t bad for other reasons as well, but the main reason is overuse (Harem). I will list some of those tropes that I think are overused and done poorly after a rant of my most hated trope:
Indecisive lover, aka the ‘I love more than one person so I’ll love both of them despite the fact that I can barely make one happy.’
-Rant inspired by ‘
My Joy’, a Yuri Manhua that traumatized me to this day.-
It’s not uncommon to love more than one person, namely when you first start realizing you have romantic feelings for others (middle school and high school). Lots of people have been in that position.
You know what they haven’t done? DATE TWO PEOPLE AT THE SAME TIME. We all thought we could pull it off at one point in our youth, but let me enlighten you:
Don’t
Love blinds, makes you stupid, and has you wanting to make the people you love happy. What it doesn’t do is make you two-time, which will hurt every party involved 99.999999% of the time. That remaining 00.000001%? That’s for the exceptionally rare case where all parties involved talk things out BEFOREHAND and the two love interests are at least good friends, if not romantically interested in each other as well.
So how do you deal with that feeling like a regular Human being? Picking one, that’s how. Love can be difficult enough one-on-one, you don’t need skeletons in your closet or a third person to make things difficult. That is, unless you don’t actually care for the other person’s feelings and just want to use them to satisfy your own feelings (coughcoughProtagonistOfMyJoyCough)
Rant Over
Now, as for a list of tropes I think is overused or done poorly:
- Indecisive lover: Explained in the rant
- Mary Sue or Gary Stu can’t win: So you’re telling me, that the perfect MC can’t defeat some secondary villain?
- Mary Sue becomes a Stupid Sally or Klutzy Kelly after meeting Gary Stu: Chinese novels and manhua.
- Cure-It-All: I have a pill or tonic for that! Even though it’s incurable to every other medically proficient person out there
- Rapist becomes lover: That whole sentence is a problem.
- Harem with Beta or Cold love interest: So the women want a person who can’t voice their own opinion because they either are too scared to say so or don’t care enough? Love!
- Beautiful/Handsome transfer student: Makes all the non-models like myself look like rubbish. Also, why do all these beautiful/handsome people have to switch schools in the first place?
- ‘The Moment’ gets interrupted: You know EXACTLY what I’m talking about, don’t lie! We always wanted them to kiss
- Dense love interest: Universally hated.
- Clingy Tsundere childhood friend: This just need to stop. It’d be one thing if they were Yandere (makes much more sense), but these bitches just... ugh
- Loli with ’Plot’: Stop sexualizing children like this. Actually, stop sexualizing children overall. Girls do develop breasts early on, but no way would they ever have a DD cup size unless they were in high school at the earliest.
- Comatose? Let’s run!: Asuna, Asuna, Asuna. Every comatose person will experience some level of muscle atrophy, so how come they always look the same and don’t really need physical therapy?
- Vampire? Hah! Bite me!: Vampire bites neck. Vampire sucks blood. Result? You either die, turn into a ghoul/slave, or maybe, just maybe, they capture you to use you as a blood bag. Why do people seem so keen on letting vampires suck their blood? (Then suddenly ROMANCE! Nani!)
- Villain has mind control/hypnotic powers: Really? Is that how you have to give them what they want? Please try again authors
- (Last one) Genderbender accepts new love: I don’t know about you, but if I suddenly woke up as a girl I wouldn’t chase men without batting an eye. It would take at least a few years before I can accept such an abruptly huge change as swapping genders. It would be another thing if the person was already interested in men (homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, etc), but that’s rarely the case in novels