Hating On Some Tropes

When you become a writer, or even an avid reader, you’re going to see a lot of the word “trope” being thrown around. Favorite tropes, most marketable tropes, problematic tropes, etc. Some tropes are universally agreed upon to be bad, and readers can’t stand ‘em. “It Was All A Dream” is a good example, because it typically feels like a cop-out on the part of the writer and negates every struggle the heroes have gone through up to that point. 

Others aren’t bothersome to many people, or they’re even liked, but I can’t stand ‘em. Since this is my blog, though, today I’m going to discuss some tropes that are generally considered to be inoffensive but I personally want to yeet into the sun.

Cluelessly Talented

This trope is common in Romance books, or stories that have a strong romantic subplot or Slice-of-Life focus. A character is really, really, good at something. Secretly. Maybe the main character loves to sing, but only sings as a hobby, to herself. One day, she’s doing chores or cooking or something, and singing to herself, at which point her love interest walks in on her. And wouldn’t you know it, she has a Broadway-quality voice! 

“What do you mean, I’m amazingly talented? I only do this by myself for fun!”

Listen, society prizes talent most of the time. Someone who can do something most people can’t do well are sought out and treated like a big deal. It’s one thing to hide your talent, because you’re shy and don’t want the spotlight, or to be good at something that isn’t valued. It’s quite another to reach one’s coming-of-age years or even adulthood and just never have anybody notice that you’re fantastically good at a thing people want to be good at. There better be a good explanation if this happens, like the character has spent their whole life in a basement, or they have a horrible parent who gaslit them to make them think they weren’t talented. 

More often than not, the character who didn’t know they could paint like Da Vinci or dance ballet with perfect form and no training is female. I suspect this trope goes hand in hand with the idea that women are more attractive if they don’t know they’re attractive. Knowing her worth would give her power, and we can’t have that, right?

The Informed Talent

On the flip side of the coin, there are some characters who are so super good at a thing, and you’ll just need to trust the author about it. They’re a champion debater or a crack shot, but we’ll never see them fire a gun, and on-page they don’t seem to be able to argue their way out of a paper bag. Yes, they may actually be demonstrably bad at a thing, despite us readers being told at every turn that they’re great. I once read a book where the MC was supposedly a wonderful rider who could race horses competitively. There were two races in the book, and she lost both of them. 

I think this one annoys me so much because as an author, I have total control over what I tell the reader and what I don’t tell them. Why have your character be a great singer if they never sing in the book? You’ve just set a reader expectation for nothing. Even worse, as a reader I feel straight up lied to when the author tells me that a character is the best XYZ there is, and then they do get a chance to prove that, but fail. Multiple times. One failure might work, to humble a character and then have them rise to the occasion later. But if they never succeed at the thing, then I guess they weren’t so talented at it, were they?

Cannot Spit It Out

This is another tried-and-true Romance or romantic subplot trope. Bob’s been in love with Alice for 27 years, and yet has never been able to tell her how he truly feels! And it’s not like there haven’t been opportunities, either. You’ll usually have a scene where Alice is lamenting that she’ll never find the right person, that she’s a plain Jane and no one’s interested in her, etc. Bob will dutifully listen to her pour her heart out, pining for her the whole time, but all he’ll do is maybe manage a timid, “There is someone …” before letting her go off, still unaware of his feelings.

I find this trope so unsatisfying because there’s nothing fun or compelling about it. A good Will They Or Won’t They? situation has two characters with equal amounts of agency bantering, fighting, and coming to the realization that they’re in love after a period of time. There’s a kinetic energy to it. Cannot Spit It Out is just indefinite stagnation while the pining character mopes around in a hell of their own making. 

Also, if the characters in question are older than teenagers, I have very little respect for someone who spends eternity fawning over someone else and never shoots their shot (barring extreme circumstances like being betrothed already, from a different class of some rigid society, or living in a parallel dimension or something.) If you’re not mature enough to even tell someone you’re attracted to them, you’re not mature enough to date. Grow. Up.

Henchmen Who Don’t Know The Plan

I’m sure you’ve seen or read this one, in an action or thriller story. The villain and his henchmen are getting ready to raid the village, or do the heist or whatever. And, inevitably, one henchman pipes up with some variation of “Wait, what are we doing again?”

From a writing standpoint, it makes sense to have a character ask this question. Now the villain has to explain their plan again, thereby filling the audience in on it. My problem with this one is, what kind of villain has henchmen who don’t know the evil plan? The one they’re currently on the way to carry out, mind you. It makes zero logical sense in the context of the story. Henchmen would be informed, hell, they’d probably have to practice for the evil plan for days or even weeks beforehand. At the very least, there’d be a PowerPoint presentation.

One thing I’d love to see is a villain who has a pack of henchmen, and one of them asks a question like this, only for the villain to just haul off and shoot them in the face for being an idiot. “Was anyone else here nodding off during orientation?”

The World’s Expert On Getting Killed

This is another action and thriller trope that makes total sense from a writing perspective, but gets really annoying within the context of the story’s world. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the heroes are trapped in a post apocalyptic hellscape, surrounded by zombies, or they’re stranded in the wilderness, or they’re new recruits in a war paired up with a grizzled old veteran. They’ll always learn just enough to survive from the veteran who’s been killing zombies and living off the land for the last 30 years, only for the expert to get killed within the hour, by whatever they’ve successfully survived against over several decades.

Now, obviously this makes sense for whoever is writing the story. The expert needs to die for the same reason the Mentor Archetype needs to die: if they’re saving the hero’s butt all the time, how will the hero come into their own and triumph? The problem is that, if handled poorly, the expert looks like they’re a doofus, or they somehow suffered a head trauma and lost all their expertise upon meeting the main characters. Sometimes it can be justified. Maybe the heroes do something so stupid that the expert gets killed saving them from themselves. Or maybe the expert is fated to die at a certain time, or there’s some other good reason for them to shuffle off this mortal coil almost immediately. But in most cases, the expert seems like they’re in the worst relay race ever. “Here’s the competency baton! Now then-” *hurk*