Least Favorite Tropes (Fangirling on Friday)

It’s Friday again, which means it’s time to Fangirl. Fangirling on Friday was started by Books in the Skye. Every week, we have something new to fangirl about.

Last week, we talked about our favorite tropes, and this week, we’re talking about our least favorite tropes. These sometimes even appear in my favorite books even, but they get overshadowed by the things I love about the books.

Unnecessary Love Triangles

Some love triangles are done well. Cassandra Clare handled the Will/Tessa/Jem and the Mark/Cristina/Kieran love triangles well; the book I’m writing right now, as well as a fanfic that I hope to write this year have love triangles in them. It’s just when a love triangle is thrown in there for no reason other than to increase tension that I’m not a fan.

In Divergent, there seems to be this hinted love triangle between Four/Tris/Uriah… fortunately, it doesn’t go very far, but in Allegiant, we get Nita and Matthew that seem to barge in. Do people really get jealous that easily? In Prodigy, all of a sudden Tess develops an interest in Day now that he’s fallen for June? The Anden/June relationship seems more realistic in that book, at least. I thought the Magiano/Adelina/Enzo love triangle in The Rose Society seemed realistic enough though.

If an author is going to do a love triangle, it should feel realistic… not just thrown in there to create tension.

Bad Boys Without a Soft Heart

No pictures, because I don’t spend a lot of time reading these kinds of books. I guess 50 Shades of Gray would be an example of this (I haven’t read it)? There are some boy (and girl) characters that I love that have done some bad things, but the bad is not typically who they are. Chatine from Sky Without Stars, who steals to survive, is an example (she’s a girl, but same concept). You don’t get into a relationship to reform a boy, right?

Weak Girls

So last week I said that I liked to read about strong girls, but on the other edge of the coin, I don’t like to read about weak girls. It’s probably a good thing that I never got around to reading Twilight, because I’ve read that Bella is the kind of girl that hangs onto her man and doesn’t really act much for herself.

While I thought The House of One Thousand Eyes had good historical information that was important to know about, there were aspects of the main character that frustrated me to no end. Lena, the protagonist, was foolish and allowed herself to be assaulted without doing something about it. I guess a corollary to not liking weak girls is I don’t like foolish, stupid girls either. Or boys.

Fortunately, I don’t read too many stories where the main premise of the book happens to be one of the above tropes. Maybe I’m lucky, those kinds of stories don’t appeal to me in the first place, or they’re just not popular enough with my reading friends to attract my notice.

Next week is already April, and I’m going to talk about which book was my favorite this month.