Writing Blog Number 2

20250127 List Of Bad Tropes

List Of Bad Tropes

And I will continue to dump on some tropes because I am having fun doing it.
         These, though, are just in list form, things I hate in writing, be that books, films or TV.

1) The very attractive, rather smart, hard-working, physically fit woman married to an ignorant man-child who can’t even remember birthdays. And do we ever see this reversed? No! Because TV writers are men and this is their Gary Stu insert!
2) A detective who doesn’t play by the rules but is tolerated because he solves crimes and never gets pinged for his bad behaviour by ethics people/ HR or taken to court or sees convictions over-turned.
3) Minimum wage workers who can afford mortgages on large houses or rent on huge apartments. Plus food, kids, holidays, a couple of cars…
4) The father who encourages his son to be a stereotypical frat-boy with no regard for the rules, especially with regards to the opposite sex, but pulls a shotgun on any male who so much as looks at his daughter.
5) Bad guys with a British accent, always dressed immaculately.
6) Mental illness (depression et al.) being seen as sexy and being fixed by the love of a beautiful member of the opposite sex.
7) Villains who don’t appear until the Third Act. Especially egregious when the person we thought was the villain was barely a lackey.
8) Kissing in the rain after a fight or as a first kiss. Kissing in the rain, full stop. It’s cold and unsexy.
9) Everything is a simulation. Yeah, I saw Tron, too… oh, and The Matrix.
10) Bad girls with a Russian accent, always dressed sexily, with slicked-back hair.
11) The characters who need rescuing are female. Always female. No matter how strong, they still need rescuing. Males? Let ‘em die, I guess.
12) A woman cutting her long hair off indicates becoming powerful and self-assured… not having a hairstyle that will now get in the way all the time.
13) “The nerdy guy loser falls in love with the manic pixie dream girl, and she soon falls for him as well.” (Stole this one, but I agree.)
14) The apparently senile person saying something so profound the story hinges on it (see Parenthood). Everything else they say is insane, by the way. But one moment of lucidity and they are Socrates incarnate.
15) Feminist women who fall in love with misogynistic arseholes. This is just an extension of number 1, but it really grates on me.

And these are some of my personal gripes in writing. Sure, some might be based too much in realty, and some of them might even work in one or two cases, but most… don’t.
         And I am sure abuse is to follow.