Your Most Hated Tropes

[FidelityBoss]

We’ve all encountered those tropes that make us cringe, groan, or even put a book down. Whether it’s the overused love triangle, the damsel in distress, the overpowered chosen one, or the villain’s endless monologue, some tropes feel like they’ve been done to death. They’ve been used so often they’re almost a punchline.

Which tropes get under your skin the most? No matter the genre, which ones make you lose interest in a story? Let’s hear your least favourites and why they just don’t work for you.

 

[trained23]

I dusluje (not sure if it’s a trope) how the general structure is blowjob, PIV (sometimes skipped), right to anal. Like there’s 1000s of ways to have sex? And I do t even go into the anal category lol

 

[TheWritingGroup]

"Trope" has a very loose meaning.

Off the top of my head: these two sexually-compatible and unattached characters meet at the beginning of the story and like each other. Therefore, they will become a romantic pairing.

-Annie

 

[Trionyx]

Meet, have sex and say “I love you” all in the same day. He, of course, has a 12 inch penis and her breasts are massive with some ridiculous bra size given.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I can't stand the standard interracial "Black thug makes slave of white woman and her boyfriend" thing. It's just the most bog-standard scenario, and they're almost never written well. Honestly, my dislike of how boring that trope is really is what first motivated me to start writing.

 

[Cagivagurl]

What is a trope????
Without researching it. (I'm lazy)
For me the answer is life....
Love is a (Trope) Romance, horror, fantasy, they're all aspects of life....
The well is very shallow when it comes to writing...
Only 7 possible story lines. Or so supposed experts say.
With that in mind, it means that.... Story lines, plots, outcomes. They will all be repeated over and over into infinity. Does that make them a trope???
History shows us that certain scenarios repeat continuously....
How many leaders have tried to take over the world and failed???
Do we learn from history? Apparently not, otherwise they wouldn't be repeated...
Writers are like dictators... We think we can do it better...
The question is... Do we hate life?

Cagivagurl

 

[VerbalAbuse]

He, of course, has a 12 inch penis.

Exactly! The size should be in cm!

 

[StillStunned]

Exactly! The size should be in cm!

But it doesn't have the same ring if you say: "She watched as his engorged manhood centimetred closer to her ladyflower."

 

[SimonDoom]

I dislike the term "hated" when referring to tropes. My attitude is that just about anything can work if it's done artfully.

The story theme I respond most negatively to at Literotica is the "burn the bitch" theme in Loving Wives stories that panders to a widespread, but wrong-headed, belief that the system screws over men. I'm sure there are some cases in which that happens, but it's the minority. Generally speaking, the system favors men, not women.

Even with this theme, there are some well-written stories, but more often than not I find that the stories, even if well-written, are unsatisfying because the characters are stereotypes and uninteresting exemplars of all good or all bad. It's a moral universe I don't recognize as the one I live in.

There's also nothing at all sexy or erotic about these stories. I come here to read about lust, not revenge.

 

[SimonDoom]

But it doesn't have the same ring if you say: "She watched as his engorged manhood centimetred closer to her ladyflower."

Desmond tried hard to squeeze his 76 centimeter-wide man loaf into Trixie's 74-centimeter-wide honey oven, but it was no go. They had to find another metrically satisfying way to cook the happy meal.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Having a woman "Hold the Idiot Ball" in order for the plot to happen. The idiot ball is always bad writing, but the review stories I get more often put it in a woman's hands than anyone elses.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

But it doesn't have the same ring if you say: "She watched as his engorged manhood centimetred closer to her...

 

[PapaRomantic]

Having a woman "Hold the Idiot Ball" in order for the plot to happen.

The devastating "Martian slut ray" in so many BTB stories in Loving Wives

 

[YmaOHyd]

Having a woman "Hold the Idiot Ball" in order for the plot to happen. The idiot ball is always bad writing, but the review stories I get more often put it in a woman's hands than anyone elses.

Related: my most hated trope is the third-act twist that relies on either character regression or deliberate mutual miscommunication. This is a romantic comedy thing, and it sucks. Most of the time it's problems that should have been, or even already have been, addressed in the first act coming back as characters suffer collective amnesia, wiping out all their character growth.

There's a really good story that has a Boy and a Girl. Boy and Girl are in college, they've overcome a lot to make their relationship work. Boy is offered the chance to achieve his dreams, but it'll mean moving to another city. Rather than go to Girl and say "oh my god babe I get to be what I've always dreamed of, our money problems are over," Boy says nothing to anyone until Girl finds out that he's planning to drop out of school. Boy and Girl hate each other, Boy rushes to the airport to get on Girl's plane, Boy and Girl reconcile and live happily ever after. The only reason this big dramatic twist happens is that one of the characters conceals information they have no reason to hide and every reason to share.

Another one, though it's not exactly a trope -- it's more of a reaction to incentives, I think -- is the constant growth of harem stories. Rather than establish a core of characters and expand their personalities, most harems keep adding people until every boy has three white girls of varying boob sizes, a set of twins, and an array of girls from a pleasing cross-section of ethnicities. None of them have a personality beyond 'this is the one who does anal' or 'this is the cum-fetish one,' except the one whose personality is 'responsible adult.'

 

[StillStunned]

Having a woman "Hold the Idiot Ball" in order for the plot to happen. The idiot ball is always bad writing, but the review stories I get more often put it in a woman's hands than anyone elses.

Someone probably misread "Hold the idiot's balls", and it got out of hand.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I dusluje (not sure if it’s a trope) how the general structure is blowjob, PIV (sometimes skipped), right to anal. Like there’s 1000s of ways to have sex? And I do t even go into the anal category lol

That's a porn trope. Give the customer a little of everything. At least the order is not reversed (that I know of anywhere) because that would be - well, unhealthy.

Okay, Penis in Vagina sex, not Personal Identity Validation. We've got to be careful with all of these abbreviations. For example, I don't use BQE unless I have a note (maybe at the beginning) explaining what it means. Same with TLC (not Tender Loving Care).

P.S.: It's a bit of stretch to say that there are thousands of ways to have sex.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Amnesia. When the story starts with the main character having amnesia it's a mystery that you get to explore with the character and so I'm fine with it in that context. But when mid-story the main character, or an important side character loses their memory either wholly or of some of the most important parts so far. Then it becomes the kind of tragedy that I just don't want to read. Sometimes I even stop reading any of that author's other works as well.

 

[Dearelliot]

I don't hate it, but I can't get into High school or college dorms stuff, and dislike anything that even hints at underage.
And I prefer Dom/sub.

 

[AG31]

I dislike the term "hated" when referring to tropes. My attitude is that just about anything can work if it's done artfully.

I agree. As I trolled through things that make me stop reading a story, it's almost always writing style. Although there are lots of stories I just never start reading just because they're not my thing.

 

[alohadave]

Another one, though it's not exactly a trope -- it's more of a reaction to incentives, I think -- is the constant growth of harem stories. Rather than establish a core of characters and expand their personalities, most harems keep adding people until every boy has three white girls of varying boob sizes, a set of twins, and an array of girls from a pleasing cross-section of ethnicities. None of them have a personality beyond 'this is the one who does anal' or 'this is the cum-fetish one,' except the one whose personality is 'responsible adult.'

I like harem stories, but the constant addition of partners does get to be ridiculous. After a while you can't keep track and I lose interest. The Quaranteam stories are really bad about this.

Add in multiple pregnancies and you need to be super wealthy to support a family that size.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I like harem stories, but the constant addition of partners does get to be ridiculous. After a while you can't keep track and I lose interest. The Quaranteam stories are really bad about this.

Add in multiple pregnancies and you need to be super wealthy to support a family that size.

Quaranteam was one of the ones I was thinking about, yeah -- though in mitigation they're operating according to rules that one person has set, and I think at least one of those stories started before QT got to the "every male has 20 partners, people are developing superpowers and telepathy" place it is today*.

I'm not against harem stories or group stories more broadly. I just want each person in the group to have a reason to be there. A thing I don't like is when there's a harem and the guy keeps having to go outside the harem for help with things that people within it could provide. "I need someone to talk to about my feelings" boy, you have four girlfriends and five regular fuck-partners who want to be your girlfriend, talk to one of them, do not go meet another girl.

And sometimes that reason is that the story is reader-supported through a Patreon or something, and the patrons want something to happen -- they want a redhead, or they want this side character to get more prominence, or... I don't like it, but God knows I'm not going to criticize someone for finding a way to make a living doing what they love. I bet if I went back and looked, at least a couple of the decisions I dislike in one or two stories were driven by paid reader voting or are sponsored content.

*Quaranteam reminds me of another trope that I hate. Low-level drama is fine. Sometimes the stakes don't need to be raised anymore. "Andy is an author, and he's in over his head in a brave new world as the Quaranteam vaccine turns sexual morality upside down" is a premise with more than enough dramatic potential. We don't need Andy to be the next President, we don't need celebrity drama, we don't need shootouts and gunfights. We need to chill the eff out and actually explore the dramatic potential inherent in the premise. What does this mean for the women? What's it like for them, feeling their emotions being manipulated? The most interesting character in the whole Quaranteam expanded universe (as far as I'm aware of it, which isn't super far) is Feather, the conspiratorial protester from QT: Northwest, who I think chooses to die rather than take the vaccine. The whole Quaranteam premise, really, is that every single anti-vax conspiracy theory is true, and... no one really touches it. It's just a conveyor belt to feed female characters who are [bra size] [skin tone] [sexual characteristic] to the male narrator.

 

[Bamagan]

I'm not a fan of the 'it was all a dream' and similar scenarios, in pretty much any medium. At least, I don't like it when it's intended to be a 'twist' ending, or to retroactively excuse a character's bad behavior by 'revealing' it never happened.

 

[StrangeLife]

I'm a little tired of men who get cheated on and then turn out to actually be ex Special Forces with a particularly set of skills, that they subsequently use to take bloody vengeance on their wives and their cheating partners.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I'm not a fan of the 'it was all a dream' and similar scenarios, in pretty much any medium. At least, I don't like it when it's intended to be a 'twist' ending, or to retroactively excuse a character's bad behavior by 'revealing' it never happened.

That has been used in movies, usually causing grief in the viewers. I can forgive The Wizard of Oz because it's obviously a dream from the beginning. (The same people from her real life show up as characters in the dream world.*) By the way, that is not quite how the novels were written.

P.S.: It's okay to include fantasies, as long as it's clear what they are.

* Except Billie Burke, as Glinda, who seems to have no counterpart in Kansas. Was that edited out of the film maybe?

 

[gunhilltrain]

I'm a little tired of men who get cheated on and then turn out to actually be ex Special Forces with a particularly set of skills, that they subsequently use to take bloody vengeance on their wives and their cheating partners.

Maybe they should mix it up a bit. Have the guy be a mobster, or maybe a secret serial killer. Not that I advocate that, but at least it's different.