"Have you ever seen those big trees? I'm not talking about the small kind here. No, really big, huge, enormous trees that usually stand in little towns, making the towns look even more picturesque. Those trees that seem to ask you if you could please climb in them, or sit at them, because they look so old and lonely. And in most cases, they usually are.
I'm one of them."
—Elder Tree's introduction to the story
Written by the same guy that wrote Thrown Into Love, Rooting for Romance is about a guy and a girl, named Yuri and Ellen, growing up together, whilst also having a second plotline that's about a husband refusing to cheat, then cheating anyway later on. The entire story is told through the eyes of a tree.You can read it here.
In Rooting for Romance, the following tropes can be found:
- Arc Words: "We're going to be best friends forever"
- Book Ends: The prologue and the epilogue start in the same way: 'Have you ever seen...'
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Elder Tree sometimes addresses the reader to make a point. For example: "You know the answer, of course. You just read it a few chapters ago and you can look it up anytime you want."
- Call-Back: Many things in the first part of the story turn out to play a role later on:
- The Childhood Marriage Promise of Yuri and Ellen later comes back to help Ellen confess her feelings for Yuri.
- That also counts for Yuri falling out of the tree and Ellen coming to rescue him: In her confession to Yuri, she uses that memory in order to tell him about her feelings for him.
- Cool Old Guy: Maril. And of course, Elder Tree himself as well.
- Character Blog: Elder Tree now has a Twitter-account.
- Childhood Marriage Promise
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Matthew starts out as a brat, but apologises later on.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste. Elder Tree often sidetracks in his narration and makes points that are unrelated to the story, to emphasise that he's a tree, old, forgetful, and has troubles understanding our society and the way we narrate.
- Father, I Want to Marry My Brother: Marisa has this in her early years when she's a toddler. This sets the Childhood Marriage Promise of Yuri and Ellen themselves in motion.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Elder Tree is, of course, not the main character, but he is the narrator.
- Foreshadowing: The story can be roughly divided into two parts - the first part is full of foreshadowing and set-up for the second part, which also contains some foreshadowing itself.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Linda and Samantha.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: The story is written from the perspective of a tree and the story is called Rooting for Romance. The working title was even worse: Don't Leaf Me Alone.
- I Need to Iron My Dog: Used by both Matthew and Kayleigh in one of the later chapters of the story, when they're trying to get Yuri and Ellen to talk again and to confess their feelings for one another
- Lemony Narrator: Guess.
- Like Brother and Sister: Yuri and Ellen.
- Mama Bear: Do NOT mess with Linda's children if you want to live. Because Linda is a very calm, loving person who is hard to piss off... until you touch her children.
- Platonic Life-Partners: Yuri and Ellen, again.
- Raised by Wolves: Comments of the tree reveal that he has troubles understanding our society.
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Schedule Slip: Averted. The story has been updated every Saturday and if the author couldn't update, then he always let the readers know beforehand. (One exception: the Fictionpress servers were offline for a Saturday, but that was beyond the writer's control) - Sequel Hook: The author has confirmed that there will be a sequel, in order to give Gabriëlla and Marisa a plotline of their own - because they didn't play as a big a role as the author wanted.
- That sequel is posted and has its own Troper Works article: It's called The Birth of Something New.
- Shout-Out: Bilbo Baggins.
- The Stoic: Derek is often described as emotionless.
- Tranquil Fury: To quote Elder Tree: "Linda spoke up like ice-cold water".
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: Matthew in regards to Ellen. He gets over it pretty quickly, though, and is implied to hook up with her sister.
- Unreliable Narrator: Elder Tree forgets a lot of things which he fills the reader in about later.
- Victorious Childhood Friend: Yuri and Ellen, of course.
- We Are as Mayflies: Elder Tree briefly comments on how we somehow only make it to the age of eighty and even wonders how it's possible how mayflies live even shorter.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Maril, again. He dies in chapter two.
