Tropes you personally don't use

NOTE: This is not a thread for Complaining About Tropes You Don't Like. Just a place to discuss tropes that you, as a writer, don't often use in your works and why. They don't even need to be tropes that are necessarily indicative of bad writing, just tropes that you personally make an effort to omit from your writing. Think of it as a sort of inverse of Author Appeal, if you will.

Anyways, to start things off, I've never really been a fan of having my villains pull an I Have You Now, My Pretty on their captives. Usually it's because I want my villains to either be at least somewhat sympathetic or the type of character the audience can grudgingly respect, and having the villain act lecherous and creepy just to drive home the fact that they're evil seems like a cop-out. Of course, on the rare occasion I do want a villain to cross the Moral Event Horizon, I usually have them achieve that via other means (Attempted genocide, a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on the hero, etc.)

So, what about you guys?

I don't think this thread is going to be very productive, nor will it be an easy task avoiding complaints about tropes that authors don't like.

Yeah...what Leradny said. ._.;

Hard to say. If I were to venture off the top of my head it's the Fourth Wall ones. I like stuff that doesn't have to resort to cheap fourth wall tricks of any kind.

Super Weight.

I don't think power levels are evrything

I don't really know. I avoid thinking in tropes when I write and so I don't really pay attention to what I have and have not included in my writing. I find writing to be an organic experience, you need to let it come from within rather than constructing it out of huge building blocks. Writing from the soul is the only way to create something beautiful, you can't artificially induce it.

I write stories as they come. Anything I avoid is entirely subconscious, so it wouldn't exactly be avoiding any given trope.

I don't tend to use Actual Pacifist much, since in the sort of settings I write in they'd probably just get killed off straight away.

I don't like to use tropes that annoy me on a fundamental level, since I don't like putting personal bias in any written work. I don't necessarily avoid them, though, but I modify them to the point where I know I'd be giving them a fair shake.

Just how many times are we going to make a thread like this, anyway?

Although for the record, one trope I avoid for reasons unrelated to personal distaste is Evil Luddite. I have absolutely no respect for anti-science mindsets, but I don't like strawmen, and if I were to feature an Evil Luddite villain that's all they could ever be. So I don't include them.

edited 28th Dec '11 9:08:26 PM by nrjxll

I tend to avoid rape tropes as I am unable to approximate a mindset where it seems like something that makes sense to actually do, so I think trying to make a character do it will come off as bizarre and fakey.

...then again I suppose my potential audience wouldn't usually recognize it, but...

There are so many tropes out there, that I think anyone, by default, doesn't use 99% of them.

The only thing I ever consciously avoid is Unfortunate Implications.

Er... I don't really use For Science!, and when I do it's usually not shown as a good thing.

I disdain the Nuclear Weapons Taboo, as well. If there's gonna be weapons of mass destruction involved and it makes sense for the setting, I'm dropping nukes, and to hell with making up random shit instead.

I don't really like Alternate History Wank or Space-Filling Empire. Countries that end up superficially better off in my settings tend to have exceptionally deep-rooted issues underneath the surface (for example, a United States that controls most of the Western Hemisphere under an authoritarian, racist, imperialistic regime it can't really hold together properly).

I don't bother with the Most Common Superpower.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

edited 29th Dec '11 1:05:14 PM by Flyboy

Since when is For Science! ever shown as a good thing?

In the world of fiction, not often, because most writer's are, obviously, liberal arts people, not science people.

When I write science fiction I rarely write the happy brand of "science will help us with everything," however. In most of my science fiction worlds, technology makes things worse, not better. Usually it's not necessarily the technology's fault, however...

I, for one, never use science is useless or science is bad- not to say I don't enjoy writing mad scientists, but the evil normally stems from personal evil and not the science itself.

edited 29th Dec '11 1:59:56 PM by butlerdidit

For Science! is basically the pursuit of scientific (or allegedly scientific) aims without regard for moral issues. You don't need to be against science in general to oppose that kind of thing. Again, I can't think of any works where it isn't shown as bad.

You're right, but I can think of quite a few people just on this forum, past and present, who happily endorsed the idea of For Science! unironically.

Girl Genius and Dexters Laboratory swing both ways showing For Science! as both good and bad.

Tropes I avoid? Hmm. Here's the ones I can think of:

• Actual Pacifist: I don't believe in pacifism myself. Therefore, I can't write them convincingly and they'd likely be strawmen.
• Bloodless Carnage: I'll admit to being a bit turned on by blood. I'm also maybe going for shock value, a little bit.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Boring.
• The Cape: Boring.
• Chickification: Pisses me right off.
• The Green Eyed Monster / Green-Eyed Epiphany: As a practitioner of Polyamory who believes that acting in a jealous manner toward another human being is the moral equivalent of slavery, it's a bit difficult for me to write this without entering into strawman territory.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: The only time I invoked this, I promptly subverted it by having the hero say she wants to be thought of as worse than the villain, so that he will fear her.
• Karma Houdini: The most annoying thing that can happen in fiction, ever. The villain exists to die, plain and simple.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Boring (see also The Cape).
• No Bisexuals: Boring.
• Poke the Poodle: I'm not exactly writing for kids here, so it wouldn't make much sense in my work.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: See also Karma Houdini.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Having a character call them out is too Anvilicious even for me. Let the audience decide whether their actions were right or wrong.
• Will They or Won't They?: I stop caring whether they will after maybe three episodes, and am beyond the point of ever caring again where Castle is concerned, so They Do in my work. Usually before they've actually had a formal date.

Tropes of male chauvinism, such as "men are strong, women are pretty", "women should stay in the kitchen", "chickification", etc.

My berserk button.

I'm not sure. I don't really write very much, but I don't think I try to consciously include or exclude tropes or anything like that.

I mean, I'm sure if I wrote something you could identify what tropes are in it, but if I'm writing something (which as I've said is rare) I don't stop and think, "Now, what trope have I just used?" or anything like that, if that makes sense.

@Gloomer: Yes, that makes perfect sense. Other people on the site have said that (I think in this thread, as a matter of fact) in different ways, so you're not alone either.

What the Hell, Hero?: Having a character call them out is too Anvilicious even for me. Let the audience decide whether their actions were right or wrong.

Hold on a sec - if all the characters are OK with something, and the text doesn't present it as reprehensible, how can that come across to the reader as anything other than endorsement by the author? Besides, isn't it kind of unrealistic for nobody to ever object to a controversial action?

What the Hell, Hero? does not mean 'I, the author, think this is wrong'. It means that a character objects to the heroes' actions, and is not portrayed as utterly evil for doing so.

Also, why is it necessary that your villains must die - and why only create villains who must be dealt with by killing them?

Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Mostly because my audience immediately catches on to what I am doing, and are annoyed or bugged by it. Although the less literainnovative audience seems to not catch it.