Markup View

Author: Kat_

Apr 7th 2014 at 4:55:04 AM

Prfnoff: not quite sure I understood you correctly, so bear with me.

I agree with you in that "having a warm-hearted nurse or schoolteacher as a Love Interest is something that happens in more ensemble-oriented comedies with romantic subplots." That's why I would include them under this trope; though they might be officially labeled just "comedy" and normally include also other high jinx besides romance (in my view mostly to appeal to a wider audience), I think there's many examples that include enough many rom com tropes (like this one) to comfortably go under works with both comedic and romantic inclination. Like Friends, for example.

But I think there IS a difference between these type of works and other genres, which is that the jobs here are usually interchangeable for the plot to function. The boy would meet the girl even if she was a plumber not a teacher, but for various reasons (which I've tried to speculate on in the text, about the indicating caring traits etc), the scriptwriters semi-randomly decided that she's a teacher. The fact that she's a teacher may offer some minor plot contrivances ("kids say darndest things") but her profession makes no difference for the core storyline.

However, in many works in other genres the profession is fixed beforehand in order for the plot to function. In e.g. dramas like Dangerous Minds, To Sir With Love, or Dead Poets Society the main character has to be a teacher, because otherwise the story wouldn't make sense - since story is specifically about the teacher-student relationship. In the same way the characters in crime movies like State of Play or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo had to be journalists, or they wouldn't have ended up in the middle of crime investigations which is what these movies are about.

There are of course exceptions both ways (some rom coms where the job is somewhat more central, or works of other genres with random teachers/doctors/creative jobs). But I still believe this is tropeworthy, due to the uncanny repetition of these jobs (without a necessary narrative reason) in rom coms specifically.