What's Your Favorite Trope?

Adorkable is my favourite. These characters are relatable, plus I like how quirky and cute they are. This trope is my all-time favourite.

Also a favorite. Another one I particularly enjoy is Freaky is Cool. I would like it a bit more if some characters that were deemed freaky would turn it into an Exploited Trope. (Incidentally, I am also a fan of the latter trope as well.)

1. Schrödinger's Butterfly

2. For Want Of A Nail

3. Recursive Reality

4. Byronic Hero

5. The Gunslinger

6. The Drifter

7. Dream Within a Dream

8. Lover and Beloved

9. Nested Story

10. Kudzu Plot

11. Unconventional Formatting

12. Lotus-Eater Machine

13. Rōnin

14. Time Abyss

15. Surreal Horror

16. Who Wants to Live Forever?

17. Interplay of Sex and Violence

18. Cloud Cuckoolander

19. Bara Genre

20. Snow Means Death

Edited by KeironCioran on Dec 27th 2018 at 10:24:28 AM

A bunch of my favorites are on my Troper page (I love a ton of tropes, so it's nowhere near a complete list).

Notably I'm a huge fan of the tropes that involve mind control and memory-wiping/alteration.

Edited by CrystalMemoria on Dec 26th 2018 at 7:52:00 AM

My favorite team trope is Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. There's just something appealing about a group of losers going to save the planet.

I love the Adorkable and Badass Adorable tropes.

The former for relatability and the latter for badassery despite being cute.

Break Them by Talking is a favorite villain trope for me.

Chekhov's Armory, when it's well-executed (which it almost always is).

Fully-Embraced Fiend is one of the best monster tropes.

My favorite Tropes can be found in my half-ass made Troper Page. I'm also a bit too lazy to add context for each Trope, but I think I'll do that later.

Oh well, I'll add in a few Tropes, this time with context for once:

• Badass Longcoat: Trench coats make everyone look cooler.
• Cat Girl: Let's face it, they're pretty adorable. Cat boys deserve some love too, you know? Like Felix Argyle for example.
• Celibate Hero: Can we get more aromantic heroes please? I would be glad to see some positive role-models for single people. Also, romantic love is overrated anyways, especially if your passion is science and using it for good.
• Dragon Tropes: I'm a huge fan of dragons, so...
  • Dragon Knight: Wanna make your knights look more badass? Add a dragon motif to them! If that doesn't satisfy you enough, why not make the knight a literal dragon?
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are very diverse and creative creatures to design, despite the natural base being a reptilian creature.
• Combat Medic: Why not do both the fighting and healing at the same time? I like having high survivability while having some decent damage output.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Despite your Jade-Colored Glasses, you still find charm in ideals and you do whatever good you can in life.
• Little Bit Beastly: Personally a favorite character design idea of mine, especially if they have dragon horns and dragon tails.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Let's just say that I'm not a fan of the Who Wants to Live Forever? trope, although I do want everyone to have the right to live forever and the right to a quick and painless death.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Team Enlightenment all they way!
• Science Hero: If I'm honest, I'm getting really damn sick with the Science Is Bad Trope, and seeing a heroic character using science for the good of others is a refreshing FUCK YOU to that Trope.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: As long as the idealists attack the Cynicism itself rather than the cynics ^note  and treat the cynics with compassion, which is more mature and idealistic for the idealists to do , this Trope helps keep my worldview on its toes, unlike Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!. Besides, Real Life is already cynical enough.
• This Is a Drill and Jousting Lance: Both of these Tropes synchronize with each other beautifully...
• White-and-Grey Morality and Rousseau Was Right: Despite my (probably and hopefully debunkable) Black-and-Grey Morality outlook on life, there is some truth about both Tropes, as there are people trying to do their best to help those in need and reducing sentient suffering. Aside from psychopaths (which are a minority of the human race anyways), people aren't born evil; just morally blank at start (with a sense of altruism and compassion), and negative environmental influences are what drive people into destruction and the spread of suffering. The former Trope is criminally underrated and underused when compared to the other morality conflict tropes.

Edited by KJsixteen on Apr 28th 2019 at 2:42:15 AM

I have so many. Some of them are listed on my troper page, too.

• English Rose: Best character trope ever. I love how specific it is and fairly narrow.
• Romantic Rain: A bit overused, but so cute if done right.
• Umbrella of Togetherness: I just love it. Love and rain go so well together.
• Unreliable Narrator: Ambiguous situations, mad people as narrators etc.
• Nested Story: I adore complex narrative situations.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Fairy tales are my favourite...
• Empathic Environment: If done right.
• Facepalm and other Stock Poses: It's especially cool if it appears in written text. For some reason, it almost always cracks me up and it's so freaking funny.

Edited by XFllo on May 17th 2019 at 1:20:14 AM

I have a huge soft spot for characters and real life people who Face Death with Dignity.

I have a list of favorite tropes on my page, but out of them all, my absolute favorite is The Woobie. That feeling of wanting to comfort a character is just something that really gets to me.

I love Newer Than They Think because of its paradoxical, fake-memory quality. Dead Unicorn Trope is another favorite of mine for similar reasons.

Darn it, I keep reading this as "What's Your Favorite Troper." :P

But since I'm here, I'll show my support for Gentle Giant and Big Fun. I also like Stout Strength too. :D

Edited by DrNoPuma on Jul 7th 2019 at 2:02:56 PM

I'm a huge fan of Adorkable.

Edited by BackSet1 on Jul 7th 2019 at 6:13:25 AM

I just searched for a thread like this after thinking about how much I like Ominous Visual Glitch. But also:

• Black Comedy
• The Anti-Nihilist
• Reality Warper
• Fun for Some
• Shown Their Work
• Combat Pragmatist
• Dark Is Not Evil / Light Is Not Good
  • On a related note, Knight in Sour Armor heroes and Knight Templar villains.
  • As well as Creepy Cute, Creepy Good, and Creepy Awesome.
• Deconstructor Fleet
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink
• Fat and Proud
• Gray-and-Grey Morality
  • As well as Anti-Villain and Heel–Face Revolving Door characters
• Hidden Depths
• Badass Pacifist
• Weak, but Skilled
• Fetish Fuel
• Nightmare Fetishist
• Line to God, because it's really cool when creators actually answer fan questions.
• He Also Did, because it shows when a creator's good at storycraft in general instead of relying on one genre's tropes.
• I've always loved and been fascinated by Eldritch Abomination
  • I also started Eldritch Location, so I guess that one too.

Seconding adorkable, even more so in real life than in fiction.

Interestingly, I'm much more partial to Older Than They Think. I like discovering that people of the past had current inventions or ideas and weren't just Medieval Morons.

Also agreeing with Face Death with Dignity, Chekhov's Armory, and Unkempt Beauty earlier up the page.

Way back when before it was merged with Nightmare Fuel, High Octane Nightmare Fuel was my favorite trope ever and probably the one I read the most times on TVT. It was really helpful for my horror writing education to know what people considered the scariest scenes from adult media, specifically, instead of having it mixed with "merely creepy" examples and ones from kids' shows.

Edited by Wheezy on Nov 19th 2020 at 3:27:31 PM

I have a lot, but my #1 favorite is Heroic BSoD. It’s very interesting to see where characters finally reach their breaking points and what they do when they reach them.

Cute Mute, The Speechless, and Hand Signals are pretty much my favorite tropes because it's interesting to see how characters that are unable to communicate in a work that uses dialogue get around this handicap. I also enjoy the Meganekko for pure aesthetics.

When She Smiles, because I’m a huge sap and I don’t think its heart-melting power is fully realized by others.

The Scrappy.

Before I realized you were joking, I thought it was because you hate Scrappy-Doo and are glad that his name is synonymous with hated characters.

I like Calling Your Attacks a lot for some reason, even though I know it’s extremely impractical and can get Narm-ish, it can be totally awesome in the right situation.

Edited by antenna_ears on Nov 24th 2020 at 10:01:16 AM

I kind of like The Scrappy unironically. It's fun to learn about what characters people absolutely loathe.

Affably Evil. I love it when villains have actual depth to their characters.