Hiya lovelies,
This week I am back with a follow-up post about book tropes. A couple of weeks ago I shared a post about the 5 book tropes I love the most, you can read it here. So, I thought it would be a great idea to share the ones I don't enjoy reading.
I am quite an open-minded reader, and as a result of this, there are only three tropes that I can think of that I'm not into. I just want to state, the following is all a matter of opinion and not fact! I can simply avoid books with these tropes (which I do) but thought this would be a fun post!
Let's dive right in:
Enemies to lovers. This may be the most controversial opinion I have, but I am not into the whole enemies-to-lovers trope at all. I don't understand how you can go from hating someone to loving them. It happens a lot in narratives where the two characters are trying to kill one another and I personally wouldn't be able to love someone who was so hell-bent on essentially killing me. I don't get it and I don't think I ever will.
The bully turns out to be queer. I can't stand it and quite frankly don't understand this trope. You see it time and time again in YA novels, the bully lashes out in the most violent ways towards queer kids and makes their lives miserable and then they turn out to be queer themselves. I don't get it, firstly, being queer doesn't excuse your behaviour towards other queer people. Secondly, would it not make sense that if you were in the closet you would just avoid the whole thing. I just hate that in these types of stories the bully gets away with being horrible. As a queer person myself it's offensive, it feeds on the stereotype that gay people are mean and/or bullies must be gay because they're picking on the gay kids. This trope? Over it.
Fat girl gets skinny. As a fat girl, it's so condescending that the fat girls in most books have to get skinny just to be recognised or loved. It's awful and as a reader just makes me feel like crap. It's not enjoyable to read and most of the time is written by a typically skinny person who has no idea what it's like to be a fat person in real life. This trope perpetuates the idea that fat = bad or that a person can't be loved until they fit a certain beauty standard. To hell with this trope! I want narratives that uplift fat people and show how happy we can be by just accepting our bodies without the need to change ourselves for other people's acceptance. I want stories about fat people succeeding, stories of triumph and not ones just focused on losing weight.
That's it! I felt a lot of passion whilst writing this post, I definitely didn't realise just how much these tropes riled me up. You may find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with my points and that's cool, one of the amazing things about reading is that there is definitely something out there for everyone!
