Tagged: cliches
My Least Favourite Book Tropes: Part Three
In parts one and two of this series I described some of the tropes that most annoy me and I’m going to continue in that griping tradition for part three. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these so I’m ready to start ranting! The usual caveat applies: tropes are not necessarily clichés. They’re just devices used by authors to tell a story but that doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally stray into the world of cliché. Some of them annoy me but you, as a reader, may very well love these ones. It all depends on the person.
This is very prominent in YA and in Children’s Fiction because the protagonists in these books are not adults. So of course they see adults as hindering their progress on whatever mission they’re on rather than what the adults are actually doing: worrying about them. Sometimes adults deliberately obstruct children’s or teen’s activities and it’s usually in the name of safety. Other times they’re just being jerks, as every child or teen has found out at some point.
In some ways the trope makes sense—children and teens are more impressionable and more likely to adapt to events going on around them. For example, if a child is telling an adult that there’s magic and lots of horrible things are happening because of it, then the adult is probably going to be useless and deny the whole thing. It’s annoying but it’s at least believable. When this trope is annoying is when all adults are useless, not just some. That’s just unrealistic and a total caricature. That’s somewhat expected in children’s fiction but when you’re reading YA it’s just patronizing, even if you are a teenager. Continue reading
My Least Favourite Book Tropes: Part Two
In Part One I discussed just some of my least favourite tropes. Now I’m ready to go on another time-wasting researching TV Tropes spree. At least it didn’t take me five hours to research this article. Let’s get into some bad tropes and why they’re so bad now, shall we? As with my first article, let me give you the caveat that tropes are not necessarily clichés. They’re just devices used by authors to tell a story but that doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally stray into the world of cliché as you’ll see with the following examples:
Generally speaking, it’s not easy to take over a territory and hold it for an extended period of time. Especially if you do everything possible to alienate the local population, which will inevitably cause an uprising in 9 out of 10 situations. So why is it that in books, especially YA, worlds are conquered quite easily? If the heroine (and it’s almost always a girl) throws out the old, oppressive government in a dystopia there’s rarely a counter-revolution or any resistance to the new rule. In truth when oppressive governments are overthrown as happened during the French Revolution, a counter revolution is pretty much inevitable from those who profited under the reign of said oppressive government.
Conquering isn’t as easy as a lot of books make it out to be and ruling a conquered land is even harder. Yet we see bad guys take over countries/worlds like it was nothing. Things are rarely so simple in real life. Continue reading
Discussion: Villains
For me, a good villain is practically a necessity in most books. I really do love great villains but I realize that not everyone’s definition of a ‘great villain’ is the same. So here’s a brief explanation of mine:
Villains have to have believable backstories to explain why they’re so terrible. It could be that they’re more morally ambiguous than most people and fought their way to the top, losing their morals all the way. Or it could be that they thought the world had done an injustice to them and wanted to strike back. But what I hate the most is villains that are evil for no reason other than they’re crazy or just want to watch the world burn.
Even with the best authors, villains are hard to pull off because it’s so easy to stray into the realm of cliché with them. They should have doubts about what they’re doing but not too many doubts or they risk becoming a hero. They should commit atrocities, but too many and it just looks like the author is aiming for senseless violence.
Some of my personal favourite villains (from all sorts of mediums) include: Baron Scarpia from Puccini’s Tosca, The Governor from The Walking Dead, Tbubui from Scroll of Saqqara, Niccoló Machiavelli from The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel and Satan from Paradise Lost.
But what I want to know is: who are your favourite villains? What makes a ‘good’ villain? What villain clichés do you absolutely hate?