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:

1.  Easily Conquered World

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 →