Top 5 Worst Common Tropes In Literature


Throughout the literature that I have read over my little life, I can't help but notice the common cliches and tropes that always love to appear in many books. Here are what I think are the top 5 worst common tropes in literature:


The trope: The chosen one.
The replacement: Normal people. 
This trope is the one that gives me some serious stress. Not that I haven't enjoyed novels with this trope but at this point it's just so overdone. Books like Harry Potter sold well on the chosen one idea because it was original at the time, but even then it felt slightly worn. To have multiple dystopian novels take this idea after the fact and overdo it to the point where everything is predictable... I'm not here for it. How about have relatable characters that make sense in a dystopian setting? Ordinary people forced into the unusual?

The trope: Flawless characters.
The replacement: Characters with dimension.
Characters that are typically flawless in personality get tiresome very quickly. Characters like this just don't exist in real life, and when they exist in literature it doesn't exactly make sense. Instead, authors should portray these characters with flaws, adding dimension to them and presenting these characters as real human beings rather than awkwardly perfect characters.

The trope: The villain with no motive.
The replacement: A villain we can understand.
It gets boring to have two-dimensional villains with no true motive behind their actions. I'm not talking about pure revenge as a motive, because that's a slightly lazy motive to give. I want deeper and further explanations. I want to be able to sympathize with the villain and side with them at times. I no longer want to just mindlessly hate the villain because that's what the author wants me to do.

The trope: Protagonist with a moral compass that is too strong. 
The replacement: A protagonist that does what actually works.
A lot of protagonists come close to meeting their end target in the novels, they come close to accomplishing that they've desired throughout the entire time that you've been reading about them and then... they could kill their antagonist and essentially be rid of them forever, but they don't simply because that would go against their moral compass. Rather than this, I want protagonists who do occasionally go against their moral compass and do things that they consider wrong, and simply deal with the consequences of this after the fact.

The trope: The overused love triangle.
The replacement: Remove the romance if it doesn't contribute to the plot.
If you didn't think this would be on the list then you're crazy. This trope is in every other book, and quite frankly, I'm so bored of it. Skip the unnecessary 'romance.' More times than not this trope does not move the plot forward in any beneficial way at all. So why is it still there? It is mostly YA that incorporates this tropes, with examples in Twilight, An Ember in the Ashes and The Iron King.

Whilst these tropes do irritate me and bore me when they are hideously overdone, I understand why they are used so often - because people do enjoy these tropes when they are done well. These tropes can become something that is incredibly fascinating for the plot-line simply if the author utilizes it correctly.




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