hosted by Parajunkee Day 10 – Tropes you love, but have a hard time admitting to other readers Love triangles. Everyone seems to hate them, but so many novels have them and sell well. I think most people do like them to some degree and just won’t admit it. Sometimes, I crave a good love triangle!Insta-Love. I’m a MAJOR defender of insta-love. I DO believe in love at first sight. I believe in meeting someone and something inside of you just knows. I know because I’ve experienced it. Yes, you still need to have a connection and get to know each other and still love the person after you’ve truly gotten to know them. Yes, if that instant connection ends up in the bedroom immediately, it’s lust, not love. But people always put down insta-love like it’s not believable and that makes me sad.
Villians/Bad Guys/Tortured Heroes. I do not like contemporary bad boys, but I love fantasy/paranormal/science fiction bad boys. Like Warner from Shatter Me and The Darkling from Shadow and Bone. I find myself nearly always rooting for the bad guy in stories like those. I hate the perfect hero sort of characters. The bad ones are much more complex. Sometimes I still root for the bad guys even if they never become the actually good guys in the end.
Romance inside of a larger conflict. I not only love romance in a good dystopian or sci fi, but I think I prefer it. It reminds me that even in the worst or most dangerous societies, a person can find their other half.
Missing Parents. While sometimes it does drive me crazy, I think I actually like it. I love the coming of age, the shedding of innocence, the emotions, and the optimism that a YA protagonist has. You just don’t get that in adult fiction. You have to build an adult character with history, but with YA, that character can enter into an adult world without any prior judgment. I read YA because I feel like I can connect and relate and the character feels less like a kid and more like an adult. At 17/18, that’s when I met the love of my life and that’s when my adventure began. But if parents are a major part of the story, sometimes I realize just how young the character is or how I can’t relate anymore because their family is so different from my own. I don’t think that YA characters are much like actual teenagers and that’s why I love YA so much. And with missing parents, I can pretend like they aren’t still teens, but get a story with conflicts that I just can’t seem to get in adult fiction.
The OMG I’m a what? I’m the key to what? realization. It drives people crazy when an otherwise ordinary plain person somehow becomes the center of a conflict or the key to saving the world, but I love it. I think it fulfills some sort of psychological need for a lot of people when they read about an ordinary person who somehow becomes crucial and extraordinary. We don’t want to read about privileged people who turn out out be important as often. They are already important. We connect to the Spidermans of the world, not the Batmans, even if we prefer Batman. We want to root for the little guys and watch them become amazing and I think we can relate.
Virgin Protagonist. I don’t agree with the whole good girl = virgin and anyone who isn’t a virgin is the bad girl or the slut because I think it does more harm than good in the message. However, in YA, a lot of it is about firsts. And as I said in my Missing Parents section, I can relate to that YA heroine who falls in love for the first time at 17. I can also relate to her being inexperienced in that way. So I prefer this, only because I have no idea what it’s like to have experience before meeting the person you fall in love with. It’s more relatable to me as a person, even though I have a lot of issues with the virginal trope and what other negative messages it may send if done in certain ways.
Overbearing love interests. There’s a difference between sweet, quirky, and sensitive love interests and controlling alpha males. I dislike both extremes, but I do like love interests to be more towards the alpha side. I don’t like super emotional male protagonists for some reason. I like them to know what they want and take control of the situation.
