What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
I’m not sure that I can suggest the most annoying trope in a book or movie – clichés I detest, but tropes are not the same thing. Tropes serve a purpose. They are tried-and-tested patterns in storytelling precisely because, when handled well, they work. They resonate. They hit the right note. Unlike clichés (like the ones I’ve just used!)
I’ve spent much of my reading life among books that are built out of recurring narrative patterns. H.G. Wells places humanity against forces greater than itself. The War of the Worlds uses alien invasion not merely as spectacle but as a way of turning the imperial gaze back on Victorian Britain. Huxley takes the apparently efficient future society and gradually reveals what has been sacrificed to achieve it. Asimov and Clarke repeatedly use cosmic scale to remind us how small our certainties are.
Historical fiction does much the same thing. Robert Graves gives us the fallible eyewitness standing slightly to one side of history, watching emperors, dynasties and families destroy themselves. Tolstoy places individual lives against enormous historical forces. Solzhenitsyn reduces survival under oppression to routines, scraps of food, work, endurance and tiny victories.
And some of my favourite fiction uses an even more familiar trope: the adult looking backwards at adolescence and discovering that the past was not what he thought it was. L.P. Hartley announces the entire genre with, “The past is a foreign country.” Boarding schools and adolescent groups become closed societies with their own hierarchies, cruelties, loyalties and currencies. A summer, a school term or a friendship becomes the period in which innocence is lost. Memory becomes unreliable.
I’m particularly susceptible to this kind of storytelling because there’s interesting territory between what somebody understood at fourteen, fifteen or sixteen and what the same person understands fifty years later. This is my own project as I revisit in detail for the first time diaries I wrote in my teens and twenties: 1975-1992!
Often, the real story lies in what was misunderstood, forgotten, or never said. Should children step in to correct the paths their parents are taking? What are the repercussions of divorce on young children? Is freedom to choose a curse? Should life’s lessons be taught or experienced?
So “the chosen one”, “found family”, “enemies to lovers”, the unreliable narrator, the mentor who dies, the red herring — none of these annoy me simply because I have encountered them before. Shakespeare worked with familiar plots. Bocaccio’s Decameron puts on record familiar stories. The Canterbury Tales was the soap opera of the 14th century.
What annoys me is the unearned trope.
It is the moment when I can see the machinery because the writer hasn’t persuaded me to believe in it: the villain who suddenly becomes good because the plot requires redemption; the couple who fall in love because the genre says they must even though they clearly should keep loathing eachother; the mentor who dies solely to manufacture motivation; the supposedly shocking betrayal that exists only to provide a third-act twist; the “chosen one” whose importance has been asserted rather than earned.
At that point a trope becomes a cliché.
The distinction, for me, is conviction. Give me another alien invasion, another boarding school, another lost summer, another unreliable memory, another crumbling empire or another middle-aged narrator trying to understand the boy he once was. I don’t particularly care whether the structure has been used a hundred times before.
Just make me believe this is the first time it has ever happened.
Authenticity and voice matter most.
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