#trope discourse

[alexadelphia-official]

"I can't lose you again" is the trope of all time perhaps

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

✨writing rant because i’m UNWELL and someone said enemies to lovers is “overdone”✨

okay listen.

i don’t care how “overdone” the trope is. let her fall in love with the enemy prince. let him smile like a knife and lie like a prayer. let her fall anyway. and then let her stab him with a hairpin. a hairpin!! we deserve this.

this isn't about originality. this is about execution and emotional violence and aesthetically pleasing betrayal.

tropes aren’t dead. they’re haunting us in new outfits.

every trope is a reusable little narrative skeleton and you get to dress it in whatever cursed, beautiful, petty, yearning flesh your heart desires. you can take enemies to lovers and make it toxic, or tender, or tragic. you can give them shared trauma. you can make them childhood friends turned enemies turned lovers turned enemies again. you can make the stabbing literal or metaphorical. you can make it an almost-stabbing, where she presses the blade to his throat and doesn’t do it. you can make her do it and then sob in his arms while he bleeds out whispering her name like a prayer he never meant to say out loud.

you can make it GAY.

that’s the power of tropes. they’re not restrictive. they’re launchpads. they give readers expectations so you can BREAK them. or better--fulfill them in devastating, soul-twisting ways.

also. like. if you think a trope is “overdone” maybe it’s not the trope that’s the problem. maybe it’s just being written without any real teeth. no emotional bite. no stakes. no tension. no pain. and that’s not the trope’s fault. that’s just boring writing.

give me the obsessive yearning. give me the knife-to-throat confessions. give me the battlefield truce that turns into a five-second pause before they go right back to trying to kill each other. give me quiet moments in enemy territory where they realize they’re not so different. give me the one bed. give me the i hate you but i’d burn down a kingdom for you and hate myself for it.

let the prince kneel at her feet, kiss her knuckles like he’d never crush them, and then go home and report to his war council like nothing happened. let her wear the hairpin he gave her while plotting his assassination. let them both suffer about it. let them choose each other anyway. or don’t. let them fail. let them fall apart in the final act and still reach for each other across the ashes.

i literally do not care how many times we’ve seen it. i want it again. i want it done well. i want it done with spite and softness and aching inevitability. i want to feel like the betrayal was worth it. i want to scream into my hands and text my writer friends like “why would you do this to me” while secretly living for it.

write your trope. write it the way it’s been done before or write it sideways and backwards and messy. just write it with emotion. and a little hairpin. and blood under their fingernails.

okay bye

Rin T.

[theweeklydiscourse]

The most irritating phenomenon to come out of shipping discourse is people applying arbitrary limits to very broad dynamics under the guise of objective analysis. They talk about what “works” and what doesn’t “work” as if their preferences are universal and not influenced by their own unique experiences and beliefs. They confuse what they personally enjoy for what is “correct”.

This is how you get people saying crazy stuff like “Enemies to Lovers can only work well when neither of the characters are aligned with something inherently evil” or claiming that it’s morally wrong to ship characters with an uneven power dynamic. Like…enemies to lovers is a trope that is defined by pushing and pulling between the parties involved. The power dynamics are subject to change and that’s what makes it so engaging. Why are you so obsessed with defanging the core ethos of the trope?

[littlefeltsparrow]

The whole “I’m hurting you to protect you” trope only works well when the harm inflicted is lesser than the harm that would have otherwise occurred had a character not intervened. This is a good guiding principle for examining how well this trope fits into a given story. Because if the harm inflicted fails to meet the condition of being lesser than the harm that would’ve otherwise occurred, then the whole relationship is called into question.

Rhysand’s actions under the mountain are a good example of this trope done wrong, because there are very few points where the threat of harm to Feyre genuinely justifies the harm he inflicts upon her. For example, Feyre could have reasonably stayed in her jail cell and remained safe without Rhysand’s intervention, which ultimately, caused her more harm than was necessary. Many fans try to justify his actions by claiming that he was sparing her from the horrors she might witness UTM, but that simply isn’t substantiated by the evidence we’re given. We’re never given a substantial reason that requires drugging and fondling Feyre for nights on end to save her from greater harm. It is never established what might have happened to Feyre had Rhysand not intervened, and the reader is given no reason to think that Feyre would have suffered more had she remained in her cell.

The most blatant example of this however, is when he uses physical force to coerce her into agreeing to a contract that serves his interests. He did not have to twist her broken arm or frighten her into signing the contract, he could’ve just healed her because Feyre beating Amarantha was ultimately beneficial to everyone. Nobody told him to do that and it is never established why he *needed* to hurt her in order to protect her.

This trope is very broad and can operate on a spectrum of severity, but it must involve an established/implied threat for it to reach its full potential. The fact that Maas overlooks this crucial aspect of the trope is further evidence of her incompetence as a writer.

[russetreynard]

Okay, seriously, what is it with this more recent trend in manga of male mentor figures with white hair and at least one eye covered?

(In this case I’d have three, but changing the meme format would have been too much work.)

We have the OG, Hatake Kakashi from Naruto; Gojo Satoru from JJK; and the one I most recently became aware of, but apparently came out before JJK, Qifrey from Witch Hat Atelier. Seriously, the resemblance between the three is uncanny.

What’s interesting to me is that none of these three are a textbook fit for “the mentor” archetype, although Gojo is closest.

Typically, the mentor is a wizened hermit who advises the main character on the Hero’s Journey. (Think Obi-Wan Kenobi and Dumbledore, but the first use of this archetype comes from the Odyssey!) They teach the hero important skills and life lessons, back the hero up in their goals, and usually die so the hero can achieve the final goal of the whole journey. (That’s why Gojo fits this archetype closest; he dies and Yuji steps up to defeat Sukuna and become the strongest sorcerer.)

What’s nice about these three is that each one’s backstory is filled with a lot of details to the point they could be classified as the deuteragonist or tritagonist. They aren’t JUST a side piece to the main character. (I love it when authors flesh out their characters.) They also aren’t too old. They are at most 40 years old, which is another way they stray from the archetype.

I don’t know exactly what inspiration the artists had, but it’s an cool contrast of their overall youthful appearance with white hair making them look much older, and the single visible eye implying an injury and rough life. (It could also be pulling from Norse mythology of Odin, with all the implications of that, ie wisdom and hidden knowledge from sacrifice.)

I don’t know, I could go a lot deeper on what I find so fascinating about their similarities and differences, but it’s late and my thoughts are approaching the coherence of children’s writing. I just find it very funny that this kind of guy has shown up not once, not twice, but three times.

[inkdoe]

I miss the time where I did not give a fuck about height differences. Like it was a neutral thing that existed for me. Then I read too much of "wrong" books and now I scream everytime a description starts with "He was so tall"

[sorcave]

The Miscommunication Trope Is Not Deep — It’s Lazy

There’s a point at which a trope stops being a storytelling tool and becomes a crutch, and the miscommunication trope has long since crossed that threshold. It’s everywhere: in romances that fizzle out for 200 pages because one person didn’t ask a single clarifying question; in tragedies that spiral out of control because a character overhears half of a conversation and storms away before hearing the rest. In theory, miscommunication is supposed to create tension. In practice, it often reveals a story’s hollowness — a manufactured conflict where genuine narrative stakes could have been.

Here’s the thing: communication is a fragile, deeply human thing. Misunderstandings happen all the time in real life. People talk past each other. People lie. People repress. But what makes this bearable — even fascinating — in real life is context, character, complexity. We misunderstand because we’re afraid, or insecure, or raised in systems that discourage clarity. When miscommunication happens in fiction without any of that grounding, it feels like the writer has run out of ideas. It feels cheap. And most of the time, it is.

The trope hinges on the idea that people do not talk to each other. But in reality — especially in high-stakes situations — people do talk. They ask. They clarify. They text. They call. They double back. They notice. And when they don’t, the absence of communication must be a feature of the character, not a flaw in the plot. If your couple breaks up because one person saw the other hug their ex and left the room in tears without speaking, that’s not romantic tension. That’s bad writing.

What’s frustrating is that this trope is almost always avoidable. Entire plotlines collapse if one character says one sentence. And not a poetic, revelatory sentence — just a basic one. “I’m not dating her.” “That’s not what I meant.” “Can we talk about this?” And when you reach that realization as a reader or viewer — that everything that hurt and broke and ruined could have been undone with a single human impulse to speak — it doesn’t feel tragic. It feels insulting.

We are past the point of finding this compelling. We are too aware now. We’ve watched too many seasons of television where the plot gets dragged by the neck through arcs that only exist because no one would sit down and have a five-minute conversation. We’ve read too many books where the third-act breakup is built on a misunderstanding that could be resolved with one text message — and worse, it’s not because the characters are flawed or scared or shaped by trauma. It’s because the author needed something to go wrong. It’s a tool for false tension. It’s scaffolding, not structure.

The tragedy is not that people misunderstand each other — the tragedy is when people understand too well and still fail to act. That is the heartbreak of Hamlet, of Anna Karenina, of The Godfather — not that no one knew what was going on, but that they did and it still wasn’t enough. Good drama is not built on withheld information. It’s built on choices. And when a story relies on miscommunication, it takes the weight of choice away from the characters and gives it to contrivance.

This is not to say that all miscommunication is bad. There is a way to do it with intent. When miscommunication is a deliberate function of character psychology — when it reveals something — it can be devastating and brilliant. Think of Kaz and Inej in Six of Crows. Think of Marianne and Connell in Normal People. These are characters who fail to communicate because of who they are — shaped by trauma, fear, shame. Their silence means something. But the key is: the audience knows. We are in on the failure. We see the missed connection. We ache with it. We understand why it happens.

But when miscommunication is used as filler — as a lazy wrench to keep a plot spinning — it becomes a disservice to the reader. It’s not clever. It’s not tragic. It’s not slow-burn. It’s just slow. And it wastes the most powerful thing a story can give us: the moment when people face each other honestly, say what they mean, and still have to deal with the consequences.

That’s what makes stories worth telling. Not silence for its own sake — but speech that costs something.

And while we’re on it, maybe the most frustrating byproduct of this trope — especially in its modern fanfic-forward iteration — is how it almost always insists on a moral asymmetry between the characters. Miscommunication, when written lazily, doesn’t just create empty drama — it manufactures a skewed sense of right and wrong, one that often exempts the protagonist from any meaningful culpability. The miscommunicating party — usually the love interest, often male — becomes the scapegoat for not anticipating a reaction they could not reasonably be expected to anticipate. Meanwhile, the protagonist — usually the POV character, often female — is framed as the injured party, even when the miscommunication stems from their own assumptions, projection, or lack of emotional maturity. And no one questions it.

We need to talk about how often these narratives implicitly frame emotional entitlement as justified, especially when the entitlement is romantic and comes from a “sympathetic” main character. How many stories hinge on a protagonist getting upset because the other person didn’t read their mind? Because they flirted once, and then didn’t follow it up with a declaration of love? Because they were kind — and kindness, apparently, is now a promise. And when the other person doesn’t deliver, the story treats it as betrayal, not misalignment. As if decency is a form of leading someone on. As if you owe people feelings just because they want you to.

And yes, I’m not saying this as a dig at female characters — I’m saying it as someone who’s tired of bad character writing being passed off as empowerment. There’s a trend, especially in fanfiction and romance media, where the female lead is insulated from fault, even when she’s the one who made assumptions, even when she projected a whole relationship onto someone who never said they were in one. If a man doesn’t communicate, it’s toxic. If a woman doesn’t communicate, it’s tragic. If he flirts but doesn’t pursue, it’s cruel. If she flirts and he doesn’t pursue, it’s his loss. There is no space for ambiguity. No space for two people who simply read a situation differently.

When we write stories this way — when we punish people for not returning someone’s feelings, or for failing to anticipate unspoken expectations — we reinforce a worldview where emotional clarity is treated as optional and where miscommunication becomes a weapon instead of a wound. The worst part? These dynamics are often dressed up as romantic. As yearning. As proof of how deep the connection is. But they’re not. They’re misunderstandings that curdle into accusations. They teach us that desire alone justifies disappointment, that feeling something entitles you to something back. And that’s not romance. That’s not tragedy. That’s just selfishness in a prettier font.

[gravedangerahead]

Move over enemies to lovers! We've got friends to lovers discourse!