Top Ten Tuesday 64 - Ten Tropes I'm quitting

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Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
This week's theme: Top Ten Bookish Tropes I'm Quitting

 Here are a list of phrases and tropes that tick me off when I see them. I started out with contemporary/YA tropes and then moved on to SF/Fantasy tropes, so they're a little random...I couldn't think of 10, but here are a bunch of tropes that I'm really tired of!
  1. "But she wasn't like the other girls"


    This one is inspired by my current read. I'm so sick of the main character of books being "special" and "not like the other girls". It's subtle girl hate, and it's so annoying! Must every main character be some sort of Chosen One?

  2. "S/he let out a breath s/he didn't know s/he was holding"

    This one is just SO OVERDONE and it doesn't even make any sense!
  3. Love triangles.


    I'm so, so done with these. Thankfully they're pretty rare in Fantasy/SF so I don't run into them much anymore but love triangles (squares? PENTAGONS?) just need to stop being a thing.
  4. The ice-queen beauty

    This one is inspired by The Red Queen and every Taylor Swift music video ever. There's always that one beautiful girl the male MC likes, but she's apparently actually a bitch and the female MC spends all her time feeling worthless in comparison. More girl hate. Go away.
  5. Hand-wavy science

    I wrote a whole post on this for Sci-fi November last year, but it really bugs me when an author tries to explain away something with really flawed science. The most infuriating example that comes to mind is the genetics nonsense in the Divergent series, but there are plenty more. Just don't try and explain it with science if you aren't even going to try and make it reasonable!
  6. SF/fantasy worlds that lack diversity


    The real world isn't full of people who all look the same or have the same heritage, but invariably in fantasy and SF worlds, almost every story takes place in either a medieval European-inspired world or a world where only the white people managed to make it to space. It's getting better recently in terms of more races/gender identities and less stereotypes, but it's crazy how homogeneous made-up worlds are when there is so much freedom to have even more variation than the real world. This is why I love The 100: they actually do have a good representation of all sorts of people.
  7. Unpronounceable fantasy/SF names

    I did a whole post on this a long time ago too! I listened to Robert Jordan's Eye of The World on audio, so I thankfully missed all the infuriating apostrophes and didn't have to worry about pronouncing names. Some books do better than others with creating a linguistic pattern that is both interesting and easy or intuitive to pronounce.
  8. Magic powers/technology that only work when all is lost

    This is basically deus ex machina. I hate when the lost memory of our orphaned main character triggers their magical powers in the last second or when a technology that has taken a back seat suddenly comes to life and saves the day. It's so unbelievable and so overdone!



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