On the recent female/male armor rant, no such thread can be complete without the CollegeHumor video... (YouTube link, some language)
The "I'm not like other girls (and therefore I am better than them)" trope.
I don't know if this is a trope, but I hate that beautiful people are heroes and ugly people are villains. The instant an non-good looking male walks on screen, I wonder if he's a villain.....and he usually is.
This isn't true of women, if a woman is ugly she's fodder for comedy but not a villain. Even women villains are good looking because Hollywood seems to have forgotten there are unattractive people out there.
The ugly duckling is ignored by the hot girl/ guy til they get a makeover and chage up their lifestyle. TYen the perosn who ignored them likes them and get into a romance..... so... y should i want you, you didnt like me when i was myself
I didn't have time to read every post because I'm heading out to a thing in a few minutes, but has anyone brought up the Over-Explaining Villain?
I would love it if the unachievable object of desire, once they have been secured by the protag, gets lectured and then dumped for being lookist, and the protag goes back to being him or herself.
I didn't have time to read every post because I'm heading out to a thing in a few minutes, but has anyone brought up the Over-Explaining Villain?
I'm sure I could come up with an example that would make me seem much more interesting and intellectual, but the first one that springs to mind is Lord Voldemort. If he would have just. Stopped. Talking, he would have had, like, six or seven chances to make Harry Potter a moot point. I realize that would have turned a seven-novel juggernaut into a depressing short-short about a wizard murdering a child, but you'd think he would have made the connection eventually.
Or if the former "ugly duckling" has an epiphany and realizes that their fixation on said object of desire back before they (the former ugly duckling) had their makeover was shallow and looks based too, and that they really liked their fellow nerd better.
A variation of this is a fiery hatred for the trope where the unremarkable male protagonist (played by an actor who is not known for being a hunk) has this "ordinary" girlfriend/lover who is anything but ordinary. She's pretty damned hot, in fact (because there really aren't that many young, female actors who aren't darned good looking), much hotter than a guy like him "should" be able to secure, even if she's presented as a "girl next door" type. But he gets fixated on a different girl, one who is arguably "hotter (maybe because she's blonder or has bigger boobs, I dunno), and somehow he has a chance to cheat with her. So he does, and of course all heck breaks loose, and his "true love" gets mad for some strange reason and he has to get her back (and of course this is possible too) after realizing that she's the "real deal," and this "hotter" gal is shallow etc. Variant being that the true love doesn't know he's cheating, and he simply decides to stop cheating on her.
The whole plot of the movie "10" and countless others I've seen over the years.
Bleh. Talk about a male-centric fantasy. Maybe it exists in reverse too, with a normal looking woman cheating on her really nice looking husband with an even hotter supermodel dude type, but I've never seen it. It might make an amusing parody.
Just for once, I want to see a love triangle end with the protagonist ending up alone -- either because she (it's usually a she) decides she'd be better off alone, or because the two competing suitors decide they're better off without her.
Reminds me of a line from the Dean Cain Superman series "Lois and Clark" -- "Clark Kent is who I am. Superman is what I can do."Superman may get his alien DNA and all the powers that come with it, from his Kryptonian parents, but ultimately his moral code, the thoughts and ideas that make him the hero he is, came from being raised by a pair of Kansas farmers.
Just for once, I want to see a love triangle end with the protagonist ending up alone -- either because she (it's usually a she) decides she'd be better off alone, or because the two competing suitors decide they're better off without her.
I'd like to see more of this too, especially the former, just because I'm a big advocate of the single life (although the latter would be humorous too). One of Sarah Dessen's more recent novels had a triangle where the girl didn't choose either of them in the end, just ended up single. I remember feeling kind of confused while reading the book because her books usually feature a pretty straightforward romance, but in that book I couldn't tell who the love interest was supposed to be, and both of them occasionally came off as jerks. Then in the end she didn't end up with either of them, and I was like, ah, cool!
Obviously that's never happened to you...