So I've been reading historical romance for some time now, and although it's my favorite sub-genre, there are certain tropes I'm thoroughly tired of seeing. I started jotting these down, and before I knew it, there was an entire essay. Without further ado...
The hero
1. The hero sets out to seduce/ruin a woman because of something her male relative did. Though while I hate this revenge plot, I wouldn’t mind reading one where the hero sets out to seduce a man because of something the man’s female relative did.
2. The scarred hero who’s either brooding or angry, but is always a recluse. When the hero has plenty of money, a title, a family who supports him, etc., and none of that matters to him because of his poor scarred face, I always want to tell him to get over his First World Problems.
3. The hero is attracted to one of his employees or servants. Bonus points if the skewed power dynamics are completely ignored here.
4. The hero becomes titled through some bizarre turn of events, e.g. his father and two older brothers all die in the same accident. Bonus points if he neither grieves for them overmuch nor is concerned about some horrible fate befalling him as well. Even more bonus points if no one suspects him of being behind the accident.
5. The hero keeps something about his past a secret from the heroine until about the two-thirds point of the book, which is when she learns the truth in the most devastating way so a separation can occur.
6. The hero sneers at debutantes, because he considers them all simpering fools who only want to catch a husband. As opposed to going to university, getting jobs, and embarking on careers, I suppose. Bonus points if he thinks the heroine is “not like the other girls”.
7. The hero owns a notorious gaming-hell.
Not only has this been done over and over again, but it often makes me wonder if the hero has any empathy at all for people with gambling addictions.
8. The hero considers making the well-bred and virginal heroine his mistress.
9. The hero refuses to fall in love or get married because his parents had a loveless or abusive marriage, therefore marriage = abuse. His counterpart is the hero who refuses to fall in love or get married because his parents had a loving marriage, so when one of them died, the other was heartbroken, therefore marriage = heartbreak.
Either way, the hero’s parents’ marriage has permanently damaged him. The heroine, though, can never use her parents’ marriage as an excuse for why she refuses to love or marry. If she did, she’d be emotionally unbalanced (and rather than being the heroine, she’d be the awful first wife).
10. The hero shows no awareness of the fact that pregnancy and labor were difficult and dangerous for women.
He has unprotected sex with women (if they get pregnant, they can deal). Or he tells the heroine he wants to have half a dozen babies with her. Easy to say when he’s not the person undergoing all the risks to health and life in the process.
The heroine
1. The heroine is determined never to marry, but she wants to experience the pleasures of the flesh just once. Bonus points if she seems completely unaware of pregnancy and venereal disease (which is why she picks a man who’s been with dozens of women already).
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be romantic if she availed herself of a sheath, nor would any self-respecting rake wear one.
2. The heroine has unprotected sex over and over again with the hero, but when he asks her to marry him, she refuses because he hasn’t said the L word. Bonus points if she’s pregnant by then, but she would rather raise an illegitimate child solo in Victorian England than marry a man who protects her, confides in her and gives her multiple orgasms, yet who has not said the L word.
Also bonus points if the hero thinks of her as intelligent.
3. The heroine rescues underprivileged children, battered wives or ex-prostitutes. Bonus points if she can’t support all her rescuees and has to rely on the hero for funds.
There’s nothing wrong with rescuing underprivileged children, battered wives or ex-prostitutes, but it’s been done so often that it’s predictable, and I would prefer to see the battered wives or ex-prostitutes rescuing themselves. I’d also prefer not to read any more books where the ex-prostitutes act like sorority sisters giving the heroine a sexy makeover and cheering her on in her romance with the hero.
4. The destitute heroine decides to be a sex worker or to auction off her virginity. Thankfully her first client is the wealthy hero, who is of course not just free of venereal disease, but so moved by her that he saves her from a potential lifetime of degradation. This is Pretty Woman in Regency England, except with Julia Roberts’s character being a virgin.
Bonus points if the hero doesn’t give a thought to other prostitutes (the ones who aren’t young, pretty and innocent), or if the story doesn't examine what it says about him that he’d patronize sex workers or virgin auctions in the first place. A good subversion of this trope is Mary Balogh’s A Precious Jewel.
5. The young, gently bred heroine goes everywhere she wants without a chaperone. Bonus points if the author tries to lampshade this by someone pointing it out so the heroine’s father can say confidently that he trusts the girl and that she can take care of herself (which isn’t the point).
One of the things I dislike about this trope, other than the potential danger to the heroine, is that it’s sometimes used to show how egalitarian she is. Rather than staying in the rarefied drawing rooms of the ton, she rubs shoulders with the common people! But not only does this ignore class distinctions, which were significant in the past, it also doesn’t take into account the fact that ignoring class distinctions could be worse for the socially inferior group than for the privileged heroine. If something happened to her, what would the consequences be for any working-class people involved?
6. The heroine sets out to ruin herself so that her parents will stop trying to push her into marriage. Bonus points if ruin is treated as a spot of temporary embarrassment with no ill-effects whatsoever.
There’s a reason Elizabeth Bennet was devastated when her younger sister ran off with a man who wasn’t going to marry her.
7. The heroine is spirited and/or principled… until she meets the hero, at which point she’s willing to compromise her values and sacrifice her needs for his sake.
8. The heroine looks down on women who want to marry titled men, considering such women superficial. When she meets the hero, she’s struck so speechless by his good looks that she doesn’t object when he speaks to her without being formally introduced, addresses her by her given name, and so on.
9. The heroine refuses to marry the hero because she’s barren, and he deserves better than such an abject failure at womanhood. I’d give bonus points if she was blissfully pregnant in the last chapter or the epilogue, but then every book which used this trope would get them.
A related trope is the heroine who suffers a miscarriage, because the moment this happens, I know the author will make certain she has a replacement baby by the end of the book. It’s not the baby that makes me roll my eyes; it’s the predictability. I don’t want to feel that I’ve read this story a dozen times already.
10. The heroine’s maid is her friend.
I firmly believe that after the end of A Little Princess, Sara and Becky continued to be close friends despite Becky being Sara’s maid. But they’d both endured a great deal together. In romances where the heroine’s maid is her confidante and cheerleader, there’s rarely if ever a shared history of this sort to show why they’re friends.
And at the end of the day, the heroine’s maid is going to help the heroine undress, brush her hair and hang up her clothes, before the maid goes to her own room in the servants’ quarters to get some sleep. Longbourn, a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from a servant’s perspective, shows just how difficult and tiring the lives of maids could be, so if one of them is little more than feisty, cheery emotional support for the heroine, that stretches my suspension of disbelief.
Plots
1. The hero and heroine, very much in love, are separated and don’t expect to see each other again. He has sex with dozens of women. She stays chaste. If she has sex at all, it’s because she was forced into marriage with someone else, and the sex is devoid of consent or pleasure. Bonus points if the hero later questions her on what she did during their separation and is jealous at the possibility that she might have been with another man.
2. The hero and heroine enter into marriage with the agreement that they will separate after a year and get an annulment.
It wasn’t easy to get an annulment in the past. Also, what would happen to the heroine after that, reputation-wise? If she wanted to remarry in the future, how would this work out?
3. The hero knows the heroine doesn’t want to meet him, so he bribes her servants to tell him wherever she goes, allowing their paths to accidentally-on-purpose cross.
In any other genre, this is called stalking.
4. The widowed hero hires the heroine as a governess for his children, who are so unruly that Maria von Trapp couldn’t do anything with them. Naturally, the heroine wins their hearts. Bonus points if they swiftly suggest she be their new mother.
One of the many reasons I loved Mary Balogh’s The Secret Pearl is because the hero’s six-year-old daughter is deeply attached to her mother, his first wife. And even after the mother dies, the daughter doesn’t immediately fixate on the heroine as her new mama. In fact, when the hero brings up the prospect of remarriage to the heroine (a year after his wife’s death), the daughter is a little upset about it at first, which struck me as very realistic. I could tell that the daughter cared about the heroine, but a lot of children don’t welcome their step-parents with open arms.
ETA : Just thought of another one.
5. The hero's mama or grandmama keeps nagging him to marry, or tries to introduce him to potential brides. Therefore, he does something either weak (hides out in his country estate) or stupid (pretends to be a rake, marries the first woman to cross his path, marries a woman who'll be completely unsuitable, persuades a woman to pretend they're engaged, etc).
It never seems to occur to him to simply tell his mama or grandmama to stop. And the reason I can't sympathize with his spinelessness is because my aunt once tried playing matchmaker with me. She offered to introduce me to a "good Christian man" looking for a "God-fearing woman with whom he could raise a family". I asked my aunt, "Did you know I'm an atheist?" and she left me alone from that moment on.
I'm a woman raised in a conservative family and a culture which emphasized respect and obedience towards one's elders. So if I could stand up for myself, an earl or a duke can damn well do the same thing.
The hero
1. The hero sets out to seduce/ruin a woman because of something her male relative did. Though while I hate this revenge plot, I wouldn’t mind reading one where the hero sets out to seduce a man because of something the man’s female relative did.
2. The scarred hero who’s either brooding or angry, but is always a recluse. When the hero has plenty of money, a title, a family who supports him, etc., and none of that matters to him because of his poor scarred face, I always want to tell him to get over his First World Problems.
3. The hero is attracted to one of his employees or servants. Bonus points if the skewed power dynamics are completely ignored here.
4. The hero becomes titled through some bizarre turn of events, e.g. his father and two older brothers all die in the same accident. Bonus points if he neither grieves for them overmuch nor is concerned about some horrible fate befalling him as well. Even more bonus points if no one suspects him of being behind the accident.
5. The hero keeps something about his past a secret from the heroine until about the two-thirds point of the book, which is when she learns the truth in the most devastating way so a separation can occur.
6. The hero sneers at debutantes, because he considers them all simpering fools who only want to catch a husband. As opposed to going to university, getting jobs, and embarking on careers, I suppose. Bonus points if he thinks the heroine is “not like the other girls”.
7. The hero owns a notorious gaming-hell.
Not only has this been done over and over again, but it often makes me wonder if the hero has any empathy at all for people with gambling addictions.
8. The hero considers making the well-bred and virginal heroine his mistress.
9. The hero refuses to fall in love or get married because his parents had a loveless or abusive marriage, therefore marriage = abuse. His counterpart is the hero who refuses to fall in love or get married because his parents had a loving marriage, so when one of them died, the other was heartbroken, therefore marriage = heartbreak.
Either way, the hero’s parents’ marriage has permanently damaged him. The heroine, though, can never use her parents’ marriage as an excuse for why she refuses to love or marry. If she did, she’d be emotionally unbalanced (and rather than being the heroine, she’d be the awful first wife).
10. The hero shows no awareness of the fact that pregnancy and labor were difficult and dangerous for women.
He has unprotected sex with women (if they get pregnant, they can deal). Or he tells the heroine he wants to have half a dozen babies with her. Easy to say when he’s not the person undergoing all the risks to health and life in the process.
The heroine
1. The heroine is determined never to marry, but she wants to experience the pleasures of the flesh just once. Bonus points if she seems completely unaware of pregnancy and venereal disease (which is why she picks a man who’s been with dozens of women already).
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be romantic if she availed herself of a sheath, nor would any self-respecting rake wear one.
2. The heroine has unprotected sex over and over again with the hero, but when he asks her to marry him, she refuses because he hasn’t said the L word. Bonus points if she’s pregnant by then, but she would rather raise an illegitimate child solo in Victorian England than marry a man who protects her, confides in her and gives her multiple orgasms, yet who has not said the L word.
Also bonus points if the hero thinks of her as intelligent.
3. The heroine rescues underprivileged children, battered wives or ex-prostitutes. Bonus points if she can’t support all her rescuees and has to rely on the hero for funds.
There’s nothing wrong with rescuing underprivileged children, battered wives or ex-prostitutes, but it’s been done so often that it’s predictable, and I would prefer to see the battered wives or ex-prostitutes rescuing themselves. I’d also prefer not to read any more books where the ex-prostitutes act like sorority sisters giving the heroine a sexy makeover and cheering her on in her romance with the hero.
4. The destitute heroine decides to be a sex worker or to auction off her virginity. Thankfully her first client is the wealthy hero, who is of course not just free of venereal disease, but so moved by her that he saves her from a potential lifetime of degradation. This is Pretty Woman in Regency England, except with Julia Roberts’s character being a virgin.
Bonus points if the hero doesn’t give a thought to other prostitutes (the ones who aren’t young, pretty and innocent), or if the story doesn't examine what it says about him that he’d patronize sex workers or virgin auctions in the first place. A good subversion of this trope is Mary Balogh’s A Precious Jewel.
5. The young, gently bred heroine goes everywhere she wants without a chaperone. Bonus points if the author tries to lampshade this by someone pointing it out so the heroine’s father can say confidently that he trusts the girl and that she can take care of herself (which isn’t the point).
One of the things I dislike about this trope, other than the potential danger to the heroine, is that it’s sometimes used to show how egalitarian she is. Rather than staying in the rarefied drawing rooms of the ton, she rubs shoulders with the common people! But not only does this ignore class distinctions, which were significant in the past, it also doesn’t take into account the fact that ignoring class distinctions could be worse for the socially inferior group than for the privileged heroine. If something happened to her, what would the consequences be for any working-class people involved?
6. The heroine sets out to ruin herself so that her parents will stop trying to push her into marriage. Bonus points if ruin is treated as a spot of temporary embarrassment with no ill-effects whatsoever.
There’s a reason Elizabeth Bennet was devastated when her younger sister ran off with a man who wasn’t going to marry her.
7. The heroine is spirited and/or principled… until she meets the hero, at which point she’s willing to compromise her values and sacrifice her needs for his sake.
8. The heroine looks down on women who want to marry titled men, considering such women superficial. When she meets the hero, she’s struck so speechless by his good looks that she doesn’t object when he speaks to her without being formally introduced, addresses her by her given name, and so on.
9. The heroine refuses to marry the hero because she’s barren, and he deserves better than such an abject failure at womanhood. I’d give bonus points if she was blissfully pregnant in the last chapter or the epilogue, but then every book which used this trope would get them.
A related trope is the heroine who suffers a miscarriage, because the moment this happens, I know the author will make certain she has a replacement baby by the end of the book. It’s not the baby that makes me roll my eyes; it’s the predictability. I don’t want to feel that I’ve read this story a dozen times already.
10. The heroine’s maid is her friend.
I firmly believe that after the end of A Little Princess, Sara and Becky continued to be close friends despite Becky being Sara’s maid. But they’d both endured a great deal together. In romances where the heroine’s maid is her confidante and cheerleader, there’s rarely if ever a shared history of this sort to show why they’re friends.
And at the end of the day, the heroine’s maid is going to help the heroine undress, brush her hair and hang up her clothes, before the maid goes to her own room in the servants’ quarters to get some sleep. Longbourn, a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from a servant’s perspective, shows just how difficult and tiring the lives of maids could be, so if one of them is little more than feisty, cheery emotional support for the heroine, that stretches my suspension of disbelief.
Plots
1. The hero and heroine, very much in love, are separated and don’t expect to see each other again. He has sex with dozens of women. She stays chaste. If she has sex at all, it’s because she was forced into marriage with someone else, and the sex is devoid of consent or pleasure. Bonus points if the hero later questions her on what she did during their separation and is jealous at the possibility that she might have been with another man.
2. The hero and heroine enter into marriage with the agreement that they will separate after a year and get an annulment.
It wasn’t easy to get an annulment in the past. Also, what would happen to the heroine after that, reputation-wise? If she wanted to remarry in the future, how would this work out?
3. The hero knows the heroine doesn’t want to meet him, so he bribes her servants to tell him wherever she goes, allowing their paths to accidentally-on-purpose cross.
In any other genre, this is called stalking.
4. The widowed hero hires the heroine as a governess for his children, who are so unruly that Maria von Trapp couldn’t do anything with them. Naturally, the heroine wins their hearts. Bonus points if they swiftly suggest she be their new mother.
One of the many reasons I loved Mary Balogh’s The Secret Pearl is because the hero’s six-year-old daughter is deeply attached to her mother, his first wife. And even after the mother dies, the daughter doesn’t immediately fixate on the heroine as her new mama. In fact, when the hero brings up the prospect of remarriage to the heroine (a year after his wife’s death), the daughter is a little upset about it at first, which struck me as very realistic. I could tell that the daughter cared about the heroine, but a lot of children don’t welcome their step-parents with open arms.
ETA : Just thought of another one.
5. The hero's mama or grandmama keeps nagging him to marry, or tries to introduce him to potential brides. Therefore, he does something either weak (hides out in his country estate) or stupid (pretends to be a rake, marries the first woman to cross his path, marries a woman who'll be completely unsuitable, persuades a woman to pretend they're engaged, etc).
It never seems to occur to him to simply tell his mama or grandmama to stop. And the reason I can't sympathize with his spinelessness is because my aunt once tried playing matchmaker with me. She offered to introduce me to a "good Christian man" looking for a "God-fearing woman with whom he could raise a family". I asked my aunt, "Did you know I'm an atheist?" and she left me alone from that moment on.
I'm a woman raised in a conservative family and a culture which emphasized respect and obedience towards one's elders. So if I could stand up for myself, an earl or a duke can damn well do the same thing.
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