OK, folks. Get ready.
I’m going to ask a terrible question: You can only read two tropes for the rest of the year. Which two do you pick?
Yes. Only two.
Amanda: I thought I would agonize over this one, but nope. My two picks came to me immediately without much second guessing, WHICH IS A RARITY.
The first would be enemies to lovers. I love a sense of antagonism in my romances and I definitely feel like it adds to the sexual tension.
The other would be the Morality Chain. I cannot remember the name of the reader who introduced me to this term. She asked for it in an SBTB Instagram Rec Request and I remember having to Google it. Once I did, it was like everything made sense.
(Note to readers, if this was you who requested it, let me know because you have my eternal thanks.)
For those who are unfamiliar (like I was) with a morality chain, it’s when a character is only “good” or “moral” for the sake of their love interest. Yes, it’s fucked up. I love it.
CarrieS: This first one is easy – Family of Choice (also known as Found Family). I’m a huge sucker for this one, and I don’t tire of it because every found family can be found differently and interact in different ways, and the trope extends through every possible genre and medium including but not limited to romance.
The second one is harder! I’m going to go for Deadpan Snarker. It’s a trope that can be found anywhere and that never fails to thrill my heart. Of course if I could add a third it would be Science Hero or Science Heroine – and I’ve noticed that Science people are often masters of the Deadpan Snark and exist best within the support system of Family of Choice.
Sarah: This was my question. I wrote it. This idea sprang from my brain parts. And what happened? I spent sixty-fifteen hours on TVTropes reading alllll the pages. What have I done?!
I love Deadpan Snarkers, and I love Enemies to Lovers. But for my picks, I’ve got two that are so similar, I should probably pick a third.
I love stories with Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl pairings, as well as Strong Girl, Smart Guy.
A number of the movies I re-watch often with my family fit this trope pair. Judy and Nick from Zootopia and Hiccup and Astrid from the How to Train Your Dragon franchise operate a little in both areas, even though TVTropes places Judy and Nick in both Strong/Smart and Savvy/Energetic while Hiccup and Astrid are in Strong/Smart.
This rabbit hole also re-introduced me to a ship I’d long, long forgotten: Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball. I shipped them before I knew what shipping was. And I wonder if they influenced Hiccup and Astrid.
Well, there went another fourteen hours of my free time.
I like these two tropes because they subvert gender expectations on both sides, but still emphasize the need for balance and complementary skills sets when people work together. They also, as TVTropes points out, can work for non-hetero pairings, too:
Many works featuring male x male or female x female romantic relationships will also follow the trope, with one partner being perky and optimistic while the other is savvy and smarter.
I also wonder if there’s a proper name for the plots that rest on one character leaving notes for another, which amount to tiny portions of intimacy that reveal their true selves. It’s like a twist on epistolary novels, and is the basis for some of my favorite stories in romance.
Elyse: This is the hardest question ever, Sarah!
Okay, after much pondering and a few muttered swear words, I think I need to with a Pining Hero. I love a hero who pines. The pinier the better. I think that’s because this guy tends to be in direct opposition from The Boner Led Hero who is objectively The Worst. The Pining Hero has loved the heroine for ages and hasn’t been like “why do I suddenly want to put my wang in her? I don’t understand my feels at all!” No, he’s so much better than that.
For my second I have to go with Friends to Lovers. I think part of this is that you get some level of intimacy already established between the hero and heroine. Plus the best relationships have an element of friendship to them as well.
Now, if I can get Friends to Lovers with a Pining Hero? That’s the best.
Ok, your turn! You can only read two tropes for the rest of 2019. Which two are yours?
Lately I’ve been finding myself going for the Beauty and the Beast trope — scarred heroes who feel they’ll never be loved. They need love! I want to read about them getting it! I do also like a good second chance romance, but if grovelling is required it had better be good and the second chance had best not be granted too easily.
1) Marriage of Convience
2) Created Family
(These are only for Romance, btw. For fantasy it would be a) Road Trip and b) Created Family.)
Most of my favorite ships seem to have two things in common: Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl and Pining Hero, the latter I think overlaps a lot of Friends to Lovers and Slow Burn, so those would be my two tropes.
There is just something about when the Pining Hero finally breaks and reveals what he feels for the heroine, usually after a delicious amount of Slow Burn.
My Top Two are Geek Meets Tough Guy/Gal and the Pining Hero.
I need a reading list for Morality Chain in Romance, though, and quick because I feel like this something I’ve been pining for without even realizing it.
Now I want a database that allows you to search for your favorite tropes. Mine currently are Pining Hero (mainly because like Elyse, I have had it with boner led heroes), and marriage of convenience.
Here’s my top two:
Curmudgeon vs smart/strong woman, in which the guy who thinks he knows it all is one-upped by the no-nonsense gal who finds different and equally (if not more) effective ways of getting things done, and learns to respect that. This is probably why I squeed so much over Uprooted by Naomi Novik. (Can also fold in Beauty-and-the-Beast and Wounded Hero tropes.)
And Strangers-to-Lovers (also including Enemies-to-Lovers) in which two evenly-matched smart people trade banter, control, and discoveries equally as they find a solution to a mystery or problem. This includes my key couple in Heyer’s The Talisman Ring and any number of 40’s rom-coms and light mysteries.
Both with tons of snark and witty banter, please.
1) Enemies to Lovers, even though I’m having trouble thinking of examples that actually satisfied me.
2) Not sure of the actual name of this, but romances that are Really Bad Ideas featuring leads who are mature adults trying really hard to be sensible and not give into the Really Bad Idea. Setups that are either vaguely taboo or at least genuinely ill-advised. These are very hard to find for some reason? Most of them either involve Brother’s Best Friend/Best Friend’s Brother, which I can’t take seriously as a “forbidden” pairing if there isn’t more to it, or boss/employee, which would qualify if the boss were a mature adult but instead usually features the boss being an abusive creepy asshole.
My least favourite tropes: the Secret Baby and anything that smacks of the Hero Showing the Heroine How Her Body Works. (The latter includes all the Repressed Nerd/Bluestocking/Science Heroines, as it is immensely offensive to me, a shy nerdy science woman, that my reading material has declared, along with the rest of society, that women with my outer semblance are universally repressed and in need of enlightenment.)
1. Enemies to Lovers
2. “Staring Over”…? I’m not sure what this would actually be called. But I’ve been going through a major “moves to small town, starts bakery/bookshop, meets adorable cast of kooky characters + hunk” phase
I FEEL YOU, AMANDA. I tend to really enjoy high-conflict romances between characters who are both wading around in the moral gray area somehow. Enemies to romance would probably be one of my two, and the other… Defrosting the Ice Queen, probably.
Elyse’s choice prove once again why I follow her reviews so closely — we are very trope aligned. I really prefer a pining hero/hero in pursuit in romance because I think it does a lot to balance out power dynamic issues I can often have in certain types of contemporaries & nearly always in historicals. Men so often have the upperhand in our world… give the woman some of the emotional power I think can be a really helpful way to balance things out.
Plot-wise, I’d pick a fake relationship/marriage of convenience. That is my actual catnip, especially in a contemporary. I also like external conflict, so any kind of mystery plot as the engine for a story is going to be my fav.
Deadpan Snark with a side of Icy Proper Hero is my absolute favorite.
Second, Enemies to Lovers, though this is sometimes done poorly.
Quoting Lucy (comment #2): grumpy, icy, reserved and/or stuffed shirt hero who suddenly has The Feelings for the heroine and doesn’t know how to handle it
This needs a name. Like “The Darcy.”
Also, I am grateful to Amanda who is grateful to the Unknown Instagram Requester (it’s a gratitude chain!) for showing me that the “Morality Chain” is a known thing and not just me swooning over sociopaths in lurve.
Marriage of convenience
Matchmakers – the old fashioned style like to read how the matchmakers go about selecting the couples. Read a book about a real matchmaking company in London and it was really interesting.
A trope I call the anti-Cinderella, where two downtrodden/marginal/poor/powerless people make good lives for themselves as a couple. Amy Lane is good at this – Racing for the Sun, Winter Ball/Summer Lessons – as is Marie Sexton – Trailer Trash. It seems to be an m/m thing more than m/f or f/f?
A Cinderella where the finances are unequal but the emotional power in the relationship is equal despite the financial disparity also works for me.
A complete turn-off is any sort of deception between the two main characters. I’d like trigger warnings for it!
First of all, I couldn’t do this. I’m such a fickle reader that I’ll sometime abandon a book in the middle when a shiny other trope catches my eye. I should make finishing books a goal for this year.
If I were somehow forced to do this, I’d probably pick Amanda and Carrie’s tropes Morality Chain and Found Family because I like them but also because they’re broad. Some of my actual fave tropes like Beauty & the Beast or Trapped Together are very specific and I’d get tired of reading only those for a year.
I like second-chance romances, both contemporary and historical, hands down.
Another trope that is growing to be a favorite is the “unworthy” hero, where he feels he is not worthy of the heroine because of his past or station in life. Could be a Beauty and the Beast story, I guess.
Devil’s Daughter by Lisa Kleypas had elements of both because West got a second chance and could make it up to Phoebe after being a bully and a scoundrel in his early days. Major book hangover here between those elements and the secret gooey center West had been hiding all his young life.
Marriage of convenience but only with historicals
Friends to lovers
And cant resist a third which might also be incorporated into any of above : cool, arrogant or rakish hero with heroine who isn’t intimidated
Sidebar, sort-of: @SarahSBTB – I’m glad you brought up Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball; however, I always thought that their main (but kind-of painfully stupid) aggressor, Bugs Meany should turn into a long-term piner for Sally. I’d like to think that that began when the eleven year old Sally took down Bugs in a karate (or was it judo?) competition.
Flash-forward twenty years to Bugs – who turned his life around and now works in law-enforcement, and shies away from romantic entanglements with women for “reasons” – having an out-of-state car with a barely-expired inspection sticker (turns out to be Sally’s, of course) towed from an illegal spot (at a hospital? a courthouse?). Sally runs out as her car disappears, sees Bugs, doesn’t recognize him, and verbally hauls off at him. Bugs, whose brain and penis immediately recognize doctor? lawyer? Sally, falls in insta-love, and we’re off! Book One! This is taking a BDSM turn, as both Sally’s and Bugs’ sexual preferences were born when Sally physically H umiliated Bugs in public twenty years ago. A rattled Sally confides her mixed-up attraction for Bugs to her always-supportive, gay, lifelong best friend, Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown (the too-smart-for-many District Attorney in town, whose solitary life will be upended in the sequel).
So many tropes here… sorry for not really answering the question.
But I’d read these in a heartbeat, and then shelve them next to all of my (currently-in-storage) Encyclopedia Brown paperbacks on my bookshelf.
So I release this synopsis into the ether and hope someone can wrangle the rights from author Donald Sobel’s estate (ahem, Scarlett Peckham should you ever veer from historical to contemporary at some point…).
1. The outsider who shakes things up and affects a lot of lives (for the better). A good example off the top of my head for this trope is Barbara Delinsky’s The Passions of Chelsea Kane or Jayne Ann Krentz’s The Golden Chance.
2. The couple is desperately in love but for some reason (either external or internal) they just can’t be together. An example of this is Lauren Dane’s Relentless (society caste system) or Rebecca Brandewyne’s Forever My Love (warring clan families) are a good example of external forces. Lavender Parker’s Kiss of Fire is a good example of internal forces (the hero is super resistant to idea of the idea of marriage with the heroine because of age difference (he’s older) and financial disparity (he’s blue collar, her family is super rich) and he has a specific idea of the woman he’s going to marry and she doesn’t fit it.
Is this a trope?
For Personal, Real Life reasons, I enjoy plus size heroine/guy who finds her attractive but not in a fetish-y way. The one that comes to mind is Say Yes to the Maquess by Tessa Dare, which involves erotic cake-eating. *swoon*
Second trope would be one of the main characters is a chef, a la Truly by Ruthie Knox.
Personal. Real Life. Reasons.
@EJ Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me is a pretty good example of your first trope
I don’t know the official name for my #1 catnip trope. Beta hero? I LOVE stories featuring confident heroines & shy or repressed heroes. Like Barbara Stanwyck & Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire. This is also good in a M/M or F/F story. Basically, it’s Rule 63 Barbara Cartland, without the icky teenaged virgin fetish.
My #2 is Forced Proximity, but Competence Porn is really close.
@EC Spurlock:
I love 40’s romantic comedies.
@allison:
Considering what I said above I should love Ball of Fire, but Gary Cooper doesn’t always work for me. I felt there was a similar dynamic in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which he also starred in, and I did like. I usually do like Stanwyck though.
@allison:
I think Jimmy Stewart also did that type of dynamic well. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And I tend to like him better in roles that others might think of Cooper in.
Is “tropes” the same thing as “themes” listed on the website here?
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/genres-and-archetypes/
I guess I’d pick Age Difference and Fated Mates. I mean, hellooooo Buffy/Giles! But I’d want to include Ward/Mentor in there too. Hmmmm.
No, wait, I pick Ward/Mentor and Fated Mates as my two choices! Because I would say that Ward/Mentor automatically implies an age difference. So I’m good with that.
Probably a relationship-of-convenience (or whatever it’s called when they make an “arrangement” or contract to do relationshippy stuff until they reach an end date). Though I mean, this does make me question trope overlap, as, like, this sometimes manifests as a fake relationship or enemies-to-lovers type deal (i.e. “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”). My other would be tortured hero/ine (preferrably in some form of mourning).
Not sure if there is a name for this trope.
I call it Pseudo-kindness; in which the villain/antagonist seduces or showers the hero/heroine with kindness, gifts, etc. It strangely stimulates my brain, be it in a romance or any fiction. Especially if the villain is so obviously evil/slimy/sinister and yet charming, cooing, and affable. Like a Siren bewitching you to death with their soft song.
Another favorite trope of mine is what i call Domestic Bliss scene; where a scene is showing homely happiness, comforting and loving families, hearth and warm fireplaces, hearty meals, gatherings, etc. For example, Outlander season 1 episode Lallybroch, is a good example of Domestic Bliss trope.
So glad to see so many slow burn lovers! Usually I find that people hate it.
For me it’d be slow burn and enemies to lovers. Those often go hand in hand. Or whatever Richard and Laney are in Act Like It. Fake romance?
DonnaMarie and I are clearly in a very small minority for liking the Secret Baby. Can someone explain the general antipathy for that trope?
And personally, I find the Morality Chain very off-putting: he’s a jerk or a sociopath but for her sake he will act morally? Sounds too close to “he’s bad news but I can change him”.
It’s been such fun going through all these comments!
For me it’s definitely The Darcy (thanks for naming it, @Deborah). With the Beauty and the Beast trope coming second.
@Dorothea I read a lot of Secret Baby tropes in Harlequin contemporaries. I found them mostly to be about rich heroes discovering they had a baby crawling around somewhere and then demanding a relationship with baby and heroine even though they didn’t want anything to do with them in the first place. Usually a lot of (misplaced) pride was involved and too much of a martyr like attitude on the heroine’s side of things. To be honest I haven’t read enough of them in other genres to know what they are like there though.
I’m definitely a sucker for a Darcy (I married one).
And Competence Porn. I love reading about a hero watching a heroine kick all kinds of ass and going “yeah, that’s the one I want”.
Lovable Rogue is a very close 3rd.
@Sam Victors
Have you read Duke of Sin by Elizabeth Hoyt? He’s the villain AND the hero (?). It’s one of my favorites. On the rare occasion when he’s nice or generous it makes me feel gooey inside. So sick.
I think Amanda is my kindred spirit. I live for enemies to lovers and morality chain even though I didn’t know what it was called. Must go look up that rec request now to get some titles.
I need to read ALL THE ANSWERS here b/c there’s such good stuff!
I was going to say Enemies to Lovers (tho for me, it’s more the slightly more specific “stop trying to kill each other and start trying to kill other people together” with possible just fighting against bad guys counting as “trying to kill other ppl together”–with a side order of trading off rescuing each other, please) and then maybe…IDK if this counts as a trope…but a power imbalance or inequality being rectified till both halves of the couple are on super equal, and equally awesome, footing.
But. I remembered that anything I consume repeatedly I will get hella bored of, so unless the stores containing these tropes were all suuuuuper different, I’d risk them being ruined for me, so I would have to choose tropes I like less in this forced limitation scenario.
@Allison
The Lady Eve with Barbara Stanwyck and super-beta Henry Fonda.
What a great topic, So many interesting answers.
My favorite trope is a heroine who is unmarried and is sexually experienced before the book begins because she actively chooses to be. She may have had only one lover or many but her consent and lack of shame about her sexuality is paramount. This doesn’t include widows, women who have been “ruined” because they were raped or coerced or plots where the heroine makes a deal with the hero to teach her about sex.
Examples I love are The Earl by Katharine Ashe, the first two books of Kelly Bowen’s The Devil’s of Dover series, Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell mysteries and of course Charlotte in Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series.
My other favorite is the non-nurturing love interests who struggle and yet find themselves forced to conceal, convey and finally admit their love. I find this fascinating always but particularly when it’s a woman because of the greater likelihood she will be described as unlikeable both within the text and across the reviewsphere.
I would go Fake Relationship and Single Woman Seeks Good Man/Beta hero
@Stefanie Magura & @ej
Maybe the trope should be named “Barbara Stanwyck.”
This is a super hard question but I think I could be happy for the rest of the year with marriage of convenience and road trip romances. I just love a road trip!