As i’ve dove very deep in to the YA community, i’ve picked up on quite a few tropes that i absolutely love and hate in books. Tropes are something that cannot be avoided, they’re everywhere and some of the time, tropes are actually really well written, if they’re written in good and interesting ways!
There are some tropes that i think can be pulled off incredibly well in a YA novel especially. There are some i really enjoy, albeit not very often. All of this honestly depends on the writing and style of the book for me. There are some tropes that i can deal with in fantasy but cannot handle in contemporary, and the other way around.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the tropes that i don’t mind and even enjoy most of the time. I feel like ‘trope’ has a lot of negative connotations at the moment, especially in the YA community, but i don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that tropes exist and they’re written in to books. Sometimes it can be a comfort for a reader to have the same comforting trope book to book.
Enemies to lovers – This is something that i love if it’s done really well. For me, it’s linked to fun story-lines and funny moments. I particularly love this in movies too. It’s usually used in comedy and comedic story-lines and i think it makes for some really interesting reading or watching! Admittedly, it mostly occurs in fantasy or dystopian type novels.
Love triangles – Again, a love triangle is a hit or miss for me. It has to be written well and the characters have to be well fleshed out and created. Or else it just feels like the love triangle is the only story-line happening. I’ve read a couple of books with it as a background story-line and it’s been fun to see the characters and relationships develop between numerous characters. However, if the characters fall flat, it’s never a good trope!
Kick-ass female protagonist – I know a lot of people are sick of a really kick-ass female character, and although i really would love my female characters to be a little more realistic and down-to-earth, i do enjoy reading about a kick-ass female every so often. Think Katniss, Hermione, all kick-ass female characters and ones i absolutely adore. A lot of the time they’re just really fun to read about and who doesn’t love a woman just coming in, beating everyone up and leaving again?
Being stuck together leads to romance – I haven’t read a lot of books with this trope written in to the story-line, but i really do enjoy it whenever i read something like this! It’s so much fun to see a couple trapped together and form a relationship, and you generally get a really great exploration of character when this happens. The same goes for the ‘fake relationship’ trope where the couple has to spend time together and ends up as a romance. I see it coming every time but it’s always fun to read.
Misfit friendship group – The misfit friendship group is present a lot in YA novels. My favourite example of this is Paper Towns by John Green. It’s one of my favourite tropes, because you do usually get some kind of diversity representation and also they make for really fun reads with interesting characters. It also seems incredibly realistic to me that you have a misfit friendship group, even in my twenties and thinking of my friends, we’re all vastly different from each other.
Making friends through unrealistic circumstance – The last trope that i really like reading is when people make friends from unexpected and unrealistic circumstance. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a stretch for me, but think Floored, all the characters make a solid friendship from a shocking death that happened in front of them. There are a couple more books like this where the friendship is made from a very strange circumstance, but i do really love seeing friendships form in strange ways!
Those were the tropes that i actually quite enjoy seeing in a book, my tastes have definitely changed as i’ve gotten older, however the tropes that i enjoy have very much stayed the same. I have another post coming up pretty soon about tropes that i hate in books, so keep your eyes out for that one!
Let me know what tropes you really enjoy, and some books that feature those tropes!
The Little Contemporary Corner 