My Favourite Tropes

Hey guys!

So a few weeks ago, several blogs I'm following all talked about their favourite tropes in books/films/tv and I thought. Hey. I'm a trope-loving human. I could talk for hours about that. I want to do it!

Quality content here, guys. Quality content.

This post has actually been planned since back in November - in fact, my initial draft talked about NaNoWriMo, which just tells you how long I left off finishing it. But it's a post I've been planning, so I'm doing it. Bear in mind that after this, I'm taking a brief break from posting for Christmas and I'll be back on the last Saturday of December with my Wrap-Up!

But that's in the future. Right now, let's talk tropes. On we go!

 Found Families

I just...I literally cannot describe to you how much I love this trope. I mean, it turns up in every one of my stories, it's in an awful lot of my favourite books/films/tv shows and I just...I love it. 

It's that friendship thing again, I'm just a total sucker for friendship and platonic relationships and this allows me to fully bask in it. I just. I love it guys. I love it. If you pop this one into your stories and it's well-written*. You've sucked me in. 

*eh, who am I kidding. I'll love it even if it isn't well-written.

Other tropes that I also love, but that are kind of too connected to this one to get their own category would be - the Ragtag Band of Misfits, the Magic of Friendship and True Companions.

Examples: the Leverage team (Leverage, obviously), the Straw-Hat Pirates (One Piece), the Batfamily (Batman comics, DC), the Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel)

Quick, Act Natural!

Or as it's called on TV Tropes, Acting Unnatural. 

Pretty self-explanatory, really. You know that moment in a film/book/tv show where someone comes into the room and all the characters have to act natural. Naturally, they're all terrible at it and they strike ridiculous poses or do stupid stuff.

I just. It's brilliant. I'll never get tired of it. 

It's a trope that turns up all over the place, but it's a little harder to find a specific example of it anywhere. So, instead, to illustrate my point, I'll just show you a snippet from my NaNo novel, where I used it. 

Dorks, all of them.

Crazy-Prepared

Do you have a character who's somehow prepared for everything? Including, but not limited to, escaped sharks in the middle of London, killer ballet dancers and the invasion of giant snails that we all know is coming?

Then you probably have a Crazy Prepared character. And I will probably love them forever.

Examples: Batman. Do I need to say anything else?

Dysfunction Junction

That group that's completely messed up in every possible way? Who all definitely need therapy? They're this trope. 

There's something about a bunch of messed up kids coming together to heal their broken pieces and fix each other that I love and this trope is a predecessor to that.

And we're back to the Found Families trope. Literally everything comes back to that eventually, I swear.

Examples: the Batfamily, the main characters from Sherlock (BBC), anyone from A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket)

The Awesome Normal People

These are your Iron-Mans, your Batmans, your Black Widows, your Samwise Gamgees. 

These are the guys who don't have any special powers - except for sometimes being rich - but they're awesome anyway. They stand up there with titans and no one ever questions that they belong there. They're the ones that prove that you don't need powers to be awesome.

Examples: Other than the examples above, Beren (Tolkien, of the Tale of Beren and Luthien fame), Steve Trevor (Wonder Woman)

Team Dad/Mum

The one slightly more mature person on the team who just parents everybody. The Dads are the slightly more harsh version of this trope, the ones who discipline and tell people off. The Mums are the warm, nurturing version of this trope. Sometimes you'll have one of each, sometimes you'll just have either one.

Then you get the giant messes that are kind of both, but kind of neither and honestly, they've no clue what they're doing but they accidentally adopted a bunch of people and they're trying, okay!

*coughs* Sorry. Got a little carried away there.

Sometimes they're literally parents to the others in the group, other times they just take this role without that. 

Examples: Wendy Darling (Peter Pan), Effie Trinket - Team Mum to an extent (more so in the films, Hunger Games) along with Haymitch Abernathy as the Team Dad, Chiron (Heroes of Olympus), Bruce Wayne (Batman, DC), Jeff Tracy (Thunderbirds)

And that was a not-exhaustive list of just a few of my favourite tropes in literature/films/tv and honestly, if you write about them, I'll love you forever.

What about you? Do you have any favourite tropes? Tell me down in the comments.