Ha, it would require a major overhaul (it was meant to be a comic, and it wasn’t even a good one) so I’m not sure it would even be worth it, but it did have some parts I really liked (a prophecy that was literally true when everyone thought it was metaphorical, a chosen one or two that wasn’t the one everyone thought he was, a sci-fi alien in a fantasy world, a couple of idiot kings that caused everything go downhill by the virtue of not taking no for an answer and everyone else getting fed up with that)… I’m not even sure who the MC would be.
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Okay, I have a litany of things I cannot stand but imma do my best to sum it up. To preface my rant, these are tropes in m/m books, because I am a gay man and read a lot of it. Not to say they aren’t tropes that apply to other genres, but I’m writing about what I know, like, and have read a ton of.
1: size difference. Ugh. Enough already. The 6’4” muscular giant with the the 5’6” RO with a slender, hairless dancer body. Also the short partner wears makeup and has long hair. It is so close to a m/f trope it immediately turns me off. Does it happen irl? I’m sure it does. I’ve never seen it, so I’d guess it’s far less than the roughly 70% of pairings portrayed in m/m fiction.
2: GFY. Please take a spoon and gouge out my eyeballs if I ever have to read one again. This is not a thing. There are pan/bi/Demi people that need realistic representation. GFY is definitely not it.
3: hazel eyes. So this might be controversial, but show me someone who claims to have hazel eyes, and I’ll tell you whether they are in fact brown or green. Again, do they exist irl? Yes. But they rep roughly 70% of m/m eyes in fiction. Just not a thing. I’m all for representation but over-rep is really not necessary.
4: jock/nerd pairings. Kill me now and refer to point 1 because they usually go hand in hand. What bothers me about this trope in particular is that the “jock” almost universally has an “awakening” about how free and bold the “nerd” actually is. Fine, but can for once the “nerd” have an awakening? Must all sporty, muscular men be constricted and confined in set roles? I have met many that are extremely open minded, thoughtful and caring. Have also met many “nerds” that are close-minded, pompous assholes. I use the terms “jock” and “nerd” in quotes because I don’t even believe in these classifications, just describing common tropes.
5: hockey. If you are an avid m/m romance reader, you know what I mean. JFC, one would think hockey is more popular worldwide than soccer (or football if you say it correctly).
6: hairless men. For fucks sake I want a man. I don’t need a gorilla but JFC give me some man hair.
7: white hair (unless a man is 60+), green, purple, blue hair (unless man is in fact a young teenage boy, in which case, no), violet eyes (not a thing), wears sleeves longer than arms (should not be a thing after 2001), neck/face tattoos (hey, I’m all for tattoos but not these kind, they’re just a bit much).
As someone who is hard-pressed to find a semi-realistic m/m pairing in any fiction (at least in the world I live in), I thank you for reading my rant.
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Good for you? Go fuck yourself? Gofers for YouTube? What does GFY mean? Genuinely asking, I’m not directing the statements at you.
Ok but that’s just a real eye color, what’s the issue?
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GFY = gay for you. Like, not gay or bi or pan or demi, just gay for one particular person.
I have no problem with hazel eyes, they are lovely. My problem is that most authors who describe hazel eyes actually describe brown or green eyes. My other problem is that a preponderance of characters in m/m fiction have hazel eyes, which are actually very rare. Give me brown, blue and green (you know, actual eyes most people have).
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Ah right. I am actually familiar with the GFY concept; I just never heard the acronym.
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TBH most of these sound like yaoi tropes. Bara doesn’t really do any of those nearly as much.
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I was gonna say, in particular the Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Hair Colors, purple eyes that don’t exist, and the clothing sense that sounds like it fell out of the nearest Final Fantasy. I don’t exactly read m/m stuff, but that shit crops up everywhere, not just in m/m stories. (And it’s just as annoying there, too - FF15 having characters wear actual clothes was a hell of a trip for me, lemme tell you.)
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Could be, I don’t really read manga or whatever other formats Yaoi/bara shows up in. (I have read some, just limited). I’m talking mainstream m/m fiction romance.
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Basically, a fair number - hell, most - of what you ranted about is commonplace in yaoi. Again, I only know this secondhand, like from brief clips on youtube that I stumble across by accident, but you only need short clips to see it in action.
I think the only ones that don’t make a big appearance ever is the hockey and abundance of piercings and tattoos, but don’t quote me on that.
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That’s a hell of an incentive for me to never read yaoi 
. Unfortunately, it’s sadly the same in most gay romance; you’re either very short with very long hair, guyliner, and oversized clothes, or you are a giant with multiple piercings, neck tattoos, very long hair and hazel eyes (and probably play hockey).
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5: hockey. If you are an avid m/m romance reader, you know what I mean. JFC, one would think hockey is more popular worldwide than soccer (or football if you say it correctly).
I can’t say I’m an avid M/M romance reader (or an avid romance reader at all), but I have major issues with many sports stories generally for how poorly they’re written with regards to said sport and the culture around it. Especially when it comes to same-sex romances and such, there would be so many obstacles and the culture around the sport simply wouldn’t work in a present-day setting. Not just for hockey, but across many sports.
Obviously I’m not saying stories have to be 100% realistic to work, and things are slowly moving toward a point in the real world where something like that could be a possibility (like with Luke Prokop being the first openly gay pro ice hockey player with an NHL contract), but it’s not something I’d be able to easily just gloss over even in a fictional story.
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Yep, definitely not into either of those things. Which is why I go for bara. Bara does still have some of the latter though.
@HoldTh3L1ne What I find preposterous is when I somehow have more knowledge of the sport than the author. Even though I literally learned more about sports from playing erotic VNs with jock MCs than I did from any of other source in life. Like, why did this person choose to write about sports when they don’t actually know anything about the sport they’re writing about?
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Yeah, I’m a student of the Write What You Know school of thought, myself, so if I don’t know something about a topic, I’m not touching it. Period. It’s part of the reason why I duck out on conversations on here that start turning political - not my interest, not my expertise, ergo not my game to play. (Excluding Dragon Age politics, but those are an in-game plot point, so they’re pretty easy to understand even for total political hicks like me, because otherwise players probably couldn’t keep up with the drama.)
It drives me kinda bonkers when I see people writing about things that two seconds of looking into it will show that they did not do nearly enough research on the subject. Witchcraft U was one of those stories, it tried to be one part college romance, one part Potterversian politics, one part mafia mystery drama, and one part small business competition turning aggressive and cutthroat, and it wound up whiffing on pretty much all fronts. It made it pretty hard for me to read, in general, but next to impossible to take seriously, in the end.
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The whole “write what you know” school of thought is a bit more complex than simply avoiding what you’re not intimately knowledgeable about, in my opinion. I believe it’s more about finding and applying any similar experiences or relevant knowledge, and combining it with any necessary research to write said story.
It’s not necessarily about being super knowledgeable about a certain subject matter, and it’s definitely not “avoid writing anything you don’t know about like the plague”. It certainly makes things easier if you don’t need additional research, but being able to add depth to unfamiliar topics through research and such can broadly expand what you can write about.
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Oh yeah, I’m not denying that in the slightest. That’s just my own personal approach to it, right wrong or in between. I prefer to write about the things that I’m already knowledgeable about, and avoid the topics I don’t know (at least until I sit myself down and learn about them), because I’m already going to be spending a lot of time on a million other details, so being able to take some of the weight off my back is a godsend.
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Witchcraft U is probably the HARDEST choice of game I’ve ever played. I’ve tried many different playthroughs with different builds and decisions and have uncovered absolutely nothing of value.
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Yeah, it was discussed in length when the game first came out, but the general consensus was that the author was trying to branch out too far to encompass too many plot threads for what the story wound up being. And one of the biggest issues was inconsistency - I completely dodged dying on accident, just picking choices at random, meanwhile everybody else got killed no matter how hard they tried to avoid it. Even something like, “how do I keep this RO from getting mind wiped?” was a mess of, “did you try x, y, z? Maybe a, b, c? I genuinely don’t know, man.”
I suppose I can’t really call it a trope, but I think we can all agree that stories that go in too ambitious and wind up a convoluted mess rather than a masterpiece of literature are fairly roundly disliked.
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Agreed on all fronts. I personally believe that if the work becomes overly ambitious it should be broken up into different books/games etc to prevent convolution and plot holes.
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I’ve seriously thought changing my novel(s) project in a collection of stories because of that (among other reasons) for a couple of months.
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I agree that demons/devils as primary antagonists has become a boring and overused trope. Even though I don’t need major antagonists to be grey or greyish I do prefer when I have little bit more sophisticated, complicated and interesting motivations for their villaineous acts( and a bit more interestin backstory) than just basically “Im eevil”.I still think a story, including a HGs and COG, can work when the antagonists include demons/devils. But for that to work for me, demons and devils must not be the primary antagonists, whether this means that there’s someone else pulling the strings(so to speak) or the demons and devils are just of the many antagonists that the hero/heroine(es) meet and not singled out as being particularly important, or the demons/devils being portrayed differently from the creatures of absolute/ultimate evil they’re usually portrayed as.The Lost Heir Trilogy, by both making the demons in question creatures of chaos(and not necessarily evil) instead of creatures of evil and the main antagonist a human who summons them, for his own personal purposes, used demons as antagonist in a way I find acceptable, though I do suspect I would have liked that series even better if it had used something else in place of demons.
Speaking of devils and demons, I also, at least if we’re talking your standard evil or at least evilish demons and/or devils who are fighting against angels or similar creatures and usually have as a part of their “shtick” that they want to corrupt/destroy/control people and the universe. To me it plays to much to another trope that I tend to really dislike, particularly when it comes to individuals that belongs to a type of beings that are portrayed as intrinsically and cosmically evil, namely “evil is sexy”.
Another type of antagonist I dislike, are the nazis. Partly, it has to do with them being so overused, that it’s difficult to use them in a way that doesn’t just recycle the same old cliches, at least unless you consciously try to make them significantly different, which almost never happens. The second reason is quite similar to my reason for not liking demons/devils as antagonists, they are generally used a straight up “I’m eevil” kind of antagonist, where the fact that they’re nazis, with all that implies, being used as their main motvation, with nazi antagonists usually not being given much of a motivation outside of bringing everything in line with nazi ideology and living and acting according to that ideology. For nazis to work as antagonists for me the story both had to make into just one out of many types of antagonists and not the main one and the story to put an interesting spin on them and their role, like in Cliffhanger, set in alternative world where Hitler never came to power and they seem more like Bond villains than the scary military and political power that was nazi germany.
Unlike you, I often enjoy stat-heavy games, as long as the game make clear what stats are being tested when and don’t make it too difficult to figure out how to “build” your stats in a way that can help you succeed in the really key stat checks. I do like both the rpg-y feel of this and how passing really difficult stat checks makes my character feel like a badass.
[spoiler]
Although you eventually get some stat checks where your stats have to be really high for you to succeed and you need to engage in a certain amount of min/maxing for stats to be high enough for your character to succeed at certain key points, I think the reputation The Lost Heir Trilogy have in certain quarters for harshness is exagerrated. Firstly, that series allows you to see when your stats increase and also, when you fail, how high a stat score you needed in order to succeed at that stat check, so that you can learn from your mistakes. Secondly for the final confrontations, whether you succeed or not is determined by whether you succeed in enough stat check out of a certain number of stat checks, with many different combinations that can all lead to success. Granted, this is not such a walk a park, at least if you want to have the best ending in the final book. but you don’t have to succeed in that many stat tests in order to get the second best ending, where your character heroically sacrifice themself in order to ruin the plans of the villain and, if they have been a good person, are shown ending up in Daria’s version of heaven. And if you have chosen a particular “adoptive parent” and gotten a particular object because of that and have been stingy/patient when given opportunities to use that object, you can also get the best ending without succeding in that many stat checks at all during the climax. So, I disagree that it’s been poorly designed. But I’m also aware that the kind of play/reading style(s) that works best for that series, is not a good fit if you prefer a COG/HG where your focus on the story an you want to immerse yourself fully in that story without having to worry so much about your character having high enough stats to pass key stat checks
[/spoiler].
I personally enjoy looking at the stat screens from time to time, both in order to check the stats and, in those COGs and HGs where they can get really high, enjoy how much they have increased since I started that COG/HG or COG/HG series. You do not, I guess, which is perfectly valid and I think it is really important to figure what you enjoy and what you don’t, so that you can concentrate on what you enjoy, both for COGs/HGs and other stuff.
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