Yesterday I realized over the course of near unconscious thought that there is a trope in works of fiction that I dislike, and what it was, and probably why. Part of the reason is this cliche is most common among romantic stories, which I don’t care for much, but it is present in many other types of stories, as well. I am referring to the plot, boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy does something, girl doesn’t like boy any more, boy spends the rest of the story getting girl back. Technically, the genders can be reversed, but it’s almost always this way.
I understand that this plot line is basically a genre unto it’s own, and it’s fine with me if the whole plot of a story is as above. Fine if you want to hear it, I don’t wanna hear it. It is very irksome, however, when it is used as a plot device. Like, I have a farm boy, I want him to go on an epic quest to become king, so I need a reason for him to leave this village, I’ll have the one and only true love chick get pissed off.
The device is unrealistic, or unlikeable. Often the male (assumed to the be the one who does something) is forced to do it. Like, the girls dad will try to kill him, and he’ll defend himself. Bam, the girl is all, “No, I hate you,” even though she obviously doesn’t and everyone knows they’re going to get together at the end of the movie and rule the country or whatever. So at this point I either think the story teller is ruining his characters by making them act out of character for plot development, or he’s telling me a story about a bitch who frankly doesn’t deserve my attention, or the love of the protagonist.
I can’t think of a single classical medium in which this trope is used that I enjoy. This may be because it’s not focused on and I just now realized it, and maybe it’s not as common as I think. I know one place it pops up a lot, video games. The described events happen in pretty much every Japanese RPG at about level 10, and sometimes again right before you beat the game. It’s not cool.
Try and think of movies or books with this plot device in them, that I might like, and see if you can catch me disagreeing with myself.