So, I was reading Cheeto’s list of male/female stereotypes and tropes she hates, and the idea came to me;
“I should steal follow up on that idea myself!”
So here it is, a Top 10 list of my most hated tropes in recent media. This isn’t so much a male/female stereotypes list so much as a bad writing points list, but here they are;
#10: Everybody’s Happy, Everybody’s Horny
This is more a case in movies than in books, but why do screenwriters/directors feel that a story positively has to have a happy ending and a love interest to be complete? Now I understand, probably 75% of movies should have a happy ending. But lets face it; the numbers are waaaaaay more skewed then that. Take Edge of Tomorrow, based off the manga/light novel with the Japanglish title All You Need Is Kill; The original ending was melancholy, but it fit; it had a certain simplicity to it that tied off all loose ends, and perfectly captured the struggle of the story so far. It wasn’t a happy ending, but by golly it was a fitting one, and it stuck with you.
Then comes the Hollywood adaptation, and just when you think they’re taking it to a different but similar conclusion, they hit you with a because science, b*tch ending out of nowhere, using inexplicable time leaping to somehow fix all problems and ensure everyone lives happily ever after.
…what?
What ever happened to the pyrrhic victory? The movies that make you leave the theater thinking “they won…but at what cost?”. This closely ties into the second part of this trope; for the love of God, why does everything need to be a romantic relationship? In the original, there was a hint of maybe some sparks of romantic interest, but frankly both characters were more focused on the fact that they finally found a kindred soul, and a way out of a cycle of death and repetition. Hollywood of course has to clumsily shove the two together, however.
If Hollywood’s to be believed, one-night stands and random flings of romantic passion are the strongest forces on earth. This isn’t even getting into the fandoms, which try and take any characters that share the same screen for more than three seconds and shove them together, or undermining pure-hearted motives with sexual attraction; like trying to take beloved characters like Sam and Frodo and convincing us that there were romantic undertones.
I’mma go ahead and say it; romantic interest is one of the shallowest reasons to do anything. Period. If you’re going on a great adventure and risking death, leaping across time and space, or taking on any other monumental task, and you’re doing it for family, friends, or humanity itself, that’s noble. But if you’re doing it to get into the pants of your sudden crush…bruh, I’m sorry, your motives are tainted AF.
#9: Big, Dumb, Evil CEO
If there’s one thing everyone hates these days, it’s the rich. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a helluva lot of evil and corrupt rich folk out there, but these days it seems to be less of a hating on their actions, and more of a hating on the fact that they have more, and were given more at birth than we were; which, in case you were unaware, is called jealousy. Now, I want to clarify; evil corporate villains are a fine, if boring trope. They’re kind of on the level of “angry dude bombing cities because you killed his dad”. They’re not creative, but at least they’re kind of believable. H O W E V E R, modern cinema feels a need to write these CEOs as not only completely evil, emotionless, chaotic sociopaths without a single shred of human motivation that might make us empathize with them, but they also make them stunningly stupid and arrogant, making you wonder how they didn’t run their massive trust-fund fortune into the ground as soon as they came of age.
See, I have a policy; never waste a villain. Big or small, petty obstacle or final boss, your audience should have some form of attachment to them. Take the three stooges from the start of Re:Zero. They’re really there just to showcase Subaru’s Return by Death ability (although they come into play waaaaay later), but by golly the author makes them endearing in their own, petty right. Now take your average CEO villain; their motive: money and power. What do they want that for? MoAr mONeY aNd POweR! How did they keep their position as CEO? Their father’s good name, baby! What makes them particularly more villainous than any other cocky, rich prick? They’re planning to blow up five occupied cities so they can turn them into shopping complexes.
You laugh, but look at the next corporate villain you see; they’re pretty basic. A good CEO villain ought to A: be intelligent. Look at the billionaires in the world today, they usually have high IQs, massive talent stacks, and maxed-out charisma levels. A villain like that becomes a worthy foe for the protagonist, someone that they actually have to work to defeat. B: They need to have a decent motive. Doesn’t matter if it’s family, friends, personal creed, twisted humanitarianism, give them something for the audience to relate to. Or at least make them so chaotically dramatic and evil you love them while still wishing for their demise. C: Don’t make them obvious. If they’re rich enough to build a particle accelerator under the city, they’re rich enough to have a stellar public image, airtight alibis, and plenty of stooges to throw under the bus. The last thing they’ll do is reveal their plan to the first nobody that contests them.
This actually ties perfectly into my next trope;
#8: Nature is Peace
If the evil Avatar CEO is planning on harvesting an alien planet’s resources, it’s up to good ol’ Mama Nature to save the day, swooping in as a force of peace, harmony, and self-defence.
…Except nature created spiders that liquify their prey’s organs so they can eat them alive, cats that torture their prey before eating them, butcherbirds that impale their prey to store for later, countless female insects that kill and/or eat their mates after breeding, lions that will kill small animals for sport, dolphins that decapitate fish to masturbate with their corpses, fungus that turn ants into zombies, sand tiger shark embryos that eat each other inside the womb, etc, etc, etc. (No really, look these up).
Fact is, nature is and always has been a lawless, cruel jungle ruled by power and survival of the fittest. There is no peace, coexistence, or Bambi-like serenity. That’s not wrong in the slightest, it’s just the natural order of things. That’s why it bothers me when people see humans as some force of chaotic cruelty, contrasting the pacifism of nature. Fact is, when humans do act like that, what do we call them? Animalistic. When they act conducive to preserving life and nature, what do we call them? Humanitarian. Get it? Humans are the benevolent ones, contrasting the brutal nature born in all animals.
A great story that exemplifies this is Rewrite, by Jun Maeda. I’m still mid-read (the thing’s positively massive), but it clearly showcases the plastic, sterilized, houseplant diorama of nature most naturalists envision with the truly brutal, animalistic cruelty of actual nature. I just wish more people would understand that we aren’t a blight on the planet, we’re its greatest hope.
#7: The Dad’s a Bastard, the Mom’s an Angel
Everyone knows this trope. The big bad terrorizes his kids while his saintly wife tries to send them to safety, the father tells his kids they’re good for nothings, the mother believes in them, the father beats his kids, the mother protects them. Don’t get me wrong, I love Darth Vader as much as the next person, but this trope’s like a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. A couple chips are good. A couple handfuls are good. But once you’re half way through the bag and your tongue is pickled and your spit hurts, you start to wonder why you thought it was a good idea to eat that many in a sitting. Fact is, in modern cinema and storytelling if there’s an evil parent, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s the dad, and the mom is either saintly, dead, or otherwise missing or incapacitated. On the rare chance the villain is a mom, she’s usually redeemable (see next trope).
Now, this isn’t just in writing; there are enough TedTalks and research articles about how parenting sucks for dads, how they’ll never have the connection to their children a mother will have, and how they’ll always feel like the less-important parent. Divorce cases primarily plant custody of the kids with the mom, and mothers are universally seen as more important to kids than fathers. It’s not like I question how this trope came to be, it’s the natural assumption to make. Mothers can be evil? Phsaw!
That’s why I find this trope kind of tired and done. I’d like to see a little more positivity towards fatherhood in media, and perhaps a little bit more of a spotlight shown on the potential damage mothers can have on kids too. For instance, where fathers are more likely to be cold, distant, and physically cruel, mothers are more likely to be controlling, domineering, and emotionally manipulative. A father wants the child out of the nest and into the real world, a mother wants the child to never leave. Frankly, these villain-mother characters write themselves, but yet you don’t see too many of them.
The only example of evil-mother-good-father that comes to mind is Kill La Kill of all things. Ryūko’s dad is a great character, selflessly risking his life to protect his daughter from his wife’s experimentation, creating both her Scissor Blades and Senketsu her companion, hoping they’d be enough to help her survive. In fact, Ryūko’s search for her dad’s murderer is the driving force of the first part of the story, and really showcases the father-daughter bond missing in a lot of stories these days.
I dunno, maybe I’m just lucky to still have a good relationship with both my parents, so that’s why I don’t feel as attached to “daddy issue” characters. However, I think a lot of my continued good relationship with them comes from me understanding their motives, even if they’re not always accompanied by the best actions. I swear, being a dad sucks these days, I fear for my future if I have kids X’D.
#6: The Somehow-Redeemable B*tch
Okay, so clear your mind for a sec. Think of all the biggest, baddest villains you can. The ones that were completely irredeemable, the ones you wanted dead from day one.
Now what do they all have in common? Likely, they’re all male.
Now switch, and think of all the female villains you can. Now that you’ve done that, you may notice a second pattern;
They’re all redeemable, sympathetic characters who are just misguided.
Isn’t that a little odd? See, I’m a person that loves balance. When things don’t “zero out”, it bothers me deeply. That’s why it didn’t take me long to recognize this one; the absolute evil characters, the Saurons, the Palpatines, the Dr. Dooms, they’re always male. And conversely, when the villain is female, like Hela, Maleficent, or Cruella de Vil, they’re seen as justified, doing evil because they were repressed or oppressed, or out of vengeance for crimes committed against them.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a perfect example of this. When John Walker’s best friend is killed and he kills one of the terrorists that participated in this, he’s branded as a villain and stripped of his title as the next Captain America (and even afterwards, he’s “redeemed” by being rebranded as a flawed character), even though it’s pretty easy to justify these actions. At the very least, he’s not the first superhero to kill people. On the other hand, Karli Morgenthau literally blows up innocent people, threatens family members of her enemies, and sets a truck of hostages on fire…and is just a tragic, sympathetic character. She wasn’t wrong, just misunderstood.
What?
I’m sorry, but here’s the facts; no matter how dark your origin story, no matter where you come from or what was done to you, it doesn’t give you a moral high ground, and it doesn’t justify your crimes. The school of hard knocks is the classic villain backstory, but we’re not supposed to consider them good people, or pretend like they aren’t clearly terrorists. Killing innocent non-combatants makes you a villain by default, no exceptions.
This is one of the many things Demon Slayer does right. Now I could go on for pages about how well-crafted the story is from a writing standpoint alone, but one of Tanjiro’s key attributes is he sympathizes with the demons, but never forgives them. He kills them without mercy, because they are evil, but he still doesn’t dehumanize them. This is how we, the viewers, should be led to view a villain. You pity them, you like them, you understand them, but you still know they have to die, for they are evil. By this count, it bothers me that we can correctly view male villains in this light, as foes that need stopping, but can’t seem to view women in an equal and fair light.