The bad boy golfer romance is genuinely so hilarious what. Like if you’re dating a bad boy golfer he isn’t gonna be some cool sexy badass, he’s gonna be an anti-vaxxer who gets with your sister Or is that just my uncle
finally! been waiting for someone to talk about this! the tropeification of the romance genre has made me not want to even read romance anymore because authors are writing around tropes instead of an actually story they want to tell and it SHOWS😭the fangirl down debacle had me gagged like i know the girlies were not on their knees for a bad boy golfer 💀
So glad im not the only one like it's too the point where I only read books from black booktok because they're relatable and actually write proper stories. Majority oc the authors out there are problematic normalizing the wrong things too yet, I see there books taking up library when they aren't even good.
people be calling anything enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers, bully x bullied, it should be ENEMIES, THEY NEED TO BE FIRMLY ON OPPOSING SIDES AND WOULD NOT HESITATE TO KILL EACHOTHER WHEN NEED BE
@@ruru_alim RIGHT like they need to be on opposite sides and have tried to/want to kill each other atleast once, and etl trope should only be reserved for fantasy, sci-fi, period dramas, thrillers, horror etc. the guy from the opposite department is NOT ur enemy, y'all are rivals at the best !! 😭😭
the most annoying part with some of the tropes is, for example, the hockey romance with "found family." that is a man, a woman, and two children. that is not unconventional found family. that is a nuclear family. what are you TALKING ABOUT!
“women can’t write men the same as men can’t write women” OH- speak on it. It alarms me sometimes how some women write men & pass it off as romance like.. you okay girl?????
FOR REAL. Especially gay romance- Heartstopper and Red White and Royal Blue were so cringy to me because they were very much written by people who consumed wayyy too much fanfic and forgot how actual teen boys and men operate.
@@wormdoodles honestly i am glad we have a good gay love story in heartstopper. At least they don’t die and it’s nice and not sad, unlike most other gay novels.
SRSLY. like women are dismissed as "having their fantasies" or "living their pain thruale characters" but women genuinely don't know how to write men at times. Those men literally feel like objects and it's hilarious how girls go "I love fictional men over real" as if we don't make fun of men when they do it. Though I do understand where they come from.
The way my jaw dropped when you explained how hockey romances became popular. That is so sinister. I need to stop being surprised when I hear shit like this.
Tbf I do understand why people have introduced “black cat x golden retriever” because in the vast majority of grumpy/sunshine books, the man is the grumpy one and the woman is the sunshine (and I hate this dynamic so much, words can’t explain). So whenever someone does say that a book is grumpy x sunshine, in my head, I’m like “Okay so there’s a 90% chance that the grumpy in this situation is the guy” and I’ll probably end up avoiding it. So I don’t mind the specification. If romance books were 50/50 on who they cast as the grumpy and who they cast as the sunshine, then it would be unnecessary.
Yeah!!! I had never thought of that before but she is so right what the hell?!?!? Like I don't like sports romances in general but I did think the hyperfixation on specifically hockey was strange.
And the way it makes SOOO MUCH sense too! The romance community has an INSANE diversity issue. 90% of the romances on shelves are with white leads, it’s literally so discouraging and disappointing
I love how these booktok books are just a reskinned version of the books you see on *that side* of the walmart book section with a real life cowboy staring into the distance
the main point missing from the "tropification" discourse is that in recent history (past 10 years), describing fiction online through tropes comes from fanfiction. in that context where the canon work has already done all the tough characterization and plot work, building a fanfiction around tropes is a useful shorthand to help readers choose which situation they want to imagine their favorite characters in. but in an original story, reducing the narrative to tropes overshadows the writing quality, characterization, and plot which are the actual IMPORTANT THINGS to develop in original fiction. it also leads to an issue where so many commercial romances feel like they're about the SAME stock-standard sarcastic girl + golden retriever guy (or vice versa) characters slotted into the same 10 situations.
You worded this well. I love fanfiction for romance for that reason as its much easier when you already have character growth and settings from the original work but romance book have a very obvious problem in seeming “shallow” and rushes as yes, they do not focus on characterization and backstories, and the settings around them enough. It bothers me. I have noticed this is more of a problem with newer books as I have read amazing older romance books.
i loveeee a good trope as much as the next person, but when we start asking “omg what tropes are in it?!” instead of “what’s the plot of the book?” is when we lose the narrative lol i also think they can be a huge spoiler, i love uncovering tropes as i read them, not having someone tell me
13:44 "if you're not trying to kill each other, it's not enemies to lovers" EXACTLY. Give me more of this!!! just being a little passive aggressive with each other does not mean enemies to lovers lmao.
It’s gotten to the point now where when I see an author market their book with those arrows, I just keep scrolling 😂 if you’ve already told me every trope in the book why do I need to read it? Also, it seems like a competition on how many tropes authors can fit into their books, and it definitely shows in their writing. Instead of writing tropes that fit the characters, they’re writing characters to check off every trope that they can.
I’m an author😭 I just did the marketing with the arrows omg but only because I kept seeing it and was trying to get up to date with the marketing. Honestly I’m definitely not going to market like what’s popular anymore I feel like it’s all starting to look repetitive.
The smut thing is my biggest hang up rn bc it’s big in the fanfic community too (ppl only wanting to read things if it has seggs) and now that there’s so much overlap with published YA and New Adult fiction, people think 🌶️ is the only indicator of a good romance WHICH IS SO SAD
im someone who reads smut sometimes and if i have to be honest, smut with no chemistry is pretty bland. i mean sure people can enjoy their oneshots however yall want idc but there's something so nice about reading how the pairing click before they have a scene together
@@Sing_A_Rebel_Song I'm ace but not necessarily sex repulsed. But so many books build the whole story on spice alone. It makes me wonder if sex is the only basis of love. I mostly read sapphic books though. But even those are now trope-ified. If you want recs, Amanda Radley doesn't write sex scenes 🤷🏾♀️
At least there's a chance that smut in AO3 is masterfully crafted with plot and philosophy.. book smut has zero regard for story or quality yet they make money off of it
I do think the tropification is a sympton of...fanfiction becoming more mainstream. It's been the biggest culture shock seeing how much fanfiction has seeped into modern publishing. I'm not necessarily upset about it but it is kind of weird to see only, like, Reylo or Dramione fics get published when fanfiction historically has always been a pretty queer space. It's also why I think most of these books are so bland bc they're built up around tropes in the same way that fanfiction is except fanfiction comes with the advantage of having characters that have already been created and fleshed out.
genuinely agree. one of the most popular romance writers right now (whose name rhymes with valley gazelwood) comes from a reylo fanfic writing background and published one of her fanfics with a few name changes (one of them being entirely unsubtle… i mean ADAM? as in adam driver??) and it is so very apparent that these characters have just not been fleshed out. very much reliant on tropes. which works in the original context of fanfiction because we already KNOW these characters as people and they’ve already had a chance to develop, but when it comes to a published, standalone book??? as great as fanfiction is, it simply needs MORE in order to be published. but so many of the popular romance writers are simply people publishing their fanfics with a few tweaks and it is insane to me how this keeps happening and ppl keep eating it up.
YEAH this is a really good way to put it!! A lot of fanfiction being built around tropes like "only one bed" or "friends to lovers" works because it's about putting established characters into new situations (usually romances) and so much of it is shorter, in media res scenes or short stories instead of full length plots which is GREAT if you just want to spend some time with characters you already love, but doesn't work so well as a full length original novel. When I read fanfiction I already know these people so I'm there for the trope/fun situation/ehehe my ship, but when I read a BOOK I'm there to read a STORY, so just telling me "it has these tropes" does nothing for me because I'm like okay??? but what's the story????
i started reading fourth wing, and it’s not bad, but it’s not super good either. i find the romantic qualities and tropes to be really exaggerated. i can just tell that the author was one of those tumblr fanfiction girlies who decided to write a fantasy about hot people riding dragons😭
I am never served these book trope stuff so seeing them here, raw and unfiltered, is insane. Because why the fuck would you add "No third act break up" to describe your book? Isn't that a spoiler? Am I crazy to care about that?
it’s not really a spoiler because everyone knows they’ll get back together after the third act breaks up plus majority romance readers hate the third act breakup which is why it’s put on the lists
I laughed so much when you started dissecting "Fangirl". 12:12 "what are you doing being a fan of a golfer?" you're so real for that LMAOOO also yesss for the enemy to lovers and they're literally 2 normal people that basically disagree on some stuff and haven't properly known each other. unless I see blood, crime, trying to kill each other, lets leave the enemies out of the tropes please. specially when it's a "mundane" romance like an office romance. like what do mean enemies?? unless one of them poisons the other persons morning coffee, get out of here lmao
I agree with you saying authors writing enemies to lovers don't know what the f they're doing, especially in a contemporary professional setting. I say this as someone in corporate, you'd NEVER get into a relationship with your work nemesis cuz of the stress and career risks involved that THEY'RE causing you. It makes it more obvious that these authors live in the safety of their homes away from actual office rivalry.
@@marisagettasooh this is so real… and it makes me think that a sport like basketball (being majority black players) would have no chance becoming popular on booktok despite the prevalence of “nba wife” content that could easily be used as inspiration for a book
@@lilacfields Kennedy Ryan did a series with basketball players, and even she had to have her first hero be half black/half white. Then the next cover model was white. Then on the third book they finally allowed a black model 🤬
I think that touch her and die thing has to have some serious drama, problems, hard times happening in order for it to make sense, like if nothing is threatening then what is someone killing for? Six of Crows has that literal scene for example with the guy on the ship that insults Inej or something but this is a high fantasy setting, life or death situation, traumatized deranged characters; if the situation is like an everyday encounter with an ex it would just be corny and boring
LMAO this video cracked me uppp, i felt like i was listening to my best friend vent about books which was great! i love tropes but only in fanfiction where i have a connection/attachment to characters and wanna read them in new situations but i've realized idc about them labeled on the front cover of books 😭 i feel like publishers want quick releases and the plot/writing suffers
tropes in fan fiction is so good which is why i think ali hazelwood works so well because even though not everyone know is reylo fan fic it’s easier for her to write characters because they’re already established
As a writer with some knowledge of the industry as it is right now, I'ma tell you: 1. Yes, it's a whole lot easier to publish now, but getting eyes on your work only gets harder as the market gets more and more flooded (especially with computer generated garbage being a thing now), and it only gets harder to find readers the further your writing is from being some flavor of romance. The less mainstream your stories are, the more you are doomed to obscurity as you're buried under a mountian of tropey, rapid release, to-market romance. 2. Most of the writers you're talking about who are writing to tropes and pushing out books at a rapid pace (especially if they're self pub) are what we call "to market" writers, people who are in it to write whatever's hottest and make a quick buck. They look at writing as a business, and do not care so much about it as an art, so they just pick whatever tropes are selling the most, throw something together, and shove it on Amazon with little-to-no revision or editing. Publishers are also increasingly not proving much editing, because they're sure they can sell it anyway, and editing costs time and all those pennies they could be pinching (there being any sort of quality standard for traditional publishing is 100% a myth, they only care about how marketable your book is, ie. how much money they can squeeze out of you).
yesss !!! especially with the rise of romantasy as a mainstream genre thanks to tiktok, i feel like most end up being a knock off acotar with whatever tropes they can shove into it. every blurb sounds the same. 😭😭😭😭
i know a foolproof way to immediately know if a book is ass: 1. if it's overhyped by booktok 2. if the author only talks about the tropes in their book to promote it (im so close to adding the YA genre as a whole to the list)
your hockey romance take is spot on! a lot of people try to justify their popularity with the nature of the sport, since it's so physical but like... hello?? american football is right there and it's much more popular than hockey, especially worldwide??? tbh even college football is more popular than hockey where i live, and i live far from the US. and if you want the whole "celebrity player" maybe make the guy play football/soccer, that's much more realistic! it really is about writing mediocre white characters without worrying about diversity, and i mean... they're not wrong about hockey players in that regard lmao
The fact that the hockey players in question are always Canadians or Americans too! A lot of pro hockey players are Eastern European but they never get romance novels... The wild thing is, I've seen arguments that pro football isn't as popular in romance because it's too "violent" or "toxic", but hockey is literally just the same thing but on ice. Just say it's because there's too many Black people in football lmao.
@@wormdoodles exactly!! hockey has one of the most toxic cultures in sports today, with some truly scary stories, especially in the younger leagues, and they’re honestly going to talk about football?? and if we’re going to be real here, whenever you get too many white boys/men together alone in a room things get really bad real quick, so saying american football is worse is just plain racism lmao
I feel like with the rise of the tiktok brain, people became so lazy, that they don't want to listen to what books are actually about, that's why they are looking for those two words that would descibe a book and that's it; This is exactly why I do appreciate Booktube and I do not think Book tok is a great alternative for it, people take their time explaining synopses and what the books are actually about that you wouldn't care what sort of tropes are included, you go in looking for a story not a feeling, like LET ME FIND OUT THE TROPE FOR MYSELF THANK YOU I really love love this form of videos myo!! thank you for the discussion.
YES LITERALLY EXACTLY im not going to read a book soley on its tropes and it makes me hate tropes honestly, like yes i like enemies to lovers and other things but im not going to read a book SOLEY because of that. i want to take interest of a story because of its plot, not simply because of its tropes. it might even lose its meaning that way
omg yes i agree! it also feels like tropes are an easy way to keep people in their niche of reading like if someone only wants to read fake dating etc. thats fine but i just think it’s so important to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while
It's not laziness - it's what happens when you marathon a medium - be it Korean dramas or the romance genre in books. Once you get a hand of the clothes you just sometimes wanna consume the next thing based on a trope or idea of a storyline. I think it's just "I'm in a specific mood for x,y,x". Also, binge watching, sometimes you find a kdramas so well done or a trope you really enjoyed that you pursue more similar content to binge through. It's like if you tasted one caramel candy and you found out you really enjoyed caramel candy more than any type you might pursue trying every caramel candy that there is. These are just common habits formed from the habit of binding content, which gamefies content - that's why it's consumed in a strange manner you're not familiar with. In the end when you've consumed many books in one genre or many shows, you found out there's only so many ways a genre can be written - hence why tropification exists.
if you’re an author, and i ask you what you book is about, and you just list off a bunch of tropes instead of giving me a synopsis, i ain’t reading it!!
Hi I studied publishing and I can kinda explain some of the "writing around tropes" and ally Hazelwood shit. So a writer like Hazelwood is a front list author, publishing houses have a front list and a back list, a front list is books they're constantly printing (penguin classics) and the main breadwinners of the publishing house (usually crime or romance as these are the highest selling genres), while a blacklist is smaller authors, more niche interest books and books more in line with the publishing houses ideology that may not be as profitable. Front list authors sometimes have contracts that require a certain number of books written in x timeframe, and depending on the contract is how much control the publishing house will have over the book. Almost all these writers also use ghost writers. There's nothing wrong with using ghost writers, especially if you have to put out like four books a year, and ghost writers can have different levels of input in a books creation (some write baisically the whole thing, some just fill in scene holes and do heavy editing). I'm not at all surprised to see an author getting recommended tropes to write, since some publishing houses will straight up tell authors what sort of book they want from them. Maybe not EXACTLY what the want but a list of tropes is very in like with how some publishing houses/authors operate. Honestly if you see an author in romance/crime who's putting out multiple books a year you can just go ahead and assume they're on a publishing houses front list and that a ghost writer was involved in the process in some way. They're gonna keep putting out multiple books a year according to whatever is popular/what the publishing house wants until their contract ends or they stop selling.
I was going to go, "akshuallyy☝🏼🤓, The Poppy War has tropes." Then, I realized the OP was asking for romance tropes lol. I like categorizing my fave media with tropes, but it's when the tropes are centralized in the writing for the sake of including the trope that the writing suffers.
Omg it’s not that hard y’all!! when I say enemies to lovers I mean enemies on opposite sides of war or enemies that families have hated each other for generations. I don’t mean ppl who had a misunderstanding or just slightly dislike each other and end up together at the end. If I called every time I’ve become eventual friends with someone I originally didn’t like “enemies” to friends that’d be sooo weird. Ppl confuse rivals to lovers, bully romance or one-sided hatred to lovers as enemies to lovers when it’s NOT! We also need a name for the troupe when it’s just “just don’t really like each other and don’t get along to lovers” bc that one is more common than real enemies…
Honestly I like a lot of specific tropes, but I’d rather read the book bc the premise sounds good and be surprised when the tropes I like appear rather than going in there knowing. Knowing all the tropes in the book feels like a spoiler to me!
I think what's stopping those strings of tropes from being a story is that they just lack internal conflict. Enemies to lovers, morally grey, touch her and die, arranged marriage. They tell me nothing about a character and why I should care about them. People only read fanfics because they're invested in the characters and thats why they like knowing the tropes. Its like choosing the flavor. But in original media, you NEED to build your characters and get us hooked on them. We will not come to read the story already invested in characters. You need to do that first.
Tropes are mainly used in fan fiction, but the repetition feels nice because the ff authors put their own spin on it, but these days, the tropification feels like copying and pasting
At first I read this and thought there were a ton of tropical books on booktok 😂 But yes, the tropes are getting to be too much. I'm glad someone is starting a conversation.
I thought we were talking about metaphors. I always forget the internet has distorted the word trope to mean something waaay different than it originally meant in regards to poetry lol
I've found some things I really liked through TvTropes by reading a description of some scene that happened in the work and thinking "yeah, that sounds fun, I'd read that". I think the main issue is thinking that the stuff that can be distilled down to a simple trope entry is the only part that matters in a work, and it's not. Marketing will always oversimplify and distill things down to purely quantitative bits that can be understood by an algorithm, but it will not be able to give you an idea of what the story is actually like until you experience it for yourself. It's kinda worrying that many readers don't seem to understand this, even people who read a lot but only in a very limited reference pool. With books it's usually romance, but for example with movies it's often superhero stuff. The industry will always find a way to optimize the soul out of art, that's to be expected, that it's having so much success despite that is what's worrying me.
golf romance cracking me tf up cuz the impression i have of golf is sleazy old rich dudes harassing the girl hired to sell beer while she tries to get away on her beer cart
I don't buy romance books anymore unless it is on bargain and authors I've read and love their other book. I will just read romance on Kindle unlimited or get it from the library. And I hate sports/music romances
Trying to do a lot of research on the book community and such. I have a passion to write a adult fantasy sapphic book (POC characters you know it) and Ive been looking at books reccomended to me. Everything...sucks? I remember I was reading a preview of a book and the two characters fucked on the 3rd page. I was so bewildered. I hope something balances out the genre soon. I love the idea of romance and intimacy but I see its been reduce heavily for the people who are inept in media literacy.
You are hilarious and have lots of great insights, like you got it spot on regarding why hockey romance has been trending so much lately. A lot of authors simply just want to write a sports romance about white men unquestioned. Which is not wrong i guess, but its just interesting to point out. And YES to so many romance authors having the WORST pov's for their male love interests. I get it, he's meant to come off as the "alpha" in the relationship but NO one thinks like that who is not a deranged psycho. I am so tired of tropes. While I have a few that i'm fond of like grumpy sunshine, they often make books feel unoriginal. I'm honestly dying for romance recs where they don't fall into any common trends.
wanted to give my two cents as a fanfic author who wants to be published someday, you kind of hit the nail on the head with the whole, "it feels like authors aren't writing what they love, rather they're writing what they know their audience would love" which, unfortunately, is even prevalent in the fanfic writing community. and part of the reason i feel like it might've spread to publishing? bc i've seen multiple people wondering if they should write for bigger fandoms - fandoms they don't care about as much - just to get reads/likes/comments. within my own work, i've noticed if i write something that suits more of what the people want, my own work suffers for it but i get wayyyyyyy more attention on it than if i'd written whatever i actually wanted to write. which maybe comes down to a fundamental difference in why people pick up books? i think you're very much like me in the sense that it matters to us if the author gave a shit about what they wrote. if they didn't write it just to write it and pander to an audience. which i appreciate so much, but i have to wonder if it's that the tropeification of writing is getting people into reading who treat it like a ridiculous romcom you watch in one afternoon and laugh over how bad it is, only to find out people are obsessed with it. which, there's nothing wrong with having different preferences! not what i'm saying at all. what i'm saying is i think that *because* the target demographic is shifting, novelists have to shift with it. which, like you said, is definitely resulting in such heartless books and drives me insane as someone who loves reading, and i genuinely do wonder what the future of publishing/novelists hold bc i truly feel like we're missing out on discovering such wildly talented authors in favor of ones who can pump out books at alarming rates for what the majority wants to read. (awesome video btw, glad this was put in my recommended, definitely subscribing after this)
loved this video. the way you conveyed your thoughts felt so genuine and relatable, which is refreshing in this time where a lot of bookish content gets formulaic. cant wait to tune in for more ❤
I've read very very very few books of adults fake dating where it actually makes sense. And the tropification is so annoying with the way authors are using it to get "trendy." Like I know that tropes are good so that people can find what they like, but being unoriginal in order to get clout is so annoying. Same with the insanely smutty books, especially since they're advertised to YA.
Tropes are the building blocks of a story. You need them to write a story. But you need to keep your eye on the finished product, and not just focus on the parts. Everything needs to fit together right. If you're only focused on popular tropes, you risk ending up with a disjointed story
I don't even read romance and i am SO tired of tropes! I don't care about them at all. And like your example The Poppy War, people are now expecting every book to have them somewhere.
Keep doing video essays!! I have never touched the romance genre but I watched this entire video because you explained stuff just the right amount for me to follow along :D
I don't really read romance, but I have noticed this as someone who WRITES books that have subplots with romance. It just feels like you either have to write something with a trope and base the whole relationship around that JUST to get reads or you write what you want to write and nobody gives a hoot nor a rat about it. Which is fine cuz I ship my characters more when IM passionate about their romance. And like how realistic is it anyway for all these tropes to be happening? Like why can't a romance just happen without all these shenanigans going on around them. So wack. Great vid tho, one of the best video essays I've seen on books frfr. And writers really appreciate this kinda input fr, makes me feel not so alone on this wack shit.
I’m glad this video is here. I went on another post weeks back and said something to the effect of “Why is there so many tropes to describe a book now?” and “ when did tropes become a ‘thing’ in books because I never saw it in all of my reading history until I discovered booktok?” Well… that didn’t go over well and I received a lot of hateful comments. I had never heard of tropes or it being used so that’s why I was confused, I’ve been reading since I was 12 and I’m 39 now. I realized from this video that it’s a romance thing. I’ve always read Historical fiction, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, Urban Fiction, and African American literature and you can’t put tropes on those types of books even though a lot of what I read has a romance subplot. Thanks for clearing it up for me.
"Should've just went poly" "is there smut?" - I used to read romance novels as a kid. Lobbies and waiting rooms ere always full of those books and travel mags. The gems had romance as a secondary to the plot i.e. the romance wasn't the focus but it burnt and simmered in the background, in the gestures, in the dialogue tags. Poly is wild to me. Is that the new norm?
I just found your channel off a Stephen King video (I'm a big King fan) and I think your channel is so adorable and creative! New sub. Keep going girl! 🌺
what annoys me most about this trend is now i know what to expect when reading the book… because you told me all the tropes that would happen in one photo 😭 also great video btw, keep making more of these !!! 🩷🩷
TY! Finally a fellow Enemies to lovers enjoyer that hates when people call everything enemies to lovers. If they aren't trying to kill each other it isn't it! 😂❤
I got into reading through booktok, and the romance trope thing is really getting on my nerves. Like idc if it’s an “enemies to lovers”, I JUST WANT AN ACTUALLY WELL-WRITTEN BOOK WITH COMPETENT CHARACTERS!!
The GOLF badboy is making me lose my mind. Also "tell your grandma to fuck off" LMAOOOO. THE 39 -34 AGE GAP HRJSJDJSJSJ Love your takes, as someone who was part of the reylo fandom back in the days, seeing the published reylo fanfiction being pumped into the market by hazelwood is CRAZYYYY. Like its pretty cringy but im kinda proud of her. Thats a dream job for a fanfic writer lol.
whenever i see a book recommended or advertised w a list of tropes it immediately turns me off. im not reading a fanfic of characters i already know, i wanna read a novel with new characters 😭
This is EXACTLY how I feel! I’m working on my debut YA romance series and most of the genre literally is just all the same tropes, plots, and titles now 😭😭
i loveeeeee hearing you talk about stuff like this!! lol but i agree, i think the romance genre has gotten so annoying, i find myself wanting to read more lit fic, thrillers and horror because the tropes are seriously getting out of hand, i hadn't even heard about golden retriever/black cat like that is so dumb please
Yeah, one thing is writing a book that has popular tropes in it; the other is writing a book *_around and based on_* a popular trope. It reduces your creative possibilities.
I think that 'when books become tropified they become not individualized" is maybe not as accurate in my experience. All books are made of tropes, that's how we determine genres most of the time, how many of certain things are used. I think what I usually see is that 'Tropified books' fall under the category of Lazy Writing, which is a sin on its own.
I’ve always been a “go into the bookstore and read the backs of books til I find something I want to read” type of person but after several instances of accidentally financially supporting genuinely terrible people, I Google every author of a book that sounds interesting before I decide now 😮💨 I’m STILL pissed that I gave CJ Piper money cause girl, wtf
I am HOWLING!!!! I have screamed aloud so many times at the freaking sermon you’re dropping “Maybe if you were on the right side of history, you’d like love triangles” YESSSSS “If you’re not trying to kill each other, it isn’t enemies to lovers” TELL THEM 👏 “I get it, if it’s easier to get an audience SELLING OUT” AAAAAAA yes i am screaming Anyway I want the actual enemies to lovers recs 😭 fav trope.
The one romance book I loved that I read was Dungeons and Drama. Despite the MC ... odd clothing choices, it was very cute. I think I enjoyed it most because it had D&D and musical references. And the two love interests where very nerdy and adorable. I also love romance in the least expected books, like horror. Maybe because the plot and characters flesh out more
Booktok is ruining the production of well written and plotted books! Publishing companies see that these are being easily consumed and are obviously going to continue publishing what's making the money flow. So these trashy stories are being published for a bunch of tiktokers that never had their wattpad era and it is so frustrating for us who love to read and enjoy a good novel and/or series. Many of these books are marketed at young teens but are so inappropriate. With constant graphic s*x scenes that go on for pages and pages!
I've been so over this type of era. It's "annoyed by vampires trope" level to me. To me right now the semi comedic horror books are doing it for me because the trope doesn't matter.
If you like second chance romance with black main characters then read the New Haven series by J.L Seegars. The first book isn’t much of a second chance, but it’s so good. The other books are second chance, but it goes over multiple books not just one.
The main reason I hate the tropification of books is that it essentially reduces what is supposed to be a completely fleshed out story into something insubstantial and superficial. The book no longer becomes a story, a whole world waiting to be delved into, but rather a cheap trendy product.
The bad boy golfer romance is genuinely so hilarious what. Like if you’re dating a bad boy golfer he isn’t gonna be some cool sexy badass, he’s gonna be an anti-vaxxer who gets with your sister
Or is that just my uncle
“who gets with your sister… or is that just my uncle” …… wait wtf
@@BohemianScandalous he was with one of my aunts for years then after they broke up he got with my other aunt
@@tyler-df3wy oh okay, still a shitty person but not as bad as i thought
all bad boy golfers are actually just your uncle
Nah cuz "bad boy" and "golfer" are so antithetical.
finally! been waiting for someone to talk about this! the tropeification of the romance genre has made me not want to even read romance anymore because authors are writing around tropes instead of an actually story they want to tell and it SHOWS😭the fangirl down debacle had me gagged like i know the girlies were not on their knees for a bad boy golfer 💀
omg and the fake dating trope!! at our big age what are we fake dating for???????!!!!
i always take a break from romance for like half the year because all it is now is just trope central
EXACTLY what I was thinking! I’ve had convos with my friends about this problem and why I’m not enjoying most new releases anymore
So glad im not the only one like it's too the point where I only read books from black booktok because they're relatable and actually write proper stories. Majority oc the authors out there are problematic normalizing the wrong things too yet, I see there books taking up library when they aren't even good.
Literally
also bully romance is NOT enemies to lovers, idk why people don't understand this 😭😭
people be calling anything enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers, bully x bullied, it should be ENEMIES, THEY NEED TO BE FIRMLY ON OPPOSING SIDES AND WOULD NOT HESITATE TO KILL EACHOTHER WHEN NEED BE
@@ruru_alim RIGHT like they need to be on opposite sides and have tried to/want to kill each other atleast once, and etl trope should only be reserved for fantasy, sci-fi, period dramas, thrillers, horror etc. the guy from the opposite department is NOT ur enemy, y'all are rivals at the best !! 😭😭
heavy on this! I swear people dk how to write enemies to lovers anymore 😭
the most annoying part with some of the tropes is, for example, the hockey romance with "found family." that is a man, a woman, and two children. that is not unconventional found family. that is a nuclear family. what are you TALKING ABOUT!
no wayyy 😭☠
They literally think its like sim households where you find a family and join it im 💀💀💀
“women can’t write men the same as men can’t write women” OH- speak on it. It alarms me sometimes how some women write men & pass it off as romance like.. you okay girl?????
FOR REAL. Especially gay romance- Heartstopper and Red White and Royal Blue were so cringy to me because they were very much written by people who consumed wayyy too much fanfic and forgot how actual teen boys and men operate.
@@wormdoodles honestly i am glad we have a good gay love story in heartstopper. At least they don’t die and it’s nice and not sad, unlike most other gay novels.
@@nagini77 I mean this very nicely, pls get higher standards/read some actual own voices gay fiction 😭
@@wormdoodles i don't read gay books often but almost all I've read are unhappy :(
SRSLY. like women are dismissed as "having their fantasies" or "living their pain thruale characters" but women genuinely don't know how to write men at times. Those men literally feel like objects and it's hilarious how girls go "I love fictional men over real" as if we don't make fun of men when they do it. Though I do understand where they come from.
The way my jaw dropped when you explained how hockey romances became popular. That is so sinister. I need to stop being surprised when I hear shit like this.
Tbf I do understand why people have introduced “black cat x golden retriever” because in the vast majority of grumpy/sunshine books, the man is the grumpy one and the woman is the sunshine (and I hate this dynamic so much, words can’t explain). So whenever someone does say that a book is grumpy x sunshine, in my head, I’m like “Okay so there’s a 90% chance that the grumpy in this situation is the guy” and I’ll probably end up avoiding it. So I don’t mind the specification. If romance books were 50/50 on who they cast as the grumpy and who they cast as the sunshine, then it would be unnecessary.
@@---ul9eq YES
Yeah!!! I had never thought of that before but she is so right what the hell?!?!? Like I don't like sports romances in general but I did think the hyperfixation on specifically hockey was strange.
And the way it makes SOOO MUCH sense too! The romance community has an INSANE diversity issue. 90% of the romances on shelves are with white leads, it’s literally so discouraging and disappointing
I love how these booktok books are just a reskinned version of the books you see on *that side* of the walmart book section with a real life cowboy staring into the distance
THIS COMMENT BTHFHDHFHFG 😭
the fact that i’ve seen many of these books sit along side those cowboy books 😭😭
the main point missing from the "tropification" discourse is that in recent history (past 10 years), describing fiction online through tropes comes from fanfiction. in that context where the canon work has already done all the tough characterization and plot work, building a fanfiction around tropes is a useful shorthand to help readers choose which situation they want to imagine their favorite characters in. but in an original story, reducing the narrative to tropes overshadows the writing quality, characterization, and plot which are the actual IMPORTANT THINGS to develop in original fiction. it also leads to an issue where so many commercial romances feel like they're about the SAME stock-standard sarcastic girl + golden retriever guy (or vice versa) characters slotted into the same 10 situations.
exactly!!
THANK YOU YOU GET IT!!!
exactly!!
You worded this well. I love fanfiction for romance for that reason as its much easier when you already have character growth and settings from the original work but romance book have a very obvious problem in seeming “shallow” and rushes as yes, they do not focus on characterization and backstories, and the settings around them enough. It bothers me. I have noticed this is more of a problem with newer books as I have read amazing older romance books.
Its like no one knows what an enemy is anymore
i loveeee a good trope as much as the next person, but when we start asking “omg what tropes are in it?!” instead of “what’s the plot of the book?” is when we lose the narrative lol
i also think they can be a huge spoiler, i love uncovering tropes as i read them, not having someone tell me
13:44 "if you're not trying to kill each other, it's not enemies to lovers" EXACTLY. Give me more of this!!! just being a little passive aggressive with each other does not mean enemies to lovers lmao.
It’s gotten to the point now where when I see an author market their book with those arrows, I just keep scrolling 😂 if you’ve already told me every trope in the book why do I need to read it?
Also, it seems like a competition on how many tropes authors can fit into their books, and it definitely shows in their writing. Instead of writing tropes that fit the characters, they’re writing characters to check off every trope that they can.
right most books now are just nothing but tropes 😭
I’m an author😭 I just did the marketing with the arrows omg but only because I kept seeing it and was trying to get up to date with the marketing. Honestly I’m definitely not going to market like what’s popular anymore I feel like it’s all starting to look repetitive.
The smut thing is my biggest hang up rn bc it’s big in the fanfic community too (ppl only wanting to read things if it has seggs) and now that there’s so much overlap with published YA and New Adult fiction, people think 🌶️ is the only indicator of a good romance WHICH IS SO SAD
At least AO3 has handy filters that you can use to sort out all the spicy fics. Books are just a free for all
Fr. I’m ace & sex repulsed but I love romance. I’ve been in love, love isn’t just about sex. SO WHY TF DOES EVERY ROMANCE BOOK HAVE SO MUCH S3X?????
im someone who reads smut sometimes and if i have to be honest, smut with no chemistry is pretty bland. i mean sure people can enjoy their oneshots however yall want idc but there's something so nice about reading how the pairing click before they have a scene together
@@Sing_A_Rebel_Song I'm ace but not necessarily sex repulsed. But so many books build the whole story on spice alone. It makes me wonder if sex is the only basis of love.
I mostly read sapphic books though. But even those are now trope-ified.
If you want recs, Amanda Radley doesn't write sex scenes 🤷🏾♀️
At least there's a chance that smut in AO3 is masterfully crafted with plot and philosophy.. book smut has zero regard for story or quality yet they make money off of it
I do think the tropification is a sympton of...fanfiction becoming more mainstream. It's been the biggest culture shock seeing how much fanfiction has seeped into modern publishing. I'm not necessarily upset about it but it is kind of weird to see only, like, Reylo or Dramione fics get published when fanfiction historically has always been a pretty queer space. It's also why I think most of these books are so bland bc they're built up around tropes in the same way that fanfiction is except fanfiction comes with the advantage of having characters that have already been created and fleshed out.
genuinely agree. one of the most popular romance writers right now (whose name rhymes with valley gazelwood) comes from a reylo fanfic writing background and published one of her fanfics with a few name changes (one of them being entirely unsubtle… i mean ADAM? as in adam driver??) and it is so very apparent that these characters have just not been fleshed out. very much reliant on tropes. which works in the original context of fanfiction because we already KNOW these characters as people and they’ve already had a chance to develop, but when it comes to a published, standalone book??? as great as fanfiction is, it simply needs MORE in order to be published. but so many of the popular romance writers are simply people publishing their fanfics with a few tweaks and it is insane to me how this keeps happening and ppl keep eating it up.
Fandom becoming mainstream as a result of quarantine has been a downgrade to everything
Kinda darkly hilarious that the only fanfics publishers are willing to touch are the boring hetero ones.
YEAH this is a really good way to put it!! A lot of fanfiction being built around tropes like "only one bed" or "friends to lovers" works because it's about putting established characters into new situations (usually romances) and so much of it is shorter, in media res scenes or short stories instead of full length plots which is GREAT if you just want to spend some time with characters you already love, but doesn't work so well as a full length original novel.
When I read fanfiction I already know these people so I'm there for the trope/fun situation/ehehe my ship, but when I read a BOOK I'm there to read a STORY, so just telling me "it has these tropes" does nothing for me because I'm like okay??? but what's the story????
i started reading fourth wing, and it’s not bad, but it’s not super good either. i find the romantic qualities and tropes to be really exaggerated. i can just tell that the author was one of those tumblr fanfiction girlies who decided to write a fantasy about hot people riding dragons😭
It’s actually crazy how fast these authors are just churning out books to please these readers with no standards.
Most writers do it for the pay and not actual passion
I am never served these book trope stuff so seeing them here, raw and unfiltered, is insane. Because why the fuck would you add "No third act break up" to describe your book? Isn't that a spoiler? Am I crazy to care about that?
it’s not really a spoiler because everyone knows they’ll get back together after the third act breaks up plus majority romance readers hate the third act breakup which is why it’s put on the lists
Personally I appreciate it bc I'm so sick of that trope + they always get back together.
I laughed so much when you started dissecting "Fangirl". 12:12 "what are you doing being a fan of a golfer?" you're so real for that LMAOOO
also yesss for the enemy to lovers and they're literally 2 normal people that basically disagree on some stuff and haven't properly known each other. unless I see blood, crime, trying to kill each other, lets leave the enemies out of the tropes please. specially when it's a "mundane" romance like an office romance. like what do mean enemies?? unless one of them poisons the other persons morning coffee, get out of here lmao
Agreed 😂😂
I agree with you saying authors writing enemies to lovers don't know what the f they're doing, especially in a contemporary professional setting. I say this as someone in corporate, you'd NEVER get into a relationship with your work nemesis cuz of the stress and career risks involved that THEY'RE causing you. It makes it more obvious that these authors live in the safety of their homes away from actual office rivalry.
I wanna know why hockey is so popular in romance😭
Because it’s a mostly whyte sport. So authors have “cover” for when they don’t write diversely.
@@marisagettas omg now it makes sense!
@@marisagettasooh this is so real… and it makes me think that a sport like basketball (being majority black players) would have no chance becoming popular on booktok despite the prevalence of “nba wife” content that could easily be used as inspiration for a book
@@lilacfields Kennedy Ryan did a series with basketball players, and even she had to have her first hero be half black/half white. Then the next cover model was white. Then on the third book they finally allowed a black model 🤬
@@marisagettasgirl you’re so smart!!!!
"What are you doing beinf a fan of a golfer" LMAOOO
I loved this!! The take on the golfing ended me 😂 because literally what about golf is giving “touch her and die” energy 😂
Maybe the "her" is his favorite golf club, lol
this is what ive been complaining about for so long, literature is no longer about plot and they're just trope checklists now.
I think that touch her and die thing has to have some serious drama, problems, hard times happening in order for it to make sense, like if nothing is threatening then what is someone killing for? Six of Crows has that literal scene for example with the guy on the ship that insults Inej or something but this is a high fantasy setting, life or death situation, traumatized deranged characters; if the situation is like an everyday encounter with an ex it would just be corny and boring
LMAO this video cracked me uppp, i felt like i was listening to my best friend vent about books which was great! i love tropes but only in fanfiction where i have a connection/attachment to characters and wanna read them in new situations but i've realized idc about them labeled on the front cover of books 😭 i feel like publishers want quick releases and the plot/writing suffers
tropes in fan fiction is so good which is why i think ali hazelwood works so well because even though not everyone know is reylo fan fic it’s easier for her to write characters because they’re already established
I don't think a bad boy golfer could possibly exist. Like babe, what are you going to do? Hit me with your golf club? Run me over with your golf cart?
The hockey romance part is so sinister jesus
As a writer with some knowledge of the industry as it is right now, I'ma tell you:
1. Yes, it's a whole lot easier to publish now, but getting eyes on your work only gets harder as the market gets more and more flooded (especially with computer generated garbage being a thing now), and it only gets harder to find readers the further your writing is from being some flavor of romance. The less mainstream your stories are, the more you are doomed to obscurity as you're buried under a mountian of tropey, rapid release, to-market romance.
2. Most of the writers you're talking about who are writing to tropes and pushing out books at a rapid pace (especially if they're self pub) are what we call "to market" writers, people who are in it to write whatever's hottest and make a quick buck. They look at writing as a business, and do not care so much about it as an art, so they just pick whatever tropes are selling the most, throw something together, and shove it on Amazon with little-to-no revision or editing. Publishers are also increasingly not proving much editing, because they're sure they can sell it anyway, and editing costs time and all those pennies they could be pinching (there being any sort of quality standard for traditional publishing is 100% a myth, they only care about how marketable your book is, ie. how much money they can squeeze out of you).
yesss !!! especially with the rise of romantasy as a mainstream genre thanks to tiktok,
i feel like most end up being a knock off acotar with whatever tropes they can shove into it. every blurb sounds the same. 😭😭😭😭
i know a foolproof way to immediately know if a book is ass:
1. if it's overhyped by booktok
2. if the author only talks about the tropes in their book to promote it
(im so close to adding the YA genre as a whole to the list)
"age gap (she's 39 and he's 34)" HELPPPP
The only excuse for that is if the person who made that graphic was a preteen 😂😂
your hockey romance take is spot on! a lot of people try to justify their popularity with the nature of the sport, since it's so physical but like... hello?? american football is right there and it's much more popular than hockey, especially worldwide??? tbh even college football is more popular than hockey where i live, and i live far from the US. and if you want the whole "celebrity player" maybe make the guy play football/soccer, that's much more realistic! it really is about writing mediocre white characters without worrying about diversity, and i mean... they're not wrong about hockey players in that regard lmao
The fact that the hockey players in question are always Canadians or Americans too! A lot of pro hockey players are Eastern European but they never get romance novels...
The wild thing is, I've seen arguments that pro football isn't as popular in romance because it's too "violent" or "toxic", but hockey is literally just the same thing but on ice. Just say it's because there's too many Black people in football lmao.
@@wormdoodles exactly!! hockey has one of the most toxic cultures in sports today, with some truly scary stories, especially in the younger leagues, and they’re honestly going to talk about football?? and if we’re going to be real here, whenever you get too many white boys/men together alone in a room things get really bad real quick, so saying american football is worse is just plain racism lmao
I feel like with the rise of the tiktok brain, people became so lazy, that they don't want to listen to what books are actually about, that's why they are looking for those two words that would descibe a book and that's it; This is exactly why I do appreciate Booktube and I do not think Book tok is a great alternative for it, people take their time explaining synopses and what the books are actually about that you wouldn't care what sort of tropes are included, you go in looking for a story not a feeling, like LET ME FIND OUT THE TROPE FOR MYSELF THANK YOU
I really love love this form of videos myo!! thank you for the discussion.
YES LITERALLY EXACTLY
im not going to read a book soley on its tropes and it makes me hate tropes honestly, like yes i like enemies to lovers and other things but im not going to read a book SOLEY because of that. i want to take interest of a story because of its plot, not simply because of its tropes. it might even lose its meaning that way
omg yes i agree! it also feels like tropes are an easy way to keep people in their niche of reading like if someone only wants to read fake dating etc. thats fine but i just think it’s so important to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while
people should just read fanfiction bruh. i'd saw off a leg before paying for paperback wattpad content.
@@ithoughtiwascishet1316These books are being marketed the same way AO3 fics are tagged 😭
It's not laziness - it's what happens when you marathon a medium - be it Korean dramas or the romance genre in books. Once you get a hand of the clothes you just sometimes wanna consume the next thing based on a trope or idea of a storyline. I think it's just "I'm in a specific mood for x,y,x". Also, binge watching, sometimes you find a kdramas so well done or a trope you really enjoyed that you pursue more similar content to binge through. It's like if you tasted one caramel candy and you found out you really enjoyed caramel candy more than any type you might pursue trying every caramel candy that there is. These are just common habits formed from the habit of binding content, which gamefies content - that's why it's consumed in a strange manner you're not familiar with. In the end when you've consumed many books in one genre or many shows, you found out there's only so many ways a genre can be written - hence why tropification exists.
if you’re an author, and i ask you what you book is about, and you just list off a bunch of tropes instead of giving me a synopsis, i ain’t reading it!!
Hi I studied publishing and I can kinda explain some of the "writing around tropes" and ally Hazelwood shit. So a writer like Hazelwood is a front list author, publishing houses have a front list and a back list, a front list is books they're constantly printing (penguin classics) and the main breadwinners of the publishing house (usually crime or romance as these are the highest selling genres), while a blacklist is smaller authors, more niche interest books and books more in line with the publishing houses ideology that may not be as profitable. Front list authors sometimes have contracts that require a certain number of books written in x timeframe, and depending on the contract is how much control the publishing house will have over the book. Almost all these writers also use ghost writers. There's nothing wrong with using ghost writers, especially if you have to put out like four books a year, and ghost writers can have different levels of input in a books creation (some write baisically the whole thing, some just fill in scene holes and do heavy editing). I'm not at all surprised to see an author getting recommended tropes to write, since some publishing houses will straight up tell authors what sort of book they want from them. Maybe not EXACTLY what the want but a list of tropes is very in like with how some publishing houses/authors operate. Honestly if you see an author in romance/crime who's putting out multiple books a year you can just go ahead and assume they're on a publishing houses front list and that a ghost writer was involved in the process in some way. They're gonna keep putting out multiple books a year according to whatever is popular/what the publishing house wants until their contract ends or they stop selling.
I was going to go, "akshuallyy☝🏼🤓, The Poppy War has tropes." Then, I realized the OP was asking for romance tropes lol.
I like categorizing my fave media with tropes, but it's when the tropes are centralized in the writing for the sake of including the trope that the writing suffers.
These book essays / diaries you’re doing are definitely your niche 💗
thank you 🫶🏾 hopefully they do good on youtube or i’ll have to find something else 😭
Omg it’s not that hard y’all!! when I say enemies to lovers I mean enemies on opposite sides of war or enemies that families have hated each other for generations. I don’t mean ppl who had a misunderstanding or just slightly dislike each other and end up together at the end. If I called every time I’ve become eventual friends with someone I originally didn’t like “enemies” to friends that’d be sooo weird. Ppl confuse rivals to lovers, bully romance or one-sided hatred to lovers as enemies to lovers when it’s NOT! We also need a name for the troupe when it’s just “just don’t really like each other and don’t get along to lovers” bc that one is more common than real enemies…
Honestly I like a lot of specific tropes, but I’d rather read the book bc the premise sounds good and be surprised when the tropes I like appear rather than going in there knowing. Knowing all the tropes in the book feels like a spoiler to me!
Finally!! Someone who mentioned how nonsensical the whole reverse grumpyxsunshine/blackcatxgoldenretriever thing is! It's always driven me so nuts
I think what's stopping those strings of tropes from being a story is that they just lack internal conflict. Enemies to lovers, morally grey, touch her and die, arranged marriage. They tell me nothing about a character and why I should care about them. People only read fanfics because they're invested in the characters and thats why they like knowing the tropes. Its like choosing the flavor. But in original media, you NEED to build your characters and get us hooked on them. We will not come to read the story already invested in characters. You need to do that first.
Tropes are mainly used in fan fiction, but the repetition feels nice because the ff authors put their own spin on it, but these days, the tropification feels like copying and pasting
At first I read this and thought there were a ton of tropical books on booktok 😂
But yes, the tropes are getting to be too much. I'm glad someone is starting a conversation.
I thought we were talking about metaphors. I always forget the internet has distorted the word trope to mean something waaay different than it originally meant in regards to poetry lol
Still watching the video but your honesty about your math skills (same) and feelings about faking dating as adults is hilarious shdkdhffjd
I've found some things I really liked through TvTropes by reading a description of some scene that happened in the work and thinking "yeah, that sounds fun, I'd read that".
I think the main issue is thinking that the stuff that can be distilled down to a simple trope entry is the only part that matters in a work, and it's not. Marketing will always oversimplify and distill things down to purely quantitative bits that can be understood by an algorithm, but it will not be able to give you an idea of what the story is actually like until you experience it for yourself.
It's kinda worrying that many readers don't seem to understand this, even people who read a lot but only in a very limited reference pool. With books it's usually romance, but for example with movies it's often superhero stuff. The industry will always find a way to optimize the soul out of art, that's to be expected, that it's having so much success despite that is what's worrying me.
Yes pls do more video essays, the ending had me dying.
golf romance cracking me tf up cuz the impression i have of golf is sleazy old rich dudes harassing the girl hired to sell beer while she tries to get away on her beer cart
I don't buy romance books anymore unless it is on bargain and authors I've read and love their other book. I will just read romance on Kindle unlimited or get it from the library. And I hate sports/music romances
I also skipped over ali Hazelwood books. That interview she did made me not respect her as a writer
I hate enemies to lovers but I do wish they would just say rivals to lovers and so on.
I like fake dating but the stakes gotta be high
People who want smut just want Wattpad like books lol and I can't take them seriously
@@GoddessKry which interview? i'm intrigued
honestly my friend and i were talking about the smut/“spice” in books and i compared it to a porn addiction and i stand by that
Trying to do a lot of research on the book community and such. I have a passion to write a adult fantasy sapphic book (POC characters you know it) and Ive been looking at books reccomended to me. Everything...sucks? I remember I was reading a preview of a book and the two characters fucked on the 3rd page. I was so bewildered.
I hope something balances out the genre soon. I love the idea of romance and intimacy but I see its been reduce heavily for the people who are inept in media literacy.
You are hilarious and have lots of great insights, like you got it spot on regarding why hockey romance has been trending so much lately. A lot of authors simply just want to write a sports romance about white men unquestioned. Which is not wrong i guess, but its just interesting to point out. And YES to so many romance authors having the WORST pov's for their male love interests. I get it, he's meant to come off as the "alpha" in the relationship but NO one thinks like that who is not a deranged psycho.
I am so tired of tropes. While I have a few that i'm fond of like grumpy sunshine, they often make books feel unoriginal. I'm honestly dying for romance recs where they don't fall into any common trends.
i had just finished your other video essay when i saw you uploaded this one, i would love to see more video essays from you !!
omg loveee!! i have so many more planned
She said get in that studio 🤣 love this, subscribed!
🫶🏾
wanted to give my two cents as a fanfic author who wants to be published someday, you kind of hit the nail on the head with the whole, "it feels like authors aren't writing what they love, rather they're writing what they know their audience would love" which, unfortunately, is even prevalent in the fanfic writing community. and part of the reason i feel like it might've spread to publishing? bc i've seen multiple people wondering if they should write for bigger fandoms - fandoms they don't care about as much - just to get reads/likes/comments. within my own work, i've noticed if i write something that suits more of what the people want, my own work suffers for it but i get wayyyyyyy more attention on it than if i'd written whatever i actually wanted to write. which maybe comes down to a fundamental difference in why people pick up books? i think you're very much like me in the sense that it matters to us if the author gave a shit about what they wrote. if they didn't write it just to write it and pander to an audience. which i appreciate so much, but i have to wonder if it's that the tropeification of writing is getting people into reading who treat it like a ridiculous romcom you watch in one afternoon and laugh over how bad it is, only to find out people are obsessed with it. which, there's nothing wrong with having different preferences! not what i'm saying at all. what i'm saying is i think that *because* the target demographic is shifting, novelists have to shift with it. which, like you said, is definitely resulting in such heartless books and drives me insane as someone who loves reading, and i genuinely do wonder what the future of publishing/novelists hold bc i truly feel like we're missing out on discovering such wildly talented authors in favor of ones who can pump out books at alarming rates for what the majority wants to read. (awesome video btw, glad this was put in my recommended, definitely subscribing after this)
I like this style of video! Your reactions and expressions lol. SO REAL about "enemies" to lovers and fake dating
loved this video. the way you conveyed your thoughts felt so genuine and relatable, which is refreshing in this time where a lot of bookish content gets formulaic. cant wait to tune in for more ❤
I've read very very very few books of adults fake dating where it actually makes sense. And the tropification is so annoying with the way authors are using it to get "trendy." Like I know that tropes are good so that people can find what they like, but being unoriginal in order to get clout is so annoying. Same with the insanely smutty books, especially since they're advertised to YA.
loooove to hear you talking, cant wait for more
literally no one has ever said this to me before they usually say the opposite 😭
Tropes are the building blocks of a story. You need them to write a story. But you need to keep your eye on the finished product, and not just focus on the parts. Everything needs to fit together right. If you're only focused on popular tropes, you risk ending up with a disjointed story
I don't even read romance and i am SO tired of tropes! I don't care about them at all. And like your example The Poppy War, people are now expecting every book to have them somewhere.
Keep doing video essays!! I have never touched the romance genre but I watched this entire video because you explained stuff just the right amount for me to follow along :D
I don't really read romance, but I have noticed this as someone who WRITES books that have subplots with romance. It just feels like you either have to write something with a trope and base the whole relationship around that JUST to get reads or you write what you want to write and nobody gives a hoot nor a rat about it. Which is fine cuz I ship my characters more when IM passionate about their romance. And like how realistic is it anyway for all these tropes to be happening? Like why can't a romance just happen without all these shenanigans going on around them. So wack. Great vid tho, one of the best video essays I've seen on books frfr. And writers really appreciate this kinda input fr, makes me feel not so alone on this wack shit.
I’m glad this video is here. I went on another post weeks back and said something to the effect of “Why is there so many tropes to describe a book now?” and “ when did tropes become a ‘thing’ in books because I never saw it in all of my reading history until I discovered booktok?” Well… that didn’t go over well and I received a lot of hateful comments. I had never heard of tropes or it being used so that’s why I was confused, I’ve been reading since I was 12 and I’m 39 now. I realized from this video that it’s a romance thing. I’ve always read Historical fiction, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, Urban Fiction, and African American literature and you can’t put tropes on those types of books even though a lot of what I read has a romance subplot. Thanks for clearing it up for me.
"Should've just went poly" "is there smut?" - I used to read romance novels as a kid. Lobbies and waiting rooms ere always full of those books and travel mags. The gems had romance as a secondary to the plot i.e. the romance wasn't the focus but it burnt and simmered in the background, in the gestures, in the dialogue tags.
Poly is wild to me. Is that the new norm?
Love this progression into your video essay era
thank you!
I just found your channel off a Stephen King video (I'm a big King fan) and I think your channel is so adorable and creative! New sub. Keep going girl! 🌺
my video being recommended under a stephen king video is sooo real! thank you so much! i’m a big king fan as well
The way I just found your channel and have just been binging!!
what annoys me most about this trend is now i know what to expect when reading the book… because you told me all the tropes that would happen in one photo 😭
also great video btw, keep making more of these !!! 🩷🩷
So true 👏🏻
TY! Finally a fellow Enemies to lovers enjoyer that hates when people call everything enemies to lovers. If they aren't trying to kill each other it isn't it! 😂❤
I got into reading through booktok, and the romance trope thing is really getting on my nerves. Like idc if it’s an “enemies to lovers”, I JUST WANT AN ACTUALLY WELL-WRITTEN BOOK WITH COMPETENT CHARACTERS!!
I wonder how old the author is if they think a difference of 5 years in your 30s is an age gap worth mentioning.
And another one, thank you 😊😊 loving your pivot in content !
thank you
The GOLF badboy is making me lose my mind. Also "tell your grandma to fuck off" LMAOOOO. THE 39 -34 AGE GAP HRJSJDJSJSJ Love your takes, as someone who was part of the reylo fandom back in the days, seeing the published reylo fanfiction being pumped into the market by hazelwood is CRAZYYYY. Like its pretty cringy but im kinda proud of her. Thats a dream job for a fanfic writer lol.
living for the video essays
🫶🏾🫶🏾
19:46 this part lmfaooooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭 im crying
video funny and real af. instant sub
girl I didnt know you had a booktube! immediately subscribed!
I feel like .... love triangles.. but the of is always the correct one. The only time i root for a second lead is when i DONT lime the main character
whenever i see a book recommended or advertised w a list of tropes it immediately turns me off. im not reading a fanfic of characters i already know, i wanna read a novel with new characters 😭
This is EXACTLY how I feel! I’m working on my debut YA romance series and most of the genre literally is just all the same tropes, plots, and titles now 😭😭
i loveeeeee hearing you talk about stuff like this!! lol but i agree, i think the romance genre has gotten so annoying, i find myself wanting to read more lit fic, thrillers and horror because the tropes are seriously getting out of hand, i hadn't even heard about golden retriever/black cat like that is so dumb please
I am so glad you’re making these vids
All these authors grew up playing episode
“found family” you didn’t even have to find the family⁉️
Yeah, one thing is writing a book that has popular tropes in it; the other is writing a book *_around and based on_* a popular trope. It reduces your creative possibilities.
I enjoy these videos and they are very eye opening. Thank you for all your hard work. 😊
2:56 genocide 🌷✨🫶🏽
Abuse 😚🐻💐
I think that 'when books become tropified they become not individualized" is maybe not as accurate in my experience. All books are made of tropes, that's how we determine genres most of the time, how many of certain things are used. I think what I usually see is that 'Tropified books' fall under the category of Lazy Writing, which is a sin on its own.
love the video essays!
thank you so much 🫶🏾
I’ve always been a “go into the bookstore and read the backs of books til I find something I want to read” type of person but after several instances of accidentally financially supporting genuinely terrible people, I Google every author of a book that sounds interesting before I decide now 😮💨 I’m STILL pissed that I gave CJ Piper money cause girl, wtf
I am HOWLING!!!! I have screamed aloud so many times at the freaking sermon you’re dropping
“Maybe if you were on the right side of history, you’d like love triangles” YESSSSS
“If you’re not trying to kill each other, it isn’t enemies to lovers” TELL THEM 👏
“I get it, if it’s easier to get an audience SELLING OUT” AAAAAAA yes i am screaming
Anyway I want the actual enemies to lovers recs 😭 fav trope.
The one romance book I loved that I read was Dungeons and Drama.
Despite the MC ... odd clothing choices, it was very cute.
I think I enjoyed it most because it had D&D and musical references.
And the two love interests where very nerdy and adorable.
I also love romance in the least expected books, like horror. Maybe because the plot and characters flesh out more
Yay glad to see another vid from uu
Booktok is ruining the production of well written and plotted books! Publishing companies see that these are being easily consumed and are obviously going to continue publishing what's making the money flow.
So these trashy stories are being published for a bunch of tiktokers that never had their wattpad era and it is so frustrating for us who love to read and enjoy a good novel and/or series.
Many of these books are marketed at young teens but are so inappropriate. With constant graphic s*x scenes that go on for pages and pages!
I've literally seen Colleen Hoover books at my SCHOOLS BOOK SALE. And there are a LOT of 7th-8th graders that read them all the time.
@@shredditti yeah, it's so bad!
I've been so over this type of era. It's "annoyed by vampires trope" level to me. To me right now the semi comedic horror books are doing it for me because the trope doesn't matter.
If you like second chance romance with black main characters then read the New Haven series by J.L Seegars. The first book isn’t much of a second chance, but it’s so good. The other books are second chance, but it goes over multiple books not just one.
This was a perfect video I loved it
“Maybe if you were on the right side of history you would like love triangles” 😂 you are hysterical
Watching this at the gym and totally lost it at “bad boy golfer” 😂
I hate the tropification of books bc it just turns the whole writing process into a 600 page Mad Libs game
The main reason I hate the tropification of books is that it essentially reduces what is supposed to be a completely fleshed out story into something insubstantial and superficial. The book no longer becomes a story, a whole world waiting to be delved into, but rather a cheap trendy product.