Hello everyone!

Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Bionic Bookworm, and it’s now hosted by Meeghan Reads. If you’re interested in participating, check out their wonderful blog to get the details and the prompts for each week!

This week’s Top Five Tuesday topic is Tropes I Dislike. This post was fairly easy for me to write because there are a handful of tropes that drive me crazy, and it was fun writing about why I dislike them.

Absent Parents – I find the absent parents trope to be incredibly irritating, especially when I run into it in a YA novel. These books almost always feature teenagers who find themselves way over their heads, and their parents are nowhere to be found. It’s one thing if there’s an explanation about where the parents are, either they passed away, or they’re working a ton to make ends meet, or something like that, but I don’t like it when the parents just don’t exist, and there’s no reason given.

Insta-Love – I dislike the insta-love or love at first sight trope because I find it too unrealistic. I like it when the love interests take some time to get to know each other and that there’s a little bit of a slow burn going on. I also think that insta-love is unsustainable because you should probably get to know someone a bit before making a huge commitment to them.

Love Fixes Everything – I cannot stand the idea that love fixes everything. Love is great, and it’s important to have people in your corner who you can lean on, but love isn’t going to magically fix everything. I don’t think the idea that falling in love with someone (or having someone fall in love with you) will fix all of the character’s problems, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.

Mental Health Being Weaponized – I’m not sure if mental health being weaponized is the best way to describe this trope, but it’s what I’m going to go with. I don’t like it when the plot twist in a book is that the character who has done bad things happens to have some sort of mental health problem. I think that mental health is stigmatized too much, to begin with, and I don’t think it’s helpful for readers to see legitimate problems being used as a plot twist or an excuse as to why the character did the things they did.

Alpha Males – I just don’t like alpha males, and I find them to be annoying. I like male characters who have flaws and who realize that they have flaws. I don’t want to read about men at the top of the hierarchy and think they are invincible. I also dislike that the alpha male character often doesn’t necessarily treat women the greatest, and that’s not something that I want to read about.