The Persistent Suitor: A guy who is after the girl and just wont take no for an answer. Nowadays we just call stalking and harassment, but it used to be romantic. Example: The Notebook (2004), Noah asks Allie out while she's on a date with another man. She refuses, but he threatens to let go and fall unless she agrees to go out with him.
Comedic Woman On Man Violence: Mostly seen in anime, recently it has decreased a lot but years back every show had a woman hitting a guy and showed it as funny. Example: Toradora!, where the quintessential tsundere, Taiga, beats up the MC regularly.
Kid Bags Adult Baddie: I remember a few of these, sometimes it was to show how cool and awesome a kid was because an adult woman fell for him, now it's just seen as problematic shit. Example: Blank Check, the woman likes the kid and kisses him telling him to look for her in 10 years.
I love that south park once called out the ‘kids and adults’ one: a kindergarten teacher is in relationship with her studetn Ike, kyle is the only one who disturbed by it, and when she’s arrested all male adults are baffled because ‘she’s hot’ ignoring the morality of it
It's the first episode with the new police station. Because the point of it is the cops seem like sensible intelligent people but they're actually idiots who don't understand a grown woman having sex with a kindergartner isn't 'nice'.
But that whole joke wouldn't land the same with Officer Barbrady who is so dumb he can barely read. You need cops that look normal to do a joke like this.
She gets arrested but she just gets sent to rehab for her sex addiction before immediately taking Ike to elope to Paris. Then she jumps off the roof when get gets cornered by Dawg the Hallway Monitor
that movie isn't a great example of this, the character who suggests using the love potion is straight up the villain, and the idiot he tricked into getting the potion by the end of the movie understands how terrible the potion is
so in that movie the love potion is almost exclusively shown as a terrible thing
Oh god the whole Hallmark thing of “engaged woman with a future who has a good man with goals and habits aligned with hers visits her small hometown for a holiday and runs into a crush from her childhood and over the course of a couple of interactions decides to throw everything precious away for a chance at true love”
Is that just one story or does that actually happen in multiple things
Dude, that is so many Hallmark movies. My mum loved those stupid ass films and I just sat with her going "What's the name of the small town in this one? What company is she a sales executive for? What silly folksy career does the love interest have? Reindeer dentist or something?" And I was always right!
To this day, I'm positive that they come up with the plots of Hallmark movies using a standardized ad lib prompt. Don't forget to mention that its usually set around some kind of holiday too, which is usually christmas. My god they make so many christmas movies.
Busy, modern executive woman has to visit her rural hometown for...reasons, I dunno. Let's go with she inherited some money & property and has to sign the papers in person for some reason. Gets stuck in snowstorm trying to make it back to seal a deal. Rescued by hunky, widowed rancher with charming daughter who live in a small, but immaculate cabin. Forced to stay for several days due to blizzard.
Soaked through and cold she's given a set of pajamas. "Those were mommy's but they fit your perfectly!". Finally gets back to big assed city, realizes she hates her life and everyone in it, misses pancakes for breakfast, gives it all up to go back and be "new mommy" with Hunky Hank and Darling Daughter just in time for Christmas.
Don’t forget the final five minutes where her original partner suddenly reveals some massive flaw or problematic behavior that hasn’t at all been mentioned or hinted at before, but now retroactively justifies her own infidelity.
The casual pervert who does stuff like grope women as a personality trait but you're generally supposed to like them and react to their antics in a "oh you silly rascal!" kind of way
He'd be salvageable if they leaned more into the shorts where Penelope was interested but was just put off by his smell (which is a whole other trope ...)
Or they could try to find some other sort of plots to work with to make his shorts less one-note, like they did with Fifi in Tiny Toons.
This particular gif is from Inuyasha. Miroku is one of the protagonists and really likeable, but you have to try to ignore the fact that he just randomly grabs women's asses and propositions them.
Back when this trope was popular, it was easy to ignore because it was everywhere. But it aged really badly.
Oh I'm aware. I lived there for four years. Can't buy phones without the shutter sound on the camera because of it. But I don't watch anime like that so I wasn't aware the "cute pervert" was a trope
this is from inuyasha. In particular, this is the priest Miroku, who is ||cursed to die early from a black hole vortex on his hand that will eventually swallow him whole|| and as a result asks basically every woman he meets to bear his children/acts as you can see from the gif
Inuyasha. Keep in mind, that particular show has the women slapping the perv repeatedly and generally calling his behavior out, perverted monk that he is.
But Sango and Miroku (pictured) do also get married and have lots of kids together. And it's implied she gets jealous later on (but before they get together), if he does this shit with other women.
Miroku is also heavily contrasted by Inuyasha who does even tiny things to respect women. He even holds his hands in fists when he's carrying Kagome so he's not grabbing her ass even though it would just be to support her.
Jiraiya is one of the most beloved characters in Naruto and is the core of some very beloved moments of the show.
His introduction is him being a massive perv, including trying to fondle a gender bent Naruto who is both underage and later in the series reveled to be his godson.
Naruto even calls him 'Great Pervy Sage'.
And again, absolute beloved character that absolutely doesn't need that as his 'comedic' trait.
God I hate this shit so much I know it's not unique to anime but I'm a newish fan to the genre and trying to kind of catch up on the classics and it's so common it's uncomfortable, it makes me want to stop watching otherwise really good series for me at least
The female stalker played for laughs. This is the inverse of the Persistent Partner trope. It feeds into the double standard of "its creepy when men do it, but it's ok if a girl does it".
And Ill guilty admit, shows like Chowder still make me laugh with trope, but it has honestly just left a sour flavor in everyone's mouth.
As a side note, Im so glad that they ditched this trope for Amy Rose in the Sonic Universe, and she became a FAR BETTER CHARACTER became of it
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does a great job deconstructing this by introducing a character named Trent who is really creepily into the main character, Rebecca, and throughout the show he's doing the exact same stuff she's been doing for her crush.
The show takes advantage of the fact the audience will naturally find it creepier for a man to be an obsessive stalker and that people would write off a woman doing it as being quirky and madly in love. It ultimately helps show that Rebecca is, in fact, just as bad.
Honestly highly recommend Crazy Ex-Girlfriend because its entire premise deconstructs the trope of...the crazy ex-girlfriend in a clever way.
The main one coming to mind for me is Juvia from Fairy Tail, and I'm still so surprised that her ship with Gray is as popular as it is.
What sucks is that it's gradually becoming canon as of the sequel despite Juvia having no real character development on her part. Like, oh it turns out Gray simply pretended to hate it because he felt undeserving of her!
I love Juvia as a character but I agree that this part of her has become annoying. I wish Mashima would just drop it and finally make them a real couple and have them spend real couple time together instead of Juvia following Gray somewhere and he being rude to her.
I think it's even canon now that Gray loves her back, so why not just let them be together?
I feel like in this particular case its popular because Juvia and Gary do actually suit each other quite well, Gary is an asshole to most people he cares about and its very clearly treated as a "He doesnt know how to be affectionate due to his upbringing" type situation, and Juvia started as a villain so his attitude towards her madr a lot of sense to begin with.
That being said its been going on for way too fucking long at this point
Won't lie the persistent suitor has extremely fucked me up. Because I believed that if I kept trying and trying and showing the best sides of myself the person I liked would feel same way for me. All it did was create a gigantic rift in our friendship because I fucked up thinking I could change their mind. People don't just come around to liking you as much you hope and want them to unfortunately
Edit: I'm glad to see I'm not only one alone who got fuck from this trope. But if I learned anything it's that you can't change how an individual feels about you. But you can change yourself to get individuals to like so long as your changing you for you
I mention this from time to time. I think I had an awful time early in life because I had this idea that women are always going to act "hard to get" and that I had to be persistent. As I began to become an adult, it took me way to long to shake off the disney-original-movie tropes that I was raised to expect.
I would try to be persistent or macho or cool then completely fail most of the time. In turn, it would ruin my self-esteem, and I would internalize it as me being unlovable. Then I gave up.
It took a little while, because again, I'm not in a movie. Eventually I landed at a point where I could interact with women like they were any other person, and that's the whole point. It sucks because chicks have their own mirrored version of this, so when I met someone that responded well to toxic behavior it made me think I was finally doing the right thing.
I remember a made-for-tv movie with Richard Thomas, Bess Armstrong and Mark Harmon from 1978 called “Getting Married” where RT’s character fell for (was obsessed with) Bess Armstrong’s character (a tv newscaster) and finds out she’s getting married in a week (fiance is Mark Harmon). He decides to “woo” her in the week before her wedding, basically stalking her, makes billboards, and newspaper ads telling her he loves her and to give him a chance because they “belong together”, takes out a marriage license with someone posing as her to profess his “love”. (This is a romantic comedy.) They end up together, he finally persuades her by making a grand gesture as she’s AT THE ALTER getting married.
I was gonna comment on this as well, this trope genuinely fucked(s) with peoples perception of how things are supposed to go. Ive known more than one woman (though girl might be more fitting in these cases) who would neg the shit out of a guy or make him work for every interaction because they believed that if a guy wasnt relentless then he wasnt interested or that he was just looking for a hookup. It was fucked up even back in my day (so oooold...)
It also seems to depend a lot on how pretty they are.
I had a stalker who was quite a pretty dude and people kept telling me to give him a chance. Would YOU give a dude a chance when you saw him digging through your trash and attempting to enter your house...?
To be fair, nowadays the whole point if that Homer is being abusive and not a role model. In fact, one episode had a joke where Homer tries to justify the strangling by saying that it's how he was raised. We then get a flashback to Homer's Dad yelling at kid Homer, and you assume that Homer is going to get strangled, instead kid Homer strangles Abe.
Yeah that was a weird time in retrospect, I have younger siblings that grew up with newer simpsons while I grew up with older/classic simpsons, they were shocked that Homer was a lovable dumbass who loves his family but would still strangle his son, when they spelled it out for me I genuinely didn’t know how to justify it lol
Simpsons was a direct counter culture satire to the typical wholesome, sanitized family shows around that time. Like when it first showed, there were literal protests about it even reaching the White House via Barbara Bush lol, heck, i remember Bart's lines or slogan were banned in school. It was always meant for an adult audience, it was shown in Sunday night. It's just nowadays with streaming, its easily accessible. Family Guy is similar as well.
I personally feel it all comes down to how slapstick you make it. Bart is bug-eyed, jaw hinges way at the back of his neck, absolutely no lasting trauma, and Bart is back to acting like a little shit the very next scene. It's Loony Tunes style slapstick violence.
The moment you go for any more realistic, it just becomes abuse. One episode has him rub at his throat for a moment afterwards, and already that started to cross the line.
I recall that early on the writers agreed to never write any hitting/physical abuse of the children that wasn't the over-the-top strangling of Bart; to highlight that it was a cartoon gag and not something they meant to normalize.
I was so fucking taken aback when I had a marriage proposal get interrupted.... while they were on the Ferris wheel.
Or that one time a girl interrupted a guy getting asked out despite having never met any of the people involved. She had just been added, saw a girl asking a guy out, and just hopped in on it. Afterwards girl who asked guy out got a relationship, girl who loved the guy got rejected, and new girl just casually continued on her way as if nothing happened.
I was watching a friend play and they had a mii confess feelings in the restaurant. They get interrupted by someone that suddenly was just sitting at the table after a cut and it caught us off guard. The mii being confessed to rejected both of them but the original mii still had hope.
Fast forward a few days and the same mii wants to confess again. I tell my friend to do it in the ferris wheel so they don't get interrupted this time (at least that was my line of thinking). They go into the ferris wheel and they get interrupted by not one, but TWO other miis (one of them even popped out from under the seats) also wanting to confess their feelings all for the same mii. He choses the original mii this time but I was just astounded by the absolute insanity of these miis lmfao.
Yeah I spent a few days trying to get my husband's mii and mine to get married. They're finally going to propose on the Ferris wheel and who shows up? Jake the dog from adventure time.
While not as egregious as Blank Check, its still weird to think about Tom Hanks character actually being a 12 year old boy trapped in a 30 year old body, dating a woman who is also 30.
The "not if they enjoyed it" trope where the idea is that rape stops being rape if the victim physically enjoys the experience, which is obviously horrible and stupid.
A somewhat similar & equally dumb trope is the "having a female character raped so that she can feel pleasure without guilt and getting her 'used' to sex," which was weirdly popular with some female authors, of all people, during the 1960s and 1970s. I know I sound like a crazy incel mentioning this, but I promise you it was a thing.
This book is one such example. I only knew of its existence because the author is from the U.S. state Louisiana like me and it's apparently a revolutionary book for the historical romance genre.
The historical context of those sorts of books is pretty explanatory for why that's a trope in romance literature as a whole.
Yeah, sure, it certainly sounds bad when you say "oh yeah, the male lead rapes her and then they fall in love" now, but when the sheik came out on 1919 and the main character was able to be freed from the societal expectations of virginity and enjoy sex outside of the confines of marriage probably felt pretty spicy and liberating for housewives of the interwar and postwar periods.
the makeover trope where a girl with curly hair and glasses straightens her hair and takes off the glasses and suddenly becomes beautiful. the curly hair part is genuinely so disgusting because you can only imagine the damage it did to girls with similar hair textures.
After years as Captain America, it's easy to forget that Chris Evans did a lot of silly and or unserious roles like this. His role in Deadpool and Wolverine must've felt like shackles being taken off for him.
If you look closely, his “look” changed because he was subtly slouching as Kent. Then, as he removed the glasses, he stopped slouching and “grew” taller. He even puffs out his chest a little. In addition, the micro expressions in his face shift as well. He goes from looking slightly down to looking straightforward, his smile becomes more genuine, etc.
Considering that DragonBall started out as a gag manga, I wouldn't be surprised if she does slap harder than a machinegun. It's funnier if it's true, therefore it must be true. That's how gag manga works.
Didn't Goku also pimp out Bulma without her knowledge to be groped by some pervy powerful dude so he can get a power up or something? It's been so long, so my memory is fuzzy
At least in the context it's extremely well deserved. At that moment Goku let Bulma get bitch slapped by the god of destruction because he thought Vegeta had it. I would doing the same thing if I was her
Take any romcom from like 25 years ago and it's gonna be full of these. Love Actually? I watched it not long ago, and god damn people were weird in 2003
Ew, he does that in the Notebook? And people find that romantic? What if she said no? He either looks insincere or he chooses to throw a tantrum and severely harms himself like an idiot.
It starts off strong with him forcing her into dating him. Then most of their interactions are either really ugly arguments or romantic tension, which is a textbook example of a toxic relationship. And to top it all off, she cheats on her fiancé with the main love interest, then
leaves the main love interest to go back to her fiancé, then she goes AGAIN to her weird ass situationship.
Even as a child I have always hated “cheating is romantic” trope, especially since her fiancé was a good man, cause it’s straight up just cruel to the person that did nothing wrong. And now that I’m older, I’ve found MORE reasons to hate this god awful horror story.
That's RomCom 101, lots of creepy or unhinged things get a pass in romcoms. Especially dumping the supportive and dedicated, if a little boring guy who has done nothing wrong in favour of the handsome loose cannon you just met but he's so totally right for you coz he gets you.
Reminds me of how many stories involve protagonist employees breaking the rules and eventually getting rewarded for it.
Part of it is probably the fantasy of knowing more than the stupid bosses who made the rules, and getting rewarded for it
But the main reason that shows up so much is because it's more exciting for a story. It creates risk and stakes that wouldn't be there if the employee did everything by the book. It's not supposed to tell you how to do your job, it's just trying to be entertaining. And applying that to real life (especially when the 'employees' are in law enforcement) it can be pretty concerning.
I assume RomComs follow a similar mentality. Part of it is the fantasy of the perfect man falling out of nowhere, but it's also a lot of doing daring things to be exciting, when those area actually pretty messed up in real life.
Apparently this started as a subversion of earlier expectations, where the man was the patriarch and ruling authority in the house, which for obvious reasons has its own problems, but then became something of a staple, so we get this infantilised imbecile with access to beer and power tools. -_-l
Never thought of that. The idiot trope in our generation is seen as this backwards negative thing.
But it started out as progressive. Showing a woman is fully capable and strong. Challenging the idea that women have to be subservient and in the kitchen.
It went from a positive influence to a negative over time.
Look up about the Hays Code, if you’re curious. It was a strict set of guidelines that American films were under, from 1934 to 1968.
But, basically, any inference of “sex perversion” was strictly forbidden.
So, even the most sympathetic of gay characters (like Martha in The Children's Hour, or Plato from Rebel Without a Cause) would still end up killed off, at the end.
There are a lot of gay fiction filled with homophobia, despair and tragedy and people call it "realistic" because of past and ongoing bigotry in this world.
Personally, I think people are just afraid to write Happy endings because that might inspire hope. If people start to see LGBTq+ folk as normal, they might become accepting and then the idea that queer life is nothing but misery and angst might be seen as problematic.
There is still plenty of injustice out there, but inspiring misery is not only more profitable but maintains the status quo that makes it profitable after all.
I swear this is not a joke: Magic Negro. Black guy is either better than white man in the story at everything he wants to be, but doesn't become the main character and only exists to help white man be better. Case in point: Legend of Bagger Vance, where a muuuuuuuch better golfer teaches white guy how to be good, even though he could have won, and The Green Mile, with John Coffey literally using miracles to fix white man's dick.
True, although I will say Michael Clarke Duncan was a treasure we lost way too soon. He was amazing in that movie and outacted everyone including Hanks.
Edit: and can I also say how much the movie pushes the magic negro trope, only to go, '"Y'know what? We're gonna kill Michael Clarke Duncan because y'all were super racist back then and too stupid to have any fórm of media literacy nowadays. He is literally Black Jesus and y'all too dumbass to heal the world.
Goddamn, The Green Mile is awesome. Michael Clarke Duncan can act circles around Tom Hanks, Sam Rockwell, and Patricia Clarkson and y'all just attribute him to just another magic negro. Michael Clarke Duncan rules. And suck a dick, guy who groomed Courtney Stodden!
stephen king is notorious for writing magic black characters. not just the green mile, but the shining, the stand, and the talisman off the top of my head.
The reason for that was actually a conscious effort by Hollywood to be more progressive.
Black actors weren’t going to be the leads at the time, simply because it would never get greenlit and it would be very difficult for it to be profitable even if it did. They also did not want to portray black people in a negative light because for a long time in Hollywood’s history that is how they were portrayed and they wanted to change that. So their solution was to always cast them in a positive role as a side character that would be able to make it into the movie. This led to the Magic Negro.
It's kind of impressive how the X-Men altogether really poisoned the well for telepaths, not even just Jean, but she's one of the biggest offenders along with Charles. I recently saw a video talking about Martian Manhunter, and the thumbnail was Xavier chatting with J'onn about how they're the only "ethical telepaths," and J'onn responds with "Who's 'we'?"
It can be polemic, but “Women which are Mean, but Competent Bosses”, precisely the ones like Miranda Priestly, which was stronger last decade.
Why? Because they appear to be progressive, but it only reinforces the patriarchal structure by giving for some women key positions from where they can absorve most of the criticism while doing the same like men in her position.
The system is bad? No, the boss that is mean, but look how cool is to have such empowered woman as leadership!
Coincidentally, the same parallel happens with black success, and being criticized as being too white now. Like you can only be successful if you act white.
Best example, again in Community, is the Christmas episode when Annie gets all dumb and sexual and Jeff is NOT into it but that's the joke so it happens anyways
Sassy or cool? Numbah 5 was smart multi talented and one of the more mature level headed members of sector 5. One of the reasons she would go on to become the supreme leader of the kind and more than likely the rare teenage operative. ... I have no idea why I remember all of this.
Cause K.N.D is underrated peak and should be recognized more. Also yea Numbah 5 doesn’t really fit that trope. She’s kinda sassy sure but it’s far from her defining trait. If anything being cool headed and able to handle everything better sums her up. There’s a reason why before Numbah 1 took over she was leader of Sector V
I mean if we’re talking “SASSY” sassy it’s Numbah 3 or 4. 4 was a massive shit talker and had a comeback for everything and 3 would just occasionally roast people unintentionally
It's funny because the violent tsundere trope is best deconstructed in Toradora. Taiga is avoided by most of the student body because of her violent tendencies. It's by getting to know Ryuji, another social outcast by his persistent mean face, that she eventually grows out of it and becomes a more well rounded person.
Little girl pantyshots (anime). They were everywhere up until 80s and rare by the 2000s. It was common to see them as part of the character design in the 60s and 70s (compare it with Minnie Mouse). Hayao Miyazaki loved putting them in. Around the 2000s, there was a big push for, uh, de-fetishizing children by replacing the bloomers (very short gym shorts that looked like underwear) with shorts and not showing so much panties in animation.
A good example of the shift can be seen in the differences in Doraemon anime in the 1980s and the 2000s. Many of the scenes of Shizuka bathing (from the manga) have been drawn to...not show as much.
There is a very popular and beloved Estonian kids story from the 60s, Sipsik, that recently got a new full lenght animated movie. Everything is wonderful, except I am very bothered by the several shots of the little girls underwear being shown when it 100% could have been avoided.
A common trope in older media was the tomboyish heroine who's strong, capable and feisty, yet at the end of the story sheds all of her unfeminine traits when she finds a love interest and embraces a regular life. Doris Day in Calamity Jane is probably the best known example, where she starys off as the gun-toting, larger than life tomboy who never learned to live any other way, but she meets a female friend who teaches her the feminine ways and at the end, she marries ajd leaves her guns and uniform behind.
Being a tomboy was considered an oddity for girls, but it was accepted as a phase, and tomboyish women were usually portrayed as women who didn't grow out of it, so their embracing feminine ways and finding a man was a common coming-of-age for them. After women started entering male positions more and more and things that made them "tomboys" became normalized (wearing pants, doing sports, fixing cars), that premise became outdated and seen as the prime example of telling women to stick with acceptable feminine goals lest they be living the wrong, inadequate life.
A lot of inspirational true story movies fall in that category. Macfarlane, Freedom Writers, The Blind Side, they got one thing in common and it’s white people helping them out of a rut
Michael Oher, the player that it was about, got cheated out of royalties by his "adopted family". The movie also made him into a bumbling idiot who didn't understand football or... anything, really.
The “savage cannibal tribe” trope. Mostly because this archetype is primarily rooted in outdated stereotypes and exaggerations of indigenous populations and their cultural practices and also a justification for colonization.
Real example of that was under the Qianlong Emperor. He was disappointed by the English ambassadors because they tried to show him their 'new' invention, the hot air balloon, in an attempt to wow him. He had already seen one when he was a boy, it had been demonstrated by the Jesuits who had served his father. (The Jesuits then rubbed in the fact that the English were showing outdated science by getting the old, moth-eaten ballon out of storage.)
People give Hazbin hate for a lot of things but you gotta give the series credit for their cannibals. Just a piece of Hell that's an early 19th century American town full of cannibals.
Which is not to say that cannibalism did not exist in isolated tribes, but it was usually more of a ritual practice than an “eat everyone not a part of the tribe” practice. Still not great though
Love potions and in general spells that make people fall in love with you.
Way before obsession, this was examined as an issue, but for the longest time I just didn’t see it.
There was a movie that came out in 2008 called were the world mine and not only did it have tropes that were problematic. It had behind the scene stuff that was problematic.
So the premise is typical gay boy who’s only unusual characteristic really that he’s super tall but skinny so get bullied by all the jocks at is all boys school. He he is a senior and so he’s part of the mandatory Shakespeare assignment and he is voluntold to play puck. While researching the play, he comes across the actual magical flower that will make people fall in love with you, and he decides to take vengeance on a homophobic town by turning half of them queer.
And then they proceed to have sex with each other, which means he has sexually assaulted these people by extension.
The people who have sex with each other include his fellow students, which means he is doing this to children. ( not every senior is 18)
At the end, he is persuaded to turn everyone back to their normal self and his love interest revealed that he is still in love with him yay happy ending! No, you sexually assaulted the half the town you should go to jail.
Also, when I did a little research, I found out that not only with their no intimacy coordinator, which was the position they didn’t really exist until nine years later during the me too movement, but they just told these teen actors just randomly pick a guy to make out with. There was no consideration of them as young actors who were not experienced with kissing people.
Let alone sex scenes.
Yeah, I haven’t seen that movie in many years that I think it would hit different.
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u/CrimsonStriker999 Sep 06 '26
I love that south park once called out the ‘kids and adults’ one: a kindergarten teacher is in relationship with her studetn Ike, kyle is the only one who disturbed by it, and when she’s arrested all male adults are baffled because ‘she’s hot’ ignoring the morality of it