r/TopCharacterTropes • • Sep 06 '26

miscellaneous Tropes that became problematic

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.

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u/NeroCrow Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

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

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u/CrazyCoKids Sep 06 '26

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...?

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u/NeroCrow Sep 06 '26

Oh god that's gross. Thankfully I went anywhere close to going that far, that's just creepy

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u/CrazyCoKids Sep 06 '26

I wasn't the only one he stalked, either. -_-;

I guarantee if he was some stereotypical ugly dude, people would tell me to taze him...

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u/NeroCrow Sep 06 '26

Sorry that happened to you

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u/CrazyCoKids Sep 06 '26

Yeah. Stalking will mess you up.

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u/Magnolia-jjlnr Sep 06 '26

I remember a few years ago a comment on YouTube said "anytime you watch a romance like Twilight, picture the main characters as ugly and that will tell you if the behaviors are either weird or truly romantic"

More people need to be aware of that

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u/confusedsalad88 Sep 06 '26

Hope you're free of him now

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u/CrazyCoKids Sep 06 '26

He's incarcerated. Once he started stalking a cop's sister, suddenly those pigs in a blanket could make out his face from the pictures his targets sent to them.

When he was let out on parole he... went right back to doing it. He ain't getting out any time soon.