Tropes that became problematic

[u/KalzK]

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.

[u/No_External_539]

The entire movie is a shit show.

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.

[u/Toadsted → u/No_External_539]

I'm often reminded of the Arthur mythology, and in particular First Knight ( I think it's the right one ) with Sean Connery and Richard Gere.

It's got the typical trope of Lancelot running away with Guinevere, both young and love / lust at first sight despite being supposedly loyal to their King, respectively.

So after a night of eloping to the woods for rooting, they wake up naked to find Excalibur thrust into the ground in the middle of their donut shaped love nest. 

Immediately they're both stricken with distraught and hysterical crying. The king without his sword, symbolic of a husband without his wife and trusted knight. Having caught them in the act and being subtle AF.

Like, we're supposed to be romanticizing their affair? And then they're all of a sudden upset and worried about this sword being there, like they're genuinely concerned about the king. Now?!

What?

[u/No_External_539 → u/Toadsted]

I can’t be convinced someone who cheats on their partner that they are with willingly is capable of genuinely loving someone else without breaking up and growing a bit first.

You love them soooo much that you continue to stay with your actual partner and never fully commit to either. And Lancelot is just as untrustworthy, cause what asswipe does that to his supposed best friend.

[u/Toadsted → u/No_External_539]

I think you can genuinely love multiple people at once, we do that for family and even material things; polygamy is a thing after all, people don't often just switch off from one person to another, which is usually the problem.

But that's a whole different thing to the cheating aspect, which is a betrayal of ethical / social code. And then you get into things like cheaters rationalizing their behavior, projecting, blaming the other person for "making" them do it, etc. etc.. It's a wild web of both understandable reasoning that is still unethical, and irrational spontaneity.

And when we're talking fantasy, sometimes the entire point of the act is that it's unethical, it's a means for the writer / reader to live vicariously through the imaginary story. Like how we love violence when we can disassociate ourselves from personaly being there involved; movies, video games, comics, novels, etc..

[u/No_External_539 → u/Toadsted]

The point I was making is if you really loved either of them, you wouldn’t be betraying any one of them. 

It’s easy to say you love someone, but it’s harder to ACTUALLY love someone.