I am back once again with a healthy dose of negativity. I’ve already posted five tropes I hate, and it was only a matter of time before I got around to posting a few more. Why three and not five? Because I thought of three off the top of my head and decided to be irregular about it.

Just a reminder, these are my dislikes, not yours. If you disagree, that’s great. But don’t try to change my mind.

1. Good Girl/Bad Boy– We know this story. She’s a good girl. If she’s young, she’s a good student, model child. If she’s older, then she’s sweet, possibly innocent, a hard worker, and rule follower. An occasional glass of wine is the most drinking she’ll do. He’s a bad boy. In school, he’s flunking grades and causing trouble. Outside of school, he continues his rule breaking ways, maybe straying into lawbreaking ways. He drinks, he smokes, he probably wears a leather jacket to show his disdain for authority. The idea behind the couple is an opposites attract situation. Of course the good girl would be attracted to the bad boy and vice versa. They both have qualities that the other admires and/or needs. The bad boy can loosen up the uptight good girl and the good girl can instill some discipline and respect in the bad boy. I suppose it’s all fine in theory, but too often it comes across as the “I can change him” fairy tale that’s been the unrealistic foundation of cis het relationships for far too long. Worse, the good girl so believes her love has changed her bad boy that she refuses to see that her man hasn’t transformed a lick, like in the Hawaii Five-O episode “Engaged to Be Buried”. He’s a daddy’s boy who killed your friend and threatened to kill your father. Why are you crying over him? Throw the whole man away.
2. Oh no! A Girl!– I want to say that this trope has been left in the past, but I know better than to get my hopes up. The trope is a play on the woman in a man’s job stereotype. The men are so weirded out that there’s a GIRL in their midst doing a MAN’S job that their brains short out and they act like the biggest misogynistic assholes shat out of a writer’s pen. There are two main reasons that this trope makes my eye twitch. The first is that it makes the characters we’ve come to know and love unlikable, and in some cases barely indistinguishable from some of the jerks already dealt with in the series. The second is that the women are frequently written to be annoying in their insistence on proving they’re worthy of the job. While that does have the basis in some truth (women have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good), they don’t have to be aggravating about it. Between the men and the women being annoying, I’m irritated and can’t enjoy the episode. One twist on this trope was in an episode of Chopper One called “Deadly Carrier” in which Burdick was first surprised that the doctor was a woman and then proceeded to treat her with a disrespect he’d never show a male doctor. This was later played off as bickering for sexual tension, which means the episode just went from one of my hated to tropes to another.
3. Let’s Add a Kid– It’s probably most popular to do on a sitcom. The original children are getting older and less cute, so let’s remedy that by adding new children. The Brady Bunch is probably the most notorious for this because of Cousin Oliver (the scapegoat for the show’s cancellation even though the obvious declining quality of episodes is right there), but other shows have done it, too. On Roseanne, the kids were all grown or nearly so when she decided she wanted another baby and they ended up with Jerry. On Step by Step, the blended family ended up with a half-sister when the six kids started hitting puberty. Even Little House on the Prairie featured an influx of orphaned children when Mary and Laura got married and Carrie was one of the older kids at the schoolhouse. The one that irks me the most is on Family Matters. The Winslows started out with three kids -Eddie, Laura, and Judy- and Harriet’s sister Rachel had a baby named Richie. They ended up writing Judy off the show (pretty much Chuck Cunninghamed her) claiming they didn’t have enough stories for her, but then when Richie got older a few seasons later, he suddenly acquired a friend named 3J that ended up living with the Winslows. Didn’t even utilize all of the children they had, but still had to get another one. Guess they thought no one would notice due to all of the Urkel happening at the time.

Do these trope dislikes age me? Make me come across as a crusty, disgruntled old woman?

Good.

There will be more.