Let's Talk About...Story Pet Peeves
I need a minute to actually think about this. It's always hard for me to compile like a list of things that annoy me in stories because I can't think of them on the spot, I can just identify them when I see them.
1. Parents
I just feel like parents are so under represented and so ill-fully portrayed in YA that I'm always left with a face about them. When they're present, which is rare, they're either so uncaring of their child its like DO YOUR JOB MAN. Parents who don't ground their child, or yell at them, or care where they are. It's so annoying. I just want to smack them through the book. In the same respect, parents who are stiff white collars who don't want their child to breathe a certain way. I want more moms like Lorelai Gilmore.
Like, yes please, thank you.
2. Male Stereotypes
We can go on and on about the Mary-Sue's of the world but the damned Larry-Stu's need to be addressed. It is so rare that I can find a complex and artfully crafted male character in a book. They're all like manic pixie dream boys. They're perfect, really. They're hot, wounded and sensitive, athletic yet intelligent, etc etc. It's like can I get a guy who just like really likes playing Fifa and eating ranch doritos and keeps his room a shit show and has a younger sister he'd fiercely protect but also bans from his batcave? Who like can't throw a ball for his life but can pack a bowl like its the only thing that matters? I just want guys who I'd recognize in my dorm not off of an episode of Vampire Diaries.
3. Insta-love
I feel like I don't have the classic approach on this because I know a lot, A LOT, of people will argue romance is too apparent in YA but I don't think its apparent enough. Romance is more said than shown these days. Like instead of proving to me that the character is interested, I just am told they are. I want bone splitting, heart attack inducing romance where I can feel it in the spaces of my ribs. And I don't really want romantic action in stories I want words. I want to hear the flirtation, the mumbling bumbling when you can't talk to someone you like. I guess what I really want is the progression from friends to lovers. To see how conversations change. Romance, guys. Just feed me the love.
4. Love Triangles/Desirability
I get that some girls just pull crowds of men to them. But I'm so tired of reading about it. I get the point of it? Like I want my character to appear beautiful and desirable so how do I do that? By making men fight for her love. By making every guy in the story have some kind of crush on her. But its so overdone. In fact, I want to see guys that just plain don't like the main character. Who are like, "you remind me of my sister." I'm tired of the main character getting all the love. She just needs one lover. Don't worry, she good.
5. Sex
Why is this always so painful to read whenever it is included in stories? I'm so tired of unrealistic flowery sex that's just soo perfect. I want personality in the sex scenes, like I read it and I'm not just imagining some porno. I want to be able to put those two characters in the situation and say, yep, I can imagine them having this encounter again. Sex shouldn't just be used in stories for shits and giggles. It needs to either develop the characters further or move the story along.
6. Purple Prose
Only Jane Austen can write like Austen and J. R. R. Tolkien. All that description, the pages and pages about the significance of the character's home-I don't need it. I personally skip over big paragraphs like that. Maybe its because I prefer a simpler cleaner writing style. I don't know. The parts that you would skip over a book you should just leave out of your own book. Just give me enough information for context. The rest can be left behind.
7. Friendships
Friendships really suck in books. I think they're just so horribly portrayed and girls are usually so badly portrayed in books to begin with that friendships just become a mess. PSA: If the girl (heroine) drops her friends when a boy (hero) enters her life than they really didn't have that great of a friendship to begin with. Friends should come first. Girl code.
8. Fix Me
I hate stories where the heroine is perfectly broken and the hero comes along and just changes the game real fast. A person who is that broken isn't going to snap back into place and suddenly fall in love and everything is lolly dandy. It just doesn't happen. This goes with mental health, and illness and how characters are portrayed with them too. Romantic love doesn't cure mental illness. It just doesn't.
9. Third Person
This is purely personal but for me, I don't like to read YA novels written in third person. It makes me feel detached from the character. I think in YA its very character driven and you need that closeness that first or second person provides. So yeah, third person just doesn't do it for me.
I'm like really trying now to come up with stuff but its getting more and more difficult.
10. Token Characters
This goes for: diversity, sexuality, personality. You name it. If the character isn't going to have a specific role in the story to further the plot I really don't want to see them. I don't want a gay character just so you can say that there's a gay character in your story. And I definitely don't want a gay character that is just one big walking stereotype just because. The same goes for certain races. I'd rather your story be very closed minded than diverse but full of misappropriations and stereotypes.
So these are my pet peeves. You heard it here folks.
