selenak

Name 5 clichés - from canon or fandom - that you'd like to see disappear.

Only five? Ah, well. Okay then. With an awareness that this won't ever happen:

1) The Insignificant Other; see the post I just linked for details. In short, creating a romantic rival solely to heighten the angst between the movie's/show's leading couple, then revealing said romantic rival as evil or dismissing him/her as unworthy so heroine and hero can finally get together usually makes me allergic to the couple in question and hostile towars them, not the rival, and this happened in quite a lot of shows/books/movies. Canon aside, I also hate it when fandom does it, which brings me to my next cliché which I'd love to see gone but which won't any time soon.

2) (S)he comes between them - let's bash! I.e. the type of character bashing which is based on shipping preferences in the fannish viewers. Which I dare say is the cause of character bashing in, oh, 90% of the cases. I'm not saying one has to love every character or every relationship. And I definitely dislike several in various fandoms myself. But all too often, the impression that overwhelming hostility for a character is not due to anything but the fact said character interferes, or is perceived to interfere, with the good 'ship X/Y is overwhelming. Even if I happen to 'ship X/Y myself, nothing will make me back off any given fanfiction faster than finding Z vilified, especially if the actual canon has managed to avoid this particular cliché. I've seen it happen from slash and het shippers alike, and if the character is female (for every Riley, there are ten Gwens), it comes with a vile case of misogyny to boot. Which brings me to:

3) The Overuse Of the Term Mary Sue. It's become downright meaningless and a synonym for "I dislike this character". Feel free to extend this to the term "canon Sue". Especially if it's gendered. (As in: curiously enough, complaints about new male characters, especially if they're attractive, are far rarer than about female ones.) And that's as good a transition as any to:

4) He's Not Bad, He's My Woobie! No, I'm not anti redemption storylines, neither in canon nor in fanfiction. (See also: being a complete Londo Mollari fan.) But what I absolutely hate are stories where fondness for a (usually male) villanous or ambigous character results in his less than admirable traits and deeds either ignored completely, prettified (see also: Fluffy Horseman Methos, to choose a Highlander example) or even excused (that's a different thing from "explained", for the record; everyone has reasons for their actions, and compelling characters often have understandable ones, but that doesn't mean their reasons make them right in what they do).

kathyh has suggested to call this phenomenon Sylarization recently...

5) GROVEL! aka that kind of story where character A, clearly in this case the author's chosen speaking tool, tells character B how utterly vile B has behaved towards C (aka the author's woobie of choice). With the result that B either sees the error if his or her ways and apologizes abjectly and completly, or, if the author hates B too much to wish B still in the same cosmos as C, is left behind while A and C saunter off in the horizon. I've seen it in Highlander, I've seen it in Buffy, I've seen it in Doctor Who most recently, and I hated this particular cliché in all fandoms. When I can see from the summary that the story is heading that way, I avoid it altogether.