Let’s try this again! Writers: are there any tropes you absolutely hate?
Yes, I just HATE them
No, not really
It’s complicated / other answer
Unsure / can’t decide
See results / I don’t write
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Let’s try this again! Writers: are there any tropes you absolutely hate?
Yes, I just HATE them
No, not really
It’s complicated / other answer
Unsure / can’t decide
See results / I don’t write

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Choose a cliché romance trope that I'm absolutely feral over
"Who hurt you!?"/murderous rage upon finding the other beaten up(bonus if quiet)
Symbolic pairs (Sun/Moon, Heaven/Earth, King/Queen, Fire/Ice, etc.)
"Are you okay?" asked by the bruised and battered one/"Thank god you're okay"
"You better not die on me"/Scolding the other for trying to sacrifice themself
Forced to fight (bonus if one of them is controlled)
Cool-down hug
"I changed because I met you."
"I've got your back"/Battle couple/Absolute trust
"I'll follow you into hell" but also "don't go where I can't follow"
Hurt/Comfort
interesting.

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“We’re not so different, you and I,” said my identical twin brother.
One thing that funny to Stiles character to me is that he obviously knows the other "weirdo" kids at school at least semi well, Erica knows him slightly before she's a wolf, he knows Boyd well enough to think dropping by his house wouldn't be awkward and he gets the ice rink keys from him, Stiles seems to know more background characters, and of course the way that him and Danny kind of stick out together despite that Danny's bff Jackson hates stiles, and yet Stiles stays really loyal to Scott as his main friend to the point of just sitting alone when they have fights. Also, does Scott just like refuse to hang out with the other weirdos in the beginning, too, cause he seems really disconnected from them despite being a loser at first???
My post about whether or not Lydia should be saved from Wickham in modern Pride and Prejudice retellings has gotten more likes and reblogs than I expected. It's made me think of another possibility of why Austen didn't save her from him.
Presumably, Lydia and Wickham's marriage could have been avoided in only three ways that would have left Lydia's reputation intact. The first is if they had only been planning to elope, but it was prevented, as with Georgiana. The second is if they had been found earlier and separated before Lydia lost her virginity. Or else Lydia could have listened to Darcy and left Wickham, and then Darcy could have used his influence to protect her honor: e.g. by claiming that she was kidnapped, or by arranging a decent marriage for her.
If Austen had wanted to make any of those choices to free Lydia, she could have done it without drastically changing the plot. But if she had, it might have felt a bit too "literary" and unrealistic.
I've just been re-watching some of Dr. Octavia Cox's literary analysis videos on YouTube. They reminded me that Austen always loved to skewer the tropes and clichés of other literature, especially Gothic melodrama, whether in outright parody or in subtler deconstruction.
Dr. Cox's video on the elder Eliza's fate in Sense and Sensibility particularly highlights this trend in Austen. She argues that Eliza's story is a classic, clichéd Gothic melodrama (a beautiful orphan, an abusive uncle, thwarted romance, forced marriage to a cruel man, a "fall" into a life of "sin," and ultimate illness and death, all narrated by Colonel Brandon in heightened, poetic language), and that Austen's point in including it was arguably to highlight that this wouldn't be the fate of her heroines. Marianne comes close to it with Willoughby and with her near-fatal illness, but in the end she's saved. Austen's point was arguably to say "Yes, I know all about this type of melodrama, I know all the clichés, but I'm relegating it to the backstory, because that's not what I want to write."
(I don't know if everyone would interpret the elder Eliza's storyline this way, but it's how Dr. Cox reads it.)
Maybe with Lydia's fate, and with the backstory of how Georgiana was freed from Wickham, Austen was doing something similar.
I'm not enough of an expert on Georgian literature to know if the rescuing of girls from predatory men with their virginity and honor intact was a cliché or not. But it does appear in late 18th century comic opera. For example, Mozart's Don Giovanni: the title character is the ultimate womanizer, but he has no success with any of the women he tries to prey on over the course of the opera. His seductions are stopped by the timely, chance arrivals of his enemies, his victims get away unscathed, and he pays for his crimes with his life in the end. Or The Marriage of Figaro: the Count's designs on Susanna are thwarted, and he's humiliated and forced to beg his wife's forgiveness.
If stories of womanizers being thwarted and punished, and their female victims saved with virtue intact, were as common in the literature of the day as they are in opera from that era, then maybe Austen used Wickham and Lydia to deconstruct them.
We definitely see some skewering of poetic cliche in the fact that despite Mrs. Bennet's fears/hopes, Lydia's honor is saved with a bribe instead of a duel.
Maybe like the Eliza backstory in Sense and Sensibility, the backstory of Georgiana's near-elopement can be read as a more perfect "literary" example of a girl escaping a cad's clutches. The elopement was thwarted partly by pure chance, as Darcy paid a surprise visit just before Wickham and Georgiana meant to run off, and partly because Georgiana was a “good victim,” whose conscience got the better of her and who chose her family and honor over her whirlwind romance.
But similar luck isn't on Lydia's side, nor does she make the right, “virtuous" choices. Darcy doesn't find the lovers until Lydia has already been living with Wickham, and like a typical reckless teenager, she cares nothing for either her reputation or her family compared to her infatuation with him. So Darcy is forced to bribe Wickham to marry her, Wickham goes unpunished except that he loses his hope of marrying rich, and all the characters have to live with the results of the scandal for the rest of their lives.
By having Georgiana's successful escape from Wickham be mere backstory while foregrounding Lydia's lack of escape, maybe once again Austen was saying "I could have freed Lydia this way – I know the tropes other authors might have used to free her – but I'm a more cynically realistic writer than that, so I won't."
I have no idea if this is valid or not, but it's a theory.