This week's Long and Short Reviews question was a hard one. A book trope I'd like to see happen less often in real life? ???
Usually book tropes that sell are things that people like to think about.
One exception might be bereavement. People like stories where widows are happily remarried and orphans are happily adopted. Well, in order to become widows and orphans, y'know...Still, I'm not sure that it would be better if everyone in a family died at the same time so that nobody had to be bereaved.
What did other people think?
"Forbidden love." Should we all just "be more accepting" of whatever people claim is "love" when we suspect they're only looking for attention? Meh. What about telling them the truth--that we are not in a position to know whether their "love" is pure or sincere, or is hurting or cheating other people, or will or won't last. That is between them and God. To the rest of humankind it's merely boring. I suppose any of it is too much, in real life. But in real life I see much less "forbidden love" than I see people anguishing, tediously, about their lack of any kind of "love." It might be good to see more of these people trying to "be worthy love and love will come."
"Unresolved endings." I don't like lack of closure either, but real life doesn't seem to me to have a lot of endings. Even when one person dies, other people's roads wind on and on.
"Abuse of other people." Well, yes. The evil that lurks in the hearts of humans is more than a book trope.
"Alien abductions." I'm not sure whether that does happen in real life. If it does, yes, it ought to stop!
"Minority characters getting killed off." As in The Hunger Games, where the author's intention was to provide sympathetic roles for minority-type actors, but the sole-survivor plot allows only the character with whom the author identifies to survive. I'd like to see less of it in fiction. I'm not sure I've seen it in real life but, if it does happen, it ought to stop..
"How could you be a virgin?" If that's common enough in fiction to be a trope, it would be in the kind of fiction most of us don't read. It's worth mentioning here, though, as one more reason for young women to remain virgins until the prospective fathers of their children have provided them with houses in which to raise the said children.
"The Singularity"--humans build robots smarter than the humans are, and the robots take over the world. Actually I don't think that'll happen, but on moar readings of Bible prophecy, central digital currency is a sign that the benefits of human civilization may come to an end.
"Man pursues woman he can't marry because of complications from his first marriage." No need to say "persons" here; we all know who actually does it and who may occasionally be harmed by it. I don't see much of this in real life or in fiction. That may be because I prefer frivolous fiction to the really trashy kind that often tries to pass itself off as "literary." It worked in Jane Eyre, where even in that difficult and dangerous day it motivated the woman to get a life of her own. It might be excused on that kind of grounds in modern fiction. If it does still happen in real life, the only explanation would be that the man's not worth the woman's time.
"Rich and powerful person with no interest in improving society." I suppose I should have thought of that one as a book trope. It's another one that doesn't often occur in books I read. It does occur in real life--you know the members of the World Economic Forum don't believe a global dictatorship can possibly benefit anyone but the dictators.
I didn't think of some of these good answers. So I was about to skip this question until I saw two romance novels mention "billionaire developers."
I'd like to see that species go extinct in the real world. "Developers" are people who barge into existing communities and inconvenience everyone by wastefully destroying what's already there and shoving in something else, often something nobody else wanted, like an "apartment tower" stocked with welfare cheats. They turn perfectly good pastures into shopping plazas located out in the country, sucking shoppers out of the downtown neighborhoods that already had shopping plazas, rotting the existing shopping plazas and causing everyone to drive more. They want to destroy what was already there just to be able to say they've changed things, without asking whether the changes were an improvement for their neighbors, or whether the changes are actually causing people to lose their homes.
I'd like to see people think more about the many benefits of people staying in one place, apart from periods of travel for things like education, and have homes, and know their neighbors, all their lives and back through generations of their families. People knowing each other well enough to want to annoy one another, to keep to themselves and trust one another to abide by agreed-upon rules of behavior. Stability is what makes a genuinely nice neighborhood. There can be students or seasonal visitors who come and go, but the base of a good neighborhood is people whose addresses don't change.
"Developers" destroy that quality of a good neighborhood even if their bids for attention do, usually by accident, have some sort of benefit for somebody.other than the realtors who jack up the prices on the houses people abandon. So it would be a good thig if people just didn't cooperate with rich, arrogant people's "developments." If, for a start, they didn't sell land outside the family, or sold it only for a limited time period with a contract bristling with restrictions, as in the Bible. People like Donald Trump would still make money but they would have to make it without ruining scenic, historic places.
Instead of "billionaire developers" they might have to be "billionaire heirs," or maybe, in a society that prized stability, "billionaire sculptors," or "billionaire investors," or "billionaire frugal fanatics." That might result in the world having fewer and better billionaires.
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