I apologize for this rant, but…
The presence of an element in your story does NOT mean it CONTAINS that trope. Tropes are architectural.
Just because your book has a grumpy person and a happy person does NOT mean it’s a Grumpy Sunshine trope.
As much as I adore the use of tropes as a way to narrow audience choice (to help me know which books I should pick), I still think readers and not writers should be the people labeling the tropes.
(Which I know is a controversial thing to say, but… authors don’t always know what they’re writing, and they shouldn’t always know… but I know, as a reader, whether the book meets my expectations or not.)
When I like Friends-to-Lovers tropes, I don’t just want a story in which the two MCs are friends (at some random point) in the book. Or even a story where they happen to be friends at the beginning of the book.
The Friends to Lovers architectural trope has certain emotional beats that you can meet in a thousand ways, but which are necessary for the architecture to motivate the story.
When you just have people who happen to be friends at the beginning of the book, but that friendship is NEVER at stake through the book… you didn’t “twist” the F2L trope. You invalidated it. (That’s not a bad thing, btw… it just means you’re writing another kind of trope.)
Hear me: You do not HAVE to write F2L. But if you’re going to call your book “friends to lovers,” then I expect that the friendship will be at stake through the book (even if it’s not the main story). Forgive me, but… if they start banging right away, it’s not friends-to-lovers. It’s some other trope where the people happen to be friends. (It’s “forbidden relationship” or “brother’s best friend” or “office romance” or something else. But in F2L, they don’t know how they feel at the beginning, then they can’t admit how they feel, because the friendship is AT STAKE, and once they know how they feel, the stakes have to go up, then when they want to admit how they feel, the stakes go up again… will the friendship go away? That’s the compelling question the F2L story answers.)
That type of book is FINE, by the way. Awesome, even. I’m not arguing against the presence of those books. (I could have used any other trope as an example, but I happened to be looking for Friends to Lovers book for an assignment, and one after another was just… the people happened to be friends, but the friendship was never at stake.)
If you want to attract fans of Emma/Knightley to your books, and you set me up the expectation that you’re giving me Emma/Knightley, and then you don’t give me that thing, I’m now disappointed, even though the story might be great. Maybe even really great.
I may take this post down, because I don’t want to start any fights. But tropes are architectural expectations. All good stories have tropes in them, and those tropes bear the motivational weight of the story. If the trope doesn’t bear weight, you’re setting me up for disappointment.
(In my opinion. Let me state that for the record. In my opinion.)
I teach a class on this, so I clearly have opinions. But I’m starting to get disappointed in books that I think I would otherwise really love (because the writing is good and the story is good), but they set up my expectations to be one thing, and then they do not give me that thing.
(To quote a friend, “don’t tell me it’s cake, and then give me spaghetti.”)
I want cake, y’all. Just give me the cake.
– Becca
I am always surprised how readers will point out tropes I hadn’t even realised I was using! I now go to my reviews to look for the tropes that readers have pinned to my books, and then I use those in my marketing.