Your Most Hated Tropes

[Kelliezgirl]

It also depends on your view and experience with modest living. If you're accustomed to houses of 1000sq ft+, 1800 sq ft might seem modest. But if you're accustomed to houses in the 6-900 sq ft range, modest is going to feel different to you and anyone who sees it differently is going to seem out of touch with what modest housing actually means.

Houses built in the last 20-25 years or new construction already rule out the idea of a modest house. That's upper middle class to lower high class housing, which isn't modest housing even if it's the smallest in the neighborhood.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and Bumfuck, Alabama and currently live in an extremely wealthy city in Massachusetts. There are modest houses here as there were in the places I grew up. They are just becoming more and more rare.

You have a different definition of modest then.
Your original definition was smaller than average. 1800 sq feet is smaller than average. So by your own definition it is modest.
Now you are moving the goal posts to some other random element.
There are "starter homes" being built by tract builders who are very much modest homes.
No fancy finishes, basic appliances. Generic carpet and tile. Single pane windows, Builder grade straight across the board.
Those are modest.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Except it's not. There are some massive and extremely expensive mobile homes available that are definitely not modest.

Example of these massive, expensive mobile homes?

 

[AllAmericanMale]

The overuse of the word "sex", used as a noun, to refer to genitalia, when story telling coitus.

It always makes for horrendous writing and I can't quit reading a story quickly enough.

Proves the "writer" is unimaginative and there's very little hope the droning on, in the rest of the story, will be any better.

 

[TheLobster]

Can we please unhijack this thread?

As a punishment for this derailment, everyone who contributed to it now has to go over their posts, pluck out all those square footage numbers, and convert them to metric.

 

[Erozetta]

Example of these massive, expensive mobile homes?

Lit doesn't allow outside links, but a quick search turned up multiple 1800+ sq ft (largest I saw on a quick glance at a builder's site was a little over 2300 sq ft) mobile homes from one builder costing over 100k for the base without consideration of land, delivery, set up, and utility/sewage hookups, which can run another 100k pretty easily and there are multiple mobile homes around me that have sold for over 250k. These are old mobile homes of around 1k sq ft on leased park land, not brand new ones on private land. They are modest homes at moderate price points for this area. But if you're looking into something like one of these 1500-2700 sq ft mobile home deals, I'd call that anything but modest.

If by some chance this link stays up: https://resources.mhvillage.com/trends/featured-homes/big-mobile-homes

And I'm going to abide by Dirk's request after this.

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

In terms of Lit specifically? Every dude is hung like a horse, every girl has, at minimum, E cup tits. Seriously, why are writers so adverse to people with realistic proportions?

Non-Lit specific: Dwarves all have beards and Scottish accents with Norse names and hate Elves for some obtuse ass reason.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I live in a ~1,000 SqFt house built in 1949. The only unmodest thing is the three acres it sits on. Three of the four houses I've lived in were built before 1960 and all were around 1,000 SqFt. I drive two 30 year old vehicles.

My looks are best described as 'disgusting' or 'repulsive'.


I wrote the opposite world. Well off, high level management, large homes with multiple features like pools and gyms. Forty-something Moms had bodies most Twenty-somethings could only dream of.

Why?


Because it's fantasy. Reality sucks. We're here to escape reality.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It's when writers get sizes totally wrong that it gets me. Your slim petite woman isn't going to have a 40-inch chest, though DDs are possible. And the chest size going up doesn't make the breasts bigger but the opposite - a 44DD woman is probably obese, with fairly small breasts in comparison.

Giving context to facts that vary round the world is helpful. If an estate agent/realtor is speaking, mentioning square footage makes sense because that's how they think (actually UK ones try to obscure it, and only mention bedrooms). If they'd said "the house was 2500 sq ft, modest for the area, where developers liked building tacky McMansions of ever-increasing size", we'd know more about the area and what 'modest' was being compared to.

I wrote about a couple reaching his parents' house, "a modern Seventies semi in a cul-de-sac, in good time ... this isn't just metaphorical net curtain-twitching country". Any Brit will picture something like Brookside Close or Privet Drive immediately; others may grasp that a 1970s house isn't old, locally, and there are nosey neighbours.

 

[designatedvictim]

In terms of Lit specifically? Every dude is hung like a horse, every girl has, at minimum, E cup tits. Seriously, why are writers so adverse to people with realistic proportions?

It's specifically for this reason that in my two works (one multi-part, one single-part, so far) that I explicitly state that the guys come to the table with, for lack of a better term, more modest sizes:

“I’d have to say that two were about your size, but the others were about an inch or two longer…”

“Or two?” I blurted out.

“Or so,” Lisa replied. “It’s not like I ever whipped out a tape measure.

and

She’d already had enough recent hands-on experience to know that I wasn’t anything bigger than average.

As for the girls (from both works):

My inexpert guess was that they were mid-C-cup range. I preferred boobs on the small- to mid-sized range on the spectrum – B’s or C’s. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at bigger – or smaller – ones, if offered, but I probably wouldn’t actively chase after them.

and

I’d never really asked, but they always struck me as barely B-cup, maybe not even that big

So, yeah, I agree that it's an overused trope.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

The last thing I expected to do with that quote was start a flamewar over the meaning of the word "modest". Sorry.

My characters are mostly lower-middle class and up. By main character:

Maria is rich. She doesn't brag, and she doesn't live in a mansion, but she made almost a million dollars in her highest-income year. Consultant and patent-holder.

Liz comes from poverty. Her dad ran off when she was little and her mom had to do sex work to keep her kids in shoes and shelter. By the time we meet her she's got a decent job and is going to college part-time.

Rose is going the other way. She comes from upper-middle-class parents, but has drifted downward after she was widowed and didn't seek work for a few years while her kid was young. Her second husband was happy to support her, but then he got downsized and had to take a worse job, so by the time we meet them they're struggling. That's a key part of her story. She hasn't held a job in over ten years, and it's hard for her to break back into the workplace anywhere above clerk or fast food or Uber or something like that. (Technically, the main character of Pranked and its sequel is her son Rick, but I liked having all women in this post for some reason.)

Maureen is doing very well. Bank executive. I haven't really defined her background.

Lit doesn't allow outside links ...

It does. It blocks certain categories, mostly competing story sites.

--Annie

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Lit doesn't allow outside links, but a quick search turned up multiple 1800+ sq ft (largest I saw on a quick glance at a builder's site was a little over 2300 sq ft) mobile homes from one builder costing over 100k for the base without consideration of land, delivery, set up, and utility/sewage hookups, which can run another 100k pretty easily and there are multiple mobile homes around me that have sold for over 250k. These are old mobile homes of around 1k sq ft on leased park land, not brand new ones on private land. They are modest homes at moderate price points for this area. But if you're looking into something like one of these 1500-2700 sq ft mobile home deals, I'd call that anything but modest.

If by some chance this link stays up: https://resources.mhvillage.com/trends/featured-homes/big-mobile-homes

And I'm going to abide by Dirk's request after this.

$250k for a mobile home?
Well, since the median price of a house sold in the US is $410k that means your mobile homes are still well below the average, which by your own definition means "modest".

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

It's specifically for this reason that in my two works (one multi-part, one single-part, so far) that I explicitly state that the guys come to the table with, for lack of a better term, more modest sizes:

and


As for the girls (from both works):

and


So, yeah, I agree that it's an overused trope.

I just like my erotica to have people who sound real, so good on you for not giving into the trope!

 

[Statius]

I don't like or hate tropes, I have however made fun of the teacher trope, kind of. I have a story titled 'Trope1: The Teacher'. I never wrote anymore, but it's a completely absurd blowbang story. The intention was to do a nurse, preachers wife, a cop, but the idea bored me pretty quick. But that one story still makes me laugh, it's so utterly redic.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I don't like or hate tropes, I have however made fun of the teacher trope, kind of. I have a story titled 'Trope1: The Teacher'. I never wrote anymore, but it's a completely absurd blowbang story. The intention was to do a nurse, preachers wife, a cop, but the idea bored me pretty quick. But that one story still makes me laugh, it's so utterly redic.

The fun part of tropes is twisting them into something else, playing against type.
My current WIP progress the FMC and MMC end up forced to share a hotel room because of a winter storm. Trope with a Capital T.
Nothing happens. They spend the night in separate beds and get back on the road in the morning.

 

[Statius]

The fun part of tropes is twisting them into something else, playing against type.
My current WIP progress the FMC and MMC end up forced to share a hotel room because of a winter storm. Trope with a Capital T.
Nothing happens. They spend the night in separate beds and get back on the road in the morning.

Like it. I got so annoyed reading about elf women being raped and 'willingly' turned to whores for orcs I wrote an elf/ orc love story. No rape, no forced. The whole story is an intrigue, and delaying tactic until they can consummate making her a queen of the orc.

 

[Abbafan]

In terms of Lit specifically? Every dude is hung like a horse, every girl has, at minimum, E cup tits. Seriously, why are writers so adverse to people with realistic proportions?

Non-Lit specific: Dwarves all have beards and Scottish accents with Norse names and hate Elves for some obtuse ass reason.

And the site of one of those monsters transforms women into amoral sex fiends who will ignore marriage vows, social taboos, and so on. Like, if I wanted that I could go to a porn site and watch videos.

 

[Statius]

And the site of one of those monsters transforms women into amoral sex fiends who will ignore marriage vows, social taboos, and so on. Like, if I wanted that I could go to a porn site and watch videos.

Read the post above yours?

 

[Kelliezgirl]

And the site of one of those monsters transforms women into amoral sex fiends who will ignore marriage vows, social taboos, and so on. Like, if I wanted that I could go to a porn site and watch videos.

Or just seeing some guy jerking off and suddenly... the transformation!

 

[Abbafan]

Or just seeing some guy jerking off and suddenly... the transformation!

She's a deeply religious mother who's only had sex with her husband, but then she catches her college age son in the act and the next thing she knows she's riding him like a cowgirl, as if she's lost free will. LOL.

 

[Abbafan]

Read the post above yours?

Yes, I prefer it when there's more to a story, some tension.

 

[Levorotatory]

It's when writers get sizes totally wrong that it gets me. Your slim petite woman isn't going to have a 40-inch chest, though DDs are possible. And the chest size going up doesn't make the breasts bigger but the opposite - a 44DD woman is probably obese, with fairly small breasts in comparison.

44DD is definitely a BBW bra size, but those cups are still bigger than they would be in a smaller DD size. My wife was that size when she was breastfeeding. They were magnificent, cantaloupe sized. Now she is a 44B and they don't look particularly large or small on her, but they are still the size of large grapefruits.