Blog: Why Are YA Novels So Tropey?

I was at lunch the other day with my cousin at a restaurant when our conversation switched from school to books, particularly young adult novels. While I haven’t read a lot of young adult novels since I was 14, my cousin has and it’s something that I have been thinking about ever since. Why are they so tropey? Why do authors feel the need to get at least one trope into every book they write?

I think the answer to the first question is due to pure laziness. If you can write a book that follows a preset recipe when that preset recipe is really popular, you can make a lot of money with minimal effort. You can just make up your own characters that totally aren’t a rip-off of someone else’s character, come up with a totally different world that totally isn’t a rip-off of someone else’s better world, send it to the publisher and the next thing you know, you have a bunch of quick money. An example of this is the teen dystopian novel craze. During the late 2000’s and 2010’s, the Hunger Games trilogy came out and it sparked a massive surge of teen books featuring a badass female protagonist (who (supposedly) wasn’t like the other girls) had a hot, brooding boyfriend, at least one other guy pining after her, and was trying to fight against an evil, dystopian society meant to oppress her. While some books did this quite well (minus the cringe-inducing relationship drama), others were just straight-up rip-offs of better stories. I could give a ton of examples of this from that particular genre and others, but I’ll forgo that for the sake of time.

Eventually, teens got tired of this and started moving on to the next new thing. In today’s society, we seem to have shifted from the teen-dystopian craze to an even earlier genre and that was the craze of the “different”, “special” girl meeting and falling in love with some sort of paranormal, semi-human creature. While this used to just be designated to vampires and werewolves, today it seems to extend to pretty much any supernatural creature with books like A Court of Thorns and Roses (which is in fact considered a YA novel even though it gets progressively smuttier the further you read), Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, etc. dominating the shelves. Due to the advent of #booktok, #booktube, and other such hashtags, these books have become even more popular and it has become easier for authors to advertise them. This has created another new craze where readers are looking for similar content, opening a door for authors and publishers to essentially write the same book and have it do just as well as the original story written by someone else.

Now to answer the second question about “Why do authors feel the need to include at least one trope into every story they write?” Once again, I do think it has something to do with laziness, however, it could also have something to do with the publisher and the target audience. If you scroll through #booktube videos like I do, one thing you’ll notice is that most of the people in the videos are women. Most people on YouTube doing book reviews are women. Thus, authors and publishers will feel the need to throw in…say…a random love triangle (even when it’s not a romance story) because that’s more appealing to women (the main audience) than men. If a trope works, there’s more incentive for authors and publishers to use that trope in their books to reach more people and expand their audience.

While this is a good marketing scheme and is effective, something I’ve noticed that’s happening is that people are getting tired of these tropes. During my conversation with my cousin, she agreed that they have become very annoying and lamented the fact that in the book she’s reading now, there is a love-triangle trope. In my own experience reading YA fiction, I have almost come to expect a love-triangle and several other tropes in every one I read.

To any authors reading this, please come up with something original and minimalize the tropes. We’re tired of them.

Until next time,

M.J.