In your opinion, what are the biggest cliches in romance novels or movies or TV shows even of how people meet or fall in love?
I think my personal favorite/hated is the "they hate each other so much that they end up ripping each other's clothes off" scenario
Or the "Hey, I just bumped into you after 15 years, let's fall in love" in movies
Sidenote: I want to work in the phrase, "throbbing love-muscle" into a story
I love when the cock is referred to as "his throbbing manhood", myself. But that's just words.
I think my biggest plot annoyance is in the really old school stories with the Prince Charming Syndrome. YOu know what I mean, where *arbitrary girl* dances one waltz with a guy she's known for ten seconds and they're planning the wedding in the next scene.
Of course, maybe I'm just bitter since I never got asked to dance as a tween. *slashes wrists*
Traditional:
1. Woman is sad and alone.
2. Woman meets and falls in love with man who has six pack abs and a throbbing huge penis.
3. Woman eventually finds out man isn't all who he says he is.
4. Woman hates man.
5. Woman remembers that man has six pack abs and a throbbing huge penis.
6. Woman falls in love with man.
Today's romance:
1. All of the above...just make sure man is either a vampire or werewolf.
Man gets divorced because he was a shit husband then he meets the hottest woman of his life and he is suddenly this great standup guy that's not a piece of shit and they fall in love. The end.
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez and whatever actress is popular this month.
Oh and Ashton Kutcher as the douchebag boyfriend who is lovably dorky even though he has the IQ of a gerbil.
Matthew McConaughey stars as a laid back bachelor opposite Sandra Bullock's workaholic who just needs to let go and have some fun!
Also in the movie poster, he'll lean against her at a 45 degree angle while wearing a suit or something.
But in seriousness, I hate most romantic cliches. Most of all I hate the over used romcom formula.
Movie starts. Establishing shots of girl and her friends, guy and his friends. They're painfully and obviously single and don't like it one bit. They meet by some bizarre coincidence (FATE?) They just don't like each other -- at first! And then suddenly, convenient situation that forces them to re-evaluate the other person. Bam, they fall in love. Then something goes wrong, they split up. Guy does something crazy to win girl back and makes big heartfelt speech. They live happily ever after.
Insert scheming exes or zany friends as you see fit.
I will admit one thing however. I'm a sucker for will they/won't they storylines. Scrubs (JD and Elliott), How I Met Your Mother (Ted and Robin.. and then Robin and Barney), The Office (Pam and Jim). I always root for those couples. I'm a sap at heart.
I hate the confirmed bachelor who loves his womanizing ways, until he meets that one woman that causes him to rethink his lonely miserable life.
Also, I hate when people get divorced and start dating again within five seconds. I just think it sends a poor message. Maybe work on being a better person before you run off and ruin someone else's life.
the woman who needs a man to feel complete.
ick.
His hot seed spilled into her hand...
I fucking hate romantic comedies! It's pretty much a given that if my wife watches one, we're going to have a fight because I don't sing in the rain, fill her office three feet deep with rose petals or anything else like said characters, ALL THE TIME (or at all, but that's beside the point). Next time I think I'll bust out some raunchy porn and tell her that I just don't feel like she values me because we can't have a three way where she eats my cum out of her sister's asshole as payment for a pizza delivery.
Okay, so I'm a little angry today.
Dave - just tell her she's pretty, okay?
The only two romantic comedies I can think of that I love are French Kiss and Fools Rush In.
@Avery--You know, I believe that would actually work
The romantic comedy I love is Reservoir Dogs.
That one is too mushy.
Bryan, you really need to get in touch with your feminine side.
Although, no one takes a goose to the nose with as much grace.
is 'goose to the nose' a new sex act? Because I think I've done that on accident and once on purpose.
I have to admit I liked Crazy, Stupid, Love though with Emma Stone. I think she is hilarious, when Ryan Gosling takes his shirt off and she goes, "Fuck! It's like you are photoshopped! Alright, let's bang!"
@Bryan - on a roller coaster? kinky exhibitionism. I guess that's why they call them amusement parks.
alien - I just watched Crazy, Stupid, Love last week and I adored it! I watched it twice. I recommended it to friends, It was so good.
Dave - it will work. Trust me.
Crazy Stupid Love was not a romantic comedy. It was just a regular comedy. NO, it was a buddy-flick. It was...um, NOT a romantic comedy!
Curses!
I just don't have the patience for rom-com's. Even with the little spin Hollywood likes to put on all of them these days it's still the same shit, and although they're kind of nice to watch, once it gets to the make-up scene I just want to stab somebody in the face.
One day I'd like to see a rom-com where the couple has fun for a while and then it all goes to shit and they realize that they just had a good time for a while. Maybe they try it again and it's even shittier than before and then they move the fuck on.
Probably the thing I hate the most about rom-com's is the stupid "I can't live without you" romantic monologue that's full of cliche.
My favourite romantic movie will always be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind specifically because they show all the love instead of having the characters say it. They all do dumb things that couples do, like pretending to smother each other with pillows; it's so real and honest. And then it all falls apart and at the end they start over, knowing shit's going to get bad. Makes me tear up just thinking about it. (And I know Kate Winslet basically plays the whole manic pixie sterotype, but the movie's so well-written it doesn't even matter.)
One day I'd like to see a rom-com where the couple has fun for a while and then it all goes to shit and they realize that they just had a good time for a while. Maybe they try it again and it's even shittier than before and then they move the fuck on.
500 Days of Summer.
Ah, right. I liked that movie, but it was a bit heavy-handed on the melodrama, and Zooey, well, she's good but she plays the same role every single time!
There should be a movie where she's the romantic interest and she wears sweat pants into Starbucks, and she sports her Guess purse and her aviator sunglasses and that stupid messy bun piled right on the top of the head hairstyle. I'd love to watch her play that chick.
There should be a romance where the two main characters commit suicide at the end because they can't be together because they have warring families that hate each other.
Oh wait.
I get mad at the the scene ALMOST at the end when the girl finds the guy in a compromising situation, which is all a big misunderstanding, but of course she doesn't want to wait around for the explaination...
American Dreamer was pretty amusing - although I think that was likely just a comedy.
Has there been a romantic comedy that embodied the idea "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with?" If there has, I'm sure they butchered it...
Alternatively, the epic; "if you can't be with the one you love, fuck their roommate" (in the ass!)
Hahahaha I can't even tell you how many times I used to have a guy over for dinner, drink too much, and wake up to find he was boning my hot roommate. Of course they'd still go for an awkward breakfast with me. I think I'm pretty much the worst at dating.
I think the worst trend in romance these days though, is truly the Reality Show Romance. I mean seriously? Has anyone seen that awful one where they have some guy who lives with his parents, and there are like 15 girls living in the house with the guy and the parents all fighting over who gets to clunk nubs with him?
I mean, I guess it's reality based, a lot of us do fight over guys who turn out to be losers, but at least it's not normally public...
I agree, the reality show romance is the worst like the Bachelor and the Bachelorette because it's usually a horde of women with silicone boobs fighting over a total douche who hot tubs with all of them (among other things). It's basically a smorgasbord for the dude to go "eeny, meany, miney moe, whose the biggest hoe?" and then the female ones, the woman always thinks she is going to meet Mr. RIght to marry her but of course there is a second season because the guy turns out to be a jerk or secretly married. It's as bad as a soap opera. Now soap opera cliches, we could start a whole thread about that......
say what you will about soap opera cliches, but I respect any episodic writing that can keep fresh ideas rolling in over the course of fifty years... aliens abducting possessed babies from evil twins back from the dead - that's some good shit right there.
I hate romantic cliches. They are so cheesy and horrible, and then I realize that when I'm talking to my lady, I say so many corny and cliche things. I even love saying it to her and making her all giggly and smiley. I guess that makes me a hypocrite.
I think my personal favorite/hated is the "they hate each other so much that they end up ripping each other's clothes off" scenario
Awe, come on, it worked SO WELL when Benedict and Beatrice did it, why would we EVER stop doing it? We'll run that one into the fucking ground until Ol' Bill's bones are dust and no one remembers where it came from in the first place.
...wait...
Daytime soaps are actually a dying medium now. A couple have been cancelled after like 50 years. What's funny is the outrage from the housewives of America or the old ladies who watched them from day one. "Don't take away my stories, goddamnit! Then I might have to actually read a book!"
To be fair, my grandmother was heart broken when All My Children got cancelled, and she is one of the most well read people I know.
On the other hand, my other grandmother was also heart broken, and she reads Harlequinn romances exclusively...I suppose my anecdotal evidence is a wash.
I will admit I watched All my Children as a teenager because my Mom watched it. It was like the soap that all the pregnant women I knew watched while they were on leave. I was generalizing. I think it sucks that the soaps got cancelled for those women who watched it every day since like 1971 but I also think the world is changing and that form of five day a week storytelling is a thing of the past. It's too expensive to produce when they have all those reality talk shows and fake judges. I will admit I used to love Melrose Place, 90210 growing up, all the cheesy nighttime soaps. At least they were fast paced though, my god, daytime soaps take a week long for someone to finish a conversation.
I only ever watched Neighbours, and then they stopped showing it in Canada, and I went through withdrawls. Sadness. Terrible writing, but fascinating for god-knows-what reason.
My favorite soap opera cliche is, someone is about to walk in the room and catch their lover cheating on them or kissing someone else when their phone rings or something and then the secret drags out for sixteen more weeks. The almost reveal. The "cliffhanger Friday to get you to come back Monday but then nothing happens" reveal.
Yeah, I used to watch soaps in the summers with my grandmothers or my mom. They suck you in. And the men are always hot, which helps (and they write in bigger roles for the teen characters in the summer, too, trying to hook the kids while they're young).
I always thought the coolest job as a writer would be a TV show, because you don't have to leave your characters behind to move to the next project--but soaps are a little too weird. There isn't much character development, because to keep it going, everyone ends up being a "bad guy" at some point or another.
I think that's why television took a leap forward by creating shows with fixed lengths - like Babylon 5, Six Feet Under etc... Instead of having to keep thinking up new storylines well after the show has jumped the shark, the arcs are laid out from the start, and it can end with some satisfaction.
Although I didn't watch it, apparently the pilot & final episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation were good bookends. In the pilot, the crew encounter another rogue omnipotent being, Q. Then they go through their adventures of space-time anomalies for however many seasons. Then in the final episode, Q returns, only to tell them that they never actually went anywhere. Remember, he's omnipotent, and has just been messing with them. Interesting turn, considering how many omnipotent beings they managed to undermine throughout the history of the franchise.
that said, Q couldn't have been all that omnipotent, because the episodes were tragically formulaic.
"Q returns, only to tell them that they never actually went anywhere."
That isn't what happened. Although Q was there.
Like I said, I didn't see it. I think that Q was holding them on trial, but as he's part of a Quantum Continuum, time isn't exactly linear. Or something. At any rate, they had plotted the last episode to bookend with the pilot episode, which is more forethought than a lot of shows have had - where they just end mid-story arc.
Oh you mean like The Sopranos that just ends mid...........
Well most British shows have like six or eight episode seasons but this might just be due to budgetary constraints but sometimes 12 episodes of a show on like HBO or showtime as a season is enough instead of network TV which is like 22 episodes a season in which 10 of them end up being filler for the main plotline. There are some shows I used to like that I ended up hating because they keep going on and on and on like House and even Dexter is starting to suck now. I'm not even much of a Simpsons fan anymore, I don't think it's that funny either like it used to be.
I think Six Feet Under had the best ending to a series ever.
I loved six feet under and agree about the ending.
Two of my favorite romantic comedies of all time: American Psycho and Ted Bundy!!
The she picks a horrible monster of a guy over a normal dude who is then happy to take her in the second her rejects her, often after the normal dude saves her just makes me want to vomit. Just once I want to see a guy say, "Hey just because I wouldn't let him beat you senceless doesn't mean we are a couple. I've meet a really nice girl at whereever since you rejected me, and I'm not going to dump her for someone who already rejected me."
And the Notebook. I'm glad that cheating tramp got sick!
Dwayne--playing off of that, I hate the Pretty In Pink formula. We are supposed to be HAPPY that she broke her best friend's heart to be with a guy that was shallow enough to dump her earlier on because she wasn't popular/rich enough? Oh, sure he came around--but what about the guy that's been supportive and awesome to her from day one?
And I also hate the movies where a character is about to get married, and then leaves their fiance at the altar--what does it matter that they just humiliated the SHIT out of someone they loved enough to almost marry? Just ride off into the sunset with the person you were "meant" to be with. And seriously, the person they left at the altar was an asshole? I'd be an asshole, too, if my soon-to-be spouse was acting a fool with an old friend in the days leading up to my wedding!
And I also hate the movies where a character is about to get married, and then leaves their fiance at the altar--what does it matter that they just humiliated the SHIT out of someone they loved enough to almost marry? Just ride off into the sunset with the person you were "meant" to be with. And seriously, the person they left at the altar was an asshole? I'd be an asshole, too, if my soon-to-be spouse was acting a fool with an old friend in the days leading up to my wedding!
Yeah, I've never seen anyone that accepting of losing someone to a comeptitor where love is concerned.I'm just vindictive enough that I would find a way to taint every single good memory they ever had of one another until they couldn't stand each other.
They need to make a spoof sequel where the jilted fiancee stalks them Cape Fear style.
