A child is born and looks so much like his mother or father that no one who sees them could NOT know that they are related. I mean this happens in real life but not as often as novels. Other variation is they have some odd characteristic (webbed toes, long fingers, a ski-slope nose) that everyone who sees it knows their parentage.
People learning languages so quickly and perfectly. You know, the old “I spent a year in France who I was in college so of course I’m perfectly fluent.” This one is prevalent in any book where people from 2 countries have to interact.
This is mostly prevalent in action thriller type novels, but it bugs me nonetheless: a character (typically the main character/hero) was an Air Force or Navy fighter pilot but somehow is an expert at small arms and hand to hand combat because of his time in the service. Sorry, no. Even career infantrymen are often not very good at hand to hand combat and most everyone except military police, infantry, special forces and air force para rescue and combat air controllers would likely not be very well trained with small arms (at least by the military).
For me, the most well known example would be Dirk Pitt, but I recently read a book, the name of which escapes me, about a USAF fighter pilot who gets mixed up with some evil rich dude who’s trying to use alien technology to create mind-controlled supersoldiers and he was another prime example of this.
I think unrealistic helps the annoyingness of the cliche. Like the nerdy female scientist, who is also totally beautiful, yet no one but our hero has ever noticed her beauty, astounded as they were by her brilliant mind.
But realistic ones count too, if they are annoying enough.
Here one: In romance novels, the lovers never find love when they’re looking for it. They never meet in a singles bar. They’re never college classmates who just decide to go out. They never get fixed up by mutual friends. They never meet on a speed-date or through an Internet match service. They always “meet cute,” or are co-workers whose initial mutual hostility masks their mutual attraction, or somehow get thrown together by improbable circumstances. How many couples do you know who started out that way?
The portrayal of skeptics as stupid. The claim that the reason that they don’t believe in the aliens/magic/vampires/ghosts is because they are willfully ignoring the evidence in front of them. Instead of the real world reason being that there is no such evidence. I much prefer it to be because the weirdness in question is really good at hiding. It’s less insulting to the skeptics, and better paranoia fuel.
Several ways. Mind control of various sorts. The supernatural was gone and is coming back. Conspiracy. Invisibility and other more exotic forms of hiding.
What bugs me about the way books often portray language acquisition is that they often focus on vocabulary instead of structure. In my experience, learning new words is easier than learning fluent grammatical structure. Words are easy to memorize. Structure is more complex. Don’t make me roll my eyes by talking about how someone’s English is bad and then having them use the second conditional (if I’d had the time, I would have gone) perfectly. Someone whose English is genuinely poor would stick with simple past (I wanted to go, but I didn’t have the time).
I guess it’s a version of the Cinderella Complex - I call it the Menolly Effect for the most egregious example of this - a cliché where the heroine is put down by everyone in her life, but she’s actually unbelievably sweet and the best at everything, but her family hates her and treats her like shit and every bad thing in the world happens to her unjustly, but she has some hidden special talents and finally gets ahead in the world. This seems to be a fairly common cliché by female writers for some reason.
Another cliché for female protagonists that I’m tired of is the uber-spunky female lead who won’t do what anyone says and goes out of her way to get into trouble (and she always ends up landing on her feet anyway). I’d maybe like to see a heroine like that just get killed for her idiocy in the second chapter and the book moves on to some who isn’t that stupid.
The young boy growing up in a small, out of the way village is actually the hidden chosen one who must fulfill a great destiny. 90% of the time the parents will be killed or the bad guy will be searching the area, requiring the young lad to take to the road. Adventure ensues.
I get tired of the action thrillers where the Cop or FBI Agent refuses to stop investigating somebody. Even when his bosses tell him to stop. Sometimes the “hero” risks arrest by his own people. He boldly walks into a dangerous situation outnumbered ten to one and with no backup.
I’ve even read stories where the stubborn “hero” escapes from custody to pursue the bad guy.
This has been used so many times that it’s become ridiculous. Any rational person wouldn’t risk his career and arrest (by his own people) to pursue a criminal.
A lot of these, it happens that way in books because if it didn’t happen that way, there wouldn’t be a book. For instance,
But if they aren’t thrown together through improbable circumstances, you don’t have a romance novel, you have a ten-second eHarmony ad. “Mary and I met on eHarmony, and now we’re married and expecting our second child”. There, end of story.
Sure. For example if he’s the chosen one to kill the evil tyrant, and the tyrant knows it, he’ll have to run and go on the road privileged or not. Or you could play it for humor, with the pampered aristocrat suddenly told he’s the designated savior, and forced to follow the Heroic Prophecy, including questing on the road whether he wants to or not.