YA Cliches: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I'm really over love triangles. From Twilight to The Vampire Diaries and the Secret Circle to anything by Cassandra Clare to the Demon's Lexicon. I actually read a book recently where both of the two main females were involved in two separate love triangles with the other four main male characters. Enough is enough, YA. And it's always an ordinary female in between two hot guys, too. It would be almost a relief at this point to see a boy stuck between two girls or, better yet, a complete end to love triangles for a while.

I also hate female protagonists who make a big deal of how plain they are, especially when compared to another female character, but every single guy she comes across either falls in love with her or makes note of her being pretty. It was relatable at first, but now it's overused.

As for things I like, I'm still a fan of characters falling for their best friends (since that's falling out of favor what with the whole bickering-bad-boy-romance thing being big). And I love it when characters mess up in a big way. Like their character flaw causes actual problems in the book instead of just being there for the sake of pretending they're not perfect.

I'm doing first person POV, even though I prefer third person. But I think with my story I need to show a lot of the inner personality struggle, so first person makes more sense... But generally, I enjoy third person more...

Yes for the bitchy cheerleaders. As a former cheerleader, I can tell you that we're not any bitchier than anyone else. Actually, the mean girls at my high school were all on the basketball team. The cheerleaders were kind of outcasts and smart girls. And there is no such thing as a "cheerleader captain." Also, there is always a coach. There are zero squads in the United States that are run by teenage mean girls with no adult supervision. It just doesn't happen. Any sport or club has to have an adult present at practices.

I love first person POV usually better than third actually

I don't mind first person as long as fourth-wall-breakage doesn't occur too often. I mean, who talks to their own mind? And that's how I view first person- you're reading someone else's thoughts.

I shall raise my hand as an example of the nerdy girl and the popular bad boy getting together. My high school experience was this huge cliche - I was nerdy and shy, guys ignored me ... then I ditched my glasses and started wearing contacts. All of a sudden, I was getting invited to parties! Guys started confessing that they liked me! Etc. I dated the bad boy when I was 16, for over a year. Even though I lived this cliche, I have to say, I hate it too. After all, it always seemed to work out in the books and the movies ... if you were enough of a good girl, you'd change him! He'd stop selling drugs! He wouldn't cheat on you anymore!

I love, love, love stories where the good girl dates the bad boy and he screws her over and she realizes that he's never going to change, and they are never going to work out, and she deserves someone who will treat her with some actual respect.

I'm a nerd. I think most hot guys are all jerks. Let them have their sluts and be popular. The weak-ordinary girl and the hot guy probably wouldn't get along in the first place. I suspect that relationship to last for a month tops a few minutes at the least.
Also, the popular girls don't mind me. I'm a wallflower and I don't get in their way.
Love at first sight makes me gag by the way. Right, when was the last time you picked out your future friend or someone you'd have a good relationship with from a crowd and were actually right?

These cliches, I despise.

Loki Mischief-Maker wrote:
And can we please, please have a YA urban fantasy without a romantic subplot? Somehow, some way? Please? Heck, even a subplot about maintaining an established romance rather than starting one would be welcome.

I'm so sick of that too. That's probably why my novel has an "anti-romance", in which the two characters involved have great sex, but they can't stand each other out of bed.

This! Or when the parents are so weak and oblivious that they can't tell that their child is smoking crack or whatever and doing it right under their noses. The adults have to be characters too, as developed as the kids.

This, this, this! I'm actually writing a YA novel this year in which only two of the primary characters are teenagers. The rest are adults, and they're far from useless (we do see the MC's fellow teenage friends at the beginning, but she's yanked out of that world pretty quickly). I wanted pretty specifically to write a story in which a sixteen-year-old kid is up against adults who are great at their jobs and very, very smart, and doesn't win (at least in the way she'd prefer).

There's also not a real romantic subplot, which might be risky. My MC does have a boyfriend at the beginning, but he doesn't come save her life, nor is she seduced by anyone else throughout the story. She does develop an inappropriate sort of crush on one of the twentysomethings she's locked up with, but it's established pretty early that nothing will ever come of it; it's just a Ship Tease/UST thing.

My novel is more "New Adult" than YA, as the main characters are all in the 19-25 age bracket. My MC is a sophomore in college studying abroad, which provides a convenient way of getting the parents out of the way.

Oh yes. So over that, I'm deliberately trying to keep the parents in the picture - out of the way at the start because my MMC has been rebelling/pushing them away, and then back in once he realises that actually, not having to spend the rest of your life with your parents believing that you're dead is quite nice.

Oh yes. Love triangles. Ugh.

Well, I don't want to say I'd stop reading a story the moment the triangle appears, but seriously, that kind of plot doesn't make a good conflict, imo. It's just not exciting or inspiring or important enough, especially if it's obvious who will the girl (and it's always the girl) end up with.

Reading about two girls in a love triangle with a guy MIGHT be a bit better, but it's often equally uninspiring. Plus, one of the girls is always a dumb slut with a hot body and another is smart and "speshul" so it's obvious who the guy ends up with. (We all know guys in YA stories always fall in love with quirky shy protagonists, unlike YA guys in reality).

Adding to the heroine thing. When the story is in first person and they use terms like "ivory skinned", "slender", "Chocolate brown eyes" to describe themselevs.

My supernatural MMC is an a-hole, but that's because he's wealthy and gets lots and lots of sex and is consequently an arrogant son of a b****. He usually suppresses his angst and when it comes out, it actually makes him a decent person as it makes him empathize with other people.

And on the flipside, my FMC is a more kicka** supernatural creature who kind of hates my MMC throughout most of the story unless it's to sleep with him, because though she can't stand him as a person, he's great in bed (when she met him, she thought he was just going to be a one night stand after a night out on the town, but due to circumstances, they accidentally end up working together). That's something that annoys me, the perception that girls don't like sex as just sex (only *guys* are like that), and that girls that are like that are terrible sluts. It's a perception that I'm definitely trying to shatter in my story.

But yeah, thinking about it, my MCs' relationship is pretty much an anti-romance to the point of being comical at times. They try so hard not to like each other and then they somehow end up being friends.

Re: "lacking a character": Exactly! What I find most irritating about many YA heroines is that they're ciphers--they have no personality to speak of beyond "shy" and "ordinary" but are inexplicably "spheshul" enough to warrant the interest of the damaged/brooding/supernatural MMC.

This is part of the character vs. characterization thing. "Characterization," i.e. laundry listing a character's physical traits, quirks, tics, speech foibles, hobbies, favorite books and movies, etc. can all help delineate him/her from other characters, but it doesn't really reflect who the character is as a person. "Character" is, pure and simple, that character's actions in certain situations. Those will tell you who the character really is.

Bahaha, I totally have the influential, wacky grandma in my story, though she's referenced posthumously as she died before the events of the book.

Heheh, I like this one too. xD

Haha, I do too in my NaNoWriMo story, but the grandma, whom I can see Betty White as, isn't the MC's grandmother, but her love interest's.

Yeah. I loved the Hunger Games, but I didn't like Katniss's indecision over whether to pick Peeta or Gale. I almost felt like she shouldn't end up with either of them.

...I was going to say more but I remembered maybe not everyone's read Mockingjay so you know I'm not going to keep going on and possibly say spoilers. ^_^

You know, I'd love to see a story where we have a bland girl and then something happens to her (like a curse) that causes two random magic hot people to be unduly interested in her, and she spends the whole book FREAKING THE HECK OUT over it and trying to get rid of them.
...in fact I think I love it so much I might write it o.o

It is true that authors often feel the need to "find a soul mate" to all their important characters... Even in YA, where characters are in their teen years.

Assumed heterosexuality is another matter. As if there are "regular" books in which gay characters are sidekicks with a sense for fashion and "queer" books in which these characters are allowed to have a full range of experiences.

Now, I must admit I don't have any queer pairings in my novel (there are gay characters but they are minor). So maybe I shouldn't talk about it.

My FMC is has deep brown skin, So I'm avoiding this.

It's back to the "speshul" thing. The heroine wouldn't dare to be something as mainstream as tan. She has to be quirky and unique and nerdy, all the way down to her skin tone.

It's interesting because I've noticed in YA films most characters, particularly female, are usually at least lightly tanned.

That's because they don't go out often: they stay at home reading Jane Austen!


But now that I think of it, I pictured my MC as being pale; I'm very pale and I guess it's easiest for me to write about it in the First person POV. However, it's a step in the wrong direction, not just because of the cliche, but because I don't want to slip into self-insert. While my MC isn't like me, she does share some of my interests, so I don't want to make her saimilar to myself in other aspects.

Thanks for reminding me of this! Paleness erased for this character!

My FMC is part Irish part Chinese. She has that pale skin that isn't pale like white pale but pale like she doesn't tan well.

You should read The Girl of Fire and Thorns. So very very very good!!!! And the FMC is dark skinned.

I try not to let my characters be super pale. I base their skin tone of of their ethnicity, like my main MC is pretty french, which some people take to mean as PALE but...yea if you've been to France you know there are a lot of really tan people over there. (Plus she has a little bit of Italian blood in her).

But seriously, why ARE they all so pale. What's wrong with being tan? Make characters relatable to the 80-something percent of us who are not porcelain.

I have a Middle Eastern (Turkish) female protag if that makes you feel any better. And I don't skirt racial issues, even if it is fantasy.

I also have the small horror of a lot of guys do like her and she's not plain--she's 'exotic' to them, a 'barbarian princess' if you will (kind of a take on all those dastardly MRAs who are like: "Get yourself a foreign wife, she'll be submissive and not a fat Caucasian!). She hates the fact they all like to /look/ at her, guys up and down the age spectrum, and she tries to act more masculine even though she's very, very vain because of it. Oooh, and she's a witch as well--and some of the guys, once caught by their SOs, just blame that about her. Like: "She put a spell on me, clearly!" Then she befriends the nephew of the man who killed her parents, a warlock--because he's seemingly pre-puberty maturity-wise and doesn't leer at her creepily, just seems confused by anything to do with intimacy. Until he kisses her while drunk. And there we go again.

Because, really, if a girl is getting a lot of attention from her male peers, she's probably getting attention from male teachers, the town pastor, and all the creepy construction workers and their like of the world. She probably gets told to "Smile!" and people call her bad names, or tell her to cover herself up, or gossip that she's going to be pregnant by sixteen (if it's modern). The emotional damage of stuff like that should be in there--a really pretty girl being creeped on by some weirdo supernatural guy shouldn't feel 'flattered' if he, say, stalks her into her bedroom and watches her while she sleeps; she would probably be terrified and call the cops, because it's her worst nightmare come true--all those horrible things guys whisper to her when they think no one else can hear and what teachers won't do anything about because they think she's just as 'easy' because she has a nice face are coming true. Any suitably non-oblivious female protag should have some grasp on this stuff--because men are taught at a young age that talking about women like they're pieces of meat or God's eye-candy is perfectly normal and that flipping skirts is 'cute'.

I hope this isn't offensive, but isn't having all MCs being white cliche? I'm a black writer and I rarely see any YA about any other race. When I got to high school I was surrounded by people of different racial backgrounds and it was beautiful, but in YA it's all white, with the occasional black friend or Hispanic. In one of my books, perhaps this makes it unrealistic, but there are five mean girls, two are white, one's black, one's Japanese and the other's Indian. I also have a story about a black girl falling for an Hispanic male. YA should switch it up in my opinion.

My current novel has two FMCs. Ria is all tanned and freckled and spends a lot of time outside (or she did before she moved to the city) whereas Val is very pale and spends most of her time inside. I guess I'm probably guilty of the cliche but at the same time, Val doesn't really go outside. At all. So while I could probably change her character a little to give her darker skin, to me it fits her character and my picture of her in my head. And I'm trying to skip most cliches so I've given myself some leeway here.

Seconded. It's entirely possible to take those familiar tropes and subvert them or play with them some. The antagonist of my novel this year is going to be a head cheerleader who develops mind control, and I'm definitely having fun trying to figure out how I'm going to make what could be a stereotypical Snotty Mean Girl into a budding supervillian.

Too add to my already-too long analysis, I think what appeals to me about YA is something that Cory Doctorow talked about when writing "Little Brother" - the idea that with YA, your characters are doing all these things that adults do, but they're doing it for the first time. Adults lie to friends, come up short in clutch situations, stand courageously for a lost cause, negotiate values with pragmatism, they do it every day all the time. Kids are still figuring out who they are, and there's still the potential in every YA character of being a total failure. What if this kid who is the hero of the story who is being set up to be amazing turned out to be a total choker in the clutch? What if he was selfish or greedy? What if he failed to do the big thing he was being set up to do? How would he learn about himself from that? How would he recover? What skills would he gain? No one EVER explores those questions!

It seems all too familiar in YA that heroes are set up to succeed, trained to succeed, and then they succeed. To me the most interesting idea in YA is the idea of a hero who is set up to succeed, trained to succeed, and then in the moment they realize something about themselves, about their inability to see X, Y, or Z, that causes them to fail. The question that many kids often ask themselves - "What if I'm not as good a person as I think I am/want to be?" YA books by and large do not address this unless they are setting characters up to be cardboard villains.

I COMPLETELY agree with what you said about the quiet/shy/loner girl getting that ideal best friend that we all want. In reality, friends (even best friends) can stab you in the back, spread rumors about you, and make you feel worthless, ESPECIALLY if the FMC is very shy and quiet. I was always the "obnoxiously nice" girl in my group of friends, and while I did have my spazzy moments now and then, I was unnervingly shy. In return, I gained some bad friendships that walked all over me. Seriously, YA, these things happen. I'd like to see an FMC who either has a "best friend" that does something awful to her, or commits the unforgivable act herself. Maybe she does something horrible to HER best friend who is quiet and shy. See? Now there's an idea!

That said, the quirky, loyal, golden retriever-esque bestie can make for an entertaining read, IF written into the story correctly. I think almost any cliche can be overcome by good writing/a great plot.

Totally get where you're coming from here. I think the good girl/bad guy (or good guy/bad guy or good girl/bad girl) romance has a reputation because not many people get it right, but in the hands of a decent writer it can be excellent.

The loner thing bothers me too--if they've got a best friend then what's the point? I just started watching the anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai (I Don't Have Many Friends) and one of the things I like about it is that all of the characters are genuinely lonely/alone.

I don't know, for me this isn't a cliche, maybe because it actually is my experience.

I'm generally the nice, shy, quiet girl (at least at school), but I met my best friend when we were about 8, and while I can't guarantee the first three years of our friendship (due to somewhat fuzzy memory), we haven't fought once in the last seven years (adding up to ten years total friendship), despite plenty of differences in opinion.

I actually hate it a lot more when friends aren't loyal, Ron Weasley drove me up the wall for pretty much this reason.

I was the shy, antisocial type of girl (still am actually) but I have that best friendship. We've been best friends since the second grade. We've had our bumps but its always come back to us. I don't think its unrealistic for the shy, somewhat antisocial girl to find a loyal and true best friend.

I understand why you'd think the 'loner with a best friend' thing would get annoying. I definitely try to avoid it in my stories, but it can be extremely difficult at times, since I was lucky enough to have that best friend bond. I've known my best friend since kindergarden (11 years now) and she's been loyal to me from the beginning, even after she moved out of state. My favorite character is the ones who are 'lonely' in a sense; they have a few close friendships, but nothing like that one, single best friend bond.

My biggest pet peeve about characters like this is when the writer doesn't really explain that the person is a homebody who doesn't know a lot of people, but beyond the people they're meeting for the first time in the story, there's no other characters. Like, this character has literally no interaction with any people. No matter how minor a character can me, it can make a story more believable if the FMC has -some- social interaction beyond the other MCs.

I agree, I've had my share of friends, but I don't have one that's there now, high school just ended and I'm alone. I'm antisocial, but I never had someone I knew from Kindergarten to now. In real life, I've learned that people change, and as much as I hate it, that's what needs to be written in YA or just real books.

In high school I was a quiet, shy, loner type, but I had a certain group of friends that's I'd had since middle school. I had two best friends. One was a popular, talkative girl, who is my cousin and still one of my best friends today. She is amazing, but a little self-centered and didn't always take other's feelings into account, though she tried. The other best friend was a horrible friend I just couldn't get up the courage to tell off, because I had known her since the first day of school. Our whole group was relieved when she moved in junior year.

Basically the point I'm making is I agree with you. If they do have a wonderful best friend they can't be THAT wonderful. Girls can be evil and while good friends don't fight a lot they do still have some rough patches. I might have never had the guts to stand up to mine, but it wasn't all puppies and lollipops (sixth grade with my random backbone caused a fight every other day with the bad friend and my anti-social behavior really caused a rift in eighth grade with my cousin). Good friends can be good friends without being entirely lovely and considerate.

Note: I love my BFF/cousin and I wouldn't want to live my life without her, warts and all. :D

Heh. The guy my main character starts developing feelings for is gorgeous. He's an angel, after all. They're supposed to be beautiful.

Too bad he's asexual. :-P

I completely agree with this. I hate that all of these YA books have these perfect perfect guys that the FMC falls for. Why can't the average guy be enough?

I don't know about anyone else, but I find people more attractive after I get to know them. Maybe it's just me but I hardly ever have the ZOMG! He's so SEEEXXYYYYY!!!! I MUST HAVE THIS

Give it up, you don't even know his middle name.

Along with the good-looking thing is the fact that every female within a fifty-mile radius things said guy is hot. I'm sorry, but this doesn't happen. I'm sure there are people out there who don't find David Beckham hot (I have never met any, but I'm sure they exist), and he's... yeah. I have never in my life seen teenage girls throw themselves at a hot guy like they do in YA books. Unless he's Robert Pattinson or something, but that's only because he's famous for playing one of those hot guys.

Hmm, beauty is in the eye of the beholder? The boy I liked in school, was tall, skinny, pale, blonde, blue-eyed, and it seemed like only I liked him. But if you mean that the guy's so hot EVERYONE likes him, than yea, I agree. In my NaNoWriMo story, the MC gets dump by the "hot" guy and after considering ending her life due to certain things, she meets a regular looking boy, but through knowing him, she finds him to be beauitful. I think people's personalities make them attractive more than anything