My Least Favorite Trope...

There are lots of drama tropes in Asian Dramas.  There's the one where the rich guy falls for the poor girl, the one where the main leads fight until they fall in love, the trope of someone getting hurt, sick, or drunk and MUST be piggybacked to some location, the wrist grab, and lots more.  Most of time I enjoy watching these tropes play out and lots of them really do move the story along.

But there is one that I absolutely hate.  I hate it to the point that I will often fast forward through the majority of the episodes that are necessary for it to play out.  That is the trope of one character breaking up with their significant other "for their own good".  Oh My Stars!!!!  It has to be the worst reason ever for breaking up.  Why?  Because it always entails someone not actually sharing the reason for the breakup with the other one. 

For example:

Female Lead is threatened that if they don't leave the Male Lead something awful will happen the Male Lead.  Female Lead breaks up with Male Lead without actually telling him about the threat.  Male Lead is crushed.  Female Lead is crushed.  Emotional Trauma ensues until the Bad guy gets caught and the Leads get back together anyway.

Literally the entire thing could have been dealt with with a conversation if everyone would just talk to one another.  It's not always a "villain" that's the cause. Sometimes it's an illness, or a truth that one person is trying to hide.  But it's some variation of the idea of "you'd be better off without me...but I'm not going to tell you that, I'm just going to leave." 

Why does this trope bug me so much?  I think it's is because it is the most unrealistic trope of them all.  In real life, people who care about each other talk to each other.  They go through the good and the bad together and only those who are wildly immature (like young teenagers) would ever think that simply giving in to a bad guy/girl or hiding from the one they love is going to fix an issue.  So when it is supposed to be adults doing this very thing, it's really hard to swallow.  Honestly, I don't think it would bug me as much if the characters had a real conversation about the situation before the break up.  But they don't.  It's usually one of them just drops out of sight leaving the other to be totally confused as to what happened.

Now, I can hear you saying, "Toni, it's a tv show...it's not real!!!"  That's true, and I get that, but here's the thing...most tropes have at least enough basis in reality that you can wrap your head around why it's there.  This one simply flies in the face of anything real so I find it beyond frustrating. 

I was going to list some shows that have this trope, but in the effort to not give away spoilers, I won't.  However, there are a BUNCH of them.  I was looking through my "completed" list of shows on the My Drama List site and I hadn't even gotten halfway through my list and I'd already come across 37 shows that had some variation of this trope.  *Sigh*  I said it frustrates me, I didn't say I didn't watch the shows that uses it.

So that's my most hated drama trope.  What's yours? 

Until next time...