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Original poster

Fiction cliches you hate

337 replies

SPBInDisguise · 30/12/2012 00:11

I read mostly crime and thriller.
Can't bear books that take the first hundred pages to describe the landscape. Thick frost, frozen lake, snowy trees, onto the action please.
Detectives that drink lots of coffee and work all night but somehow seem to actually work very little

OP posts:
StairsInTheNight · 30/12/2012 20:55

Oh, in books children are amazingly articulate, and precocious, and sometimes called Ptomely. They often act like hideous knowing preschool cupids by cleverly bringing together compatible adults

'Oh, miss, can you just help Mr Matthews with his dog, please?'

Cue Mr Matthews appearance, all broad shoulders in a checked shirt wrestling with a lead and a comical mongrel...

Bundlejoycosysweet · 30/12/2012 20:52

Ok more of a cliche would be how in books everyone is miraculously way more articulate, especially teenagers and children. Every conversation gets to the point.

Bundlejoycosysweet · 30/12/2012 20:49

I hate it when male authors underwrite female characters but expect you to understand why another character loves them....like in Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Loved the book but just could not see what was so great about Patty.

Hum, that's not really a cliche is it?

tigerdriverII · 30/12/2012 20:45

Oh yessss. Snag a donut. Why?

CaseyShraeger · 30/12/2012 20:42

I like the way that post juxtaposition makes it look as though LRD is opining that the one saving grace of the Clan of the Cave Bear series was that at least it wasn't set in London...

LineRunner · 30/12/2012 20:42

In US cop lit, when they 'work' on a piece of pizza. Or 'snag' a donut.

Why can't just fucking eat normally?

Original poster
SPBInDisguise · 30/12/2012 20:39

Don't forget the frequent sex and inability to commit

OP posts:
BillyBollyBrandy · 30/12/2012 20:38

40 something male cop, divorced, bit of a maverick, narrows his eyes a lot as the smoke from his cigarette curls into them. Needs a shave and probably reeks of gin

Always just a hair breadth from flipping out and shooting someone in the US or getting frightfully angry and shouting loudly at someone if based in the UK. Thumps desks often.

Comes across as slightly unbalanced and metaphorically shoots from the hip and follows hunches.

Just who I want in charge of my muder investigations

Original poster
SPBInDisguise · 30/12/2012 20:37

Am pmsl at the techno loving, alco pop drinking middl aged detective
Also the tooth mug - if you're going to be mingling and not wash your glass a tooth mug is as nasty as a normal glass

OP posts:
nkf · 30/12/2012 20:28

How about, "I'll have your badge for this" and detectives who eat doughnuts.

tigerdriverII · 30/12/2012 20:13

Anyone padding about (as freepeacesweet said) - they just don't have their shoes on, so nbu for 50% of MN and bu for the other 50%

Anyone who guns the engine of their car. Gun is not a verb. They started it up, quickly.

However I am fairly partial to the alcoholic fifties tec, even if he's into jazz.

carovioletfizz · 30/12/2012 20:08

stupid plots where the heroine accidentally gets caught naked or in her underwear, after spilling food over herself/spraying herself with a tap in the hero's bedroom/ knocking over a paint pot and covering herself in paint then 'having' to strip off and forgetting to lock the door so the hero/his mother/her boss walk in on her standing there.

MsNobodyAgain · 30/12/2012 20:07

Crime fiction. There is always one bent policeman, another that is a sexist rude idiot and a female that everybody lusts after but is a bit 'damaged'.

And most pathologists are women who live alone apart from having a cat or dog.

Salmotrutta · 30/12/2012 20:04
StairsInTheNight · 30/12/2012 20:03

Ayla had a magic fanjo, she gave birth at 11 to a massive headed child and yet IIRC it did that milkmaid squeezing of Jondalars giant penis.

Salmotrutta · 30/12/2012 20:03

Yes, "jolted" suggests they have had 240 volts passed through them.

GrendelsMum · 30/12/2012 20:01

LRD - yes, I thought you'd like to hear about that!

carlywurly · 30/12/2012 20:00

Anyone being jolted from a reverie makes my teeth itch..Confused

Salmotrutta · 30/12/2012 20:00

I also hate the incredibly stupid hero/heroine who absolutely must enter the creepy old building alone.

Stupid feckers.

LRDtheFeministDude · 30/12/2012 20:00

grendel - wow. Goes to show we shouldn't mock, I guess!

Trills · 30/12/2012 19:59

Jondalar's spear...

LRDtheFeministDude · 30/12/2012 19:59

morris - I hear Kalamazoo is good for that. Wink

Ayla was irritatingly perfect. I think she fits the 'ugly duckling' cliche, right? Woman who is very beautiful but the ugly, violent, and (oh-so coincidentally) swarthy folks she's with just aren't enlightened enough to see it. Hmm

Salmotrutta · 30/12/2012 19:58

Ayla fgs!

GrendelsMum · 30/12/2012 19:58

LRD - Although bizarrely enough I do know a beautiful young woman with flowing hair and long legs who sold the cosmetics business she ran from the kitchen table from her country cottage for a sizeable sum of money. She might have flowing chestnut locks, but she negotiated with the lawyers like a tiger on steroids. They didn't know what had hit them.

Salmotrutta · 30/12/2012 19:57

Ayala bloody well invented everything.

Apart from Jondalar's Spear Thrower.

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