I'm a fandom girl, a geek girl, I speak the language of the fanfic writers and the RPers (appreciate the former am the latter).  I love my world because it's generally accepting of differences and forgiving of faults.  It doesn't matter the gaping holes in plots or the weird turns that writers make when you're in a fandom you tend to love it with it's faults not despite them.  Which is why one fandom term has come to really bother me.  And it might just be that I take a negative connotation with it because I'm surrounded in the real world by people who hyper analyze everything and don't just enjoy them for the sake of liking them.

But recently I've realized that I don't like the term trope.  To me, it feels like an insulting term.  Like you're taking something detailed and amazingly creative (Buffy, Lord of the Rings, Dark-Hunter whatever) and boiling it down to it's cliches.  And I readily admit that if a different word or phrase were used I might not feel this way.  If you boil something down to it's archetypes I'm not offended (English BA that I am) but there's something unsettling about seeing something that you love and appreciate for it's complexity written off as nothing more than a series of cliches (or tropes...I really don't like that word).

I'm pretty sure that I'm in the minority in my feelings about this (and I'm pretty sure I offended a good friend because of my resulting freak out) but I think I'm just tired of defending myself all the freaking time.  I get it.  Really, I do.  My taste isn't cool, nor is it sophisticated and it certainly isn't mainstream but it's mine.  I like romance novels and teen fiction and pop/rock music.  I like books that explore the ways that people connect to each other because we live in an isolated age.  I like music that moves through me and makes me happy.  I like knowing when I listen to a song that it was recorded for the sheer joy of making music.  I like TV shows that use language in unique ways.  And I like to enjoy them without running them into the ground.

Maybe that's it after all.  Maybe the reason I don't like the word is because I am a trope in my own way.