Hello, and thank you for reading!
This week’s challenge for the Brooding YA Hero Street team has to do with romance tropes! We’re all sharing our favorite tropes and why we *heart eyes emoji* them so much! Check the #BroodyBFF tag on Twitter for other posts from my stellar peers.
The Challenge: What’s your favorite romance trope? Friends to lovers? Fake-dating? Sharing a bed platonically? Clumsy meet cute? Explain the feels this trope gives you!
Being on the asexuality spectrum makes reading romance an odd experience. While society has conditioned me to just accept that instantaneous sexual attraction is a thing that exists, it’s not been my experience. So lots of times, romantic plots that involve locking eyes once and falling in love forever require a lot of willful suspension of disbelief on my end.
Which is why the “friends to lovers” trope is almost always the only one that feels authentic. Knowing someone super well, liking them platonically, then realizing there may be something else there just makes sense to me. I’ve spent years rooting for the platonic best friend of YA heroines who is thrown over for the Brooding Bad Boy – not because Broody isn’t totally swoonworthy, but because I don’t *do* relationships without a strong platonic background.
This trope can totally be combined with other tropes from Mindy Klasky’s list, like “office romance” (working together is a great way to get to know people!), “ugly duckling” (screw conventional beauty – but not literally), “gay for you” (I’m biromantic, but the element of confusion/discovery attached to these relationships is what I experience basically every time I develop a crush, homoromantic or not).
If you know of any super great “friends to lovers” stories, feel free share them with me here, or tweet at @BookRevueBlog!
P.S. Check out Broody’s COVER REVEAL! Is it not glorious?
The Book Revue 
Yeah, the “locked eyes across a room and fell in love” is hard for me too…probably because I even have trouble maintaining friendships if I’m not forced to be with the person. Haha. 🙂 I have never experienced serious sexual or romantic attraction, although I desire to (not sure if I’m ace or not), so romance stories are always a fun peek into what the rest of the world is experiencing.
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