Wednesday 28 December 2016

Trope Series #17

How Old is This Character?

I know vintage is in, but I didn't think it was that popular.

Do you ever find that authors often project themselves onto their main characters? It's pretty natural to do so, author's characters are like their babies and we all know that parents want their children t be like them.
But it can get silly after a while.

A very common thing is many teenage main characters are into things that are now considered "retro" and whatnot. But they weren't retro when the authors were teenagers. How can so many fictional teenagers be into things that, coincidently, were big when the authors were young? I know that hipsters are a thing, but not enough of these characters have a weird thing with coffee to all be hipsters. Even then, the trope would be "why is everyone a hipster?" or "an abundance of hipsters". Bc I'm witty like that. I'm being sarcastic, please don't hate me.

Also, these teenagers are only into some old music, they don't even dress retro or vintage or whatever. And, let's be honest, some vintage stuff is cute. And some of it is ugly as fuck, but that's not the point. The closest you often get to dressing vintage is clothes from the 90's, bc that's somehow vintage now. Soon the 2000's will be vintage and we'll get to cringe at fun fashion choices from Disney actors all over again.

This isn't the only way authors project their occasionally views onto their readers. I wrote about this badly in another post.
It's perfectly natural that author's project their views onto their characters, but some views are often creepy or an age thing that suggests that they don't understand teenagers.

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