Tropes I Don't Like

Monologues!

Think of a shonen anime or manga.
Any one of them is fine, from the iconic to the obscure.
That said series probably has monologues. Usually, it is either the main character or the antagonist who engages in this style of talking.

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First, what is a monologue?

Monologuing is the act of one character presenting a speech that consists of their inner thoughts (majority of the time). In most cases, the character is  addressing their thoughts to another character or to the audience.

Monologues are a great tool used by writers to address what their characters are thinking. I do not dislike the whole concept of monologues. However, monologues can be both overused and overdone.

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Let's first start off with monologues that the main protagonist says.

In most cases (going by pretty much every shonen series out there), the protagonist engages in a monologue whenever they are explaining a future event that is about to happen. An example of a said future event would be a series of fighting techniques our main character (or someone else) may use. In other cases, our main character may be monologuing about past incidences, an upcoming speech, and many other scenarios were monologuing is a common act that people do.

My problem with monologues in general is the use of characters over-explaining what they are trying to say. Not only is most of the speech verbose, but it can also push anyone reading (or watching) the character out of the moment. While it is realistic for some monologues to go on longer than others (otherwise, overthinking something so much to the point where a monologue begins in your thoughts), some representation of this idea is ridiculous.

For example, in many anime, simple thoughts our main character has stay internal. However, whenever they begin to overthink something, most of the time, it is as if other background characters know what our main character is thinking (or simply our overthinking MC is saying everything out loud). While some people  may seem to say everything that's on their minds, I find it irritating when many segments of a story are of just the main character's chaotic monologues.

Now, for our antagonists, in which I will be sticking with using the entire shonen genre as my example.

There is one simple thing about an antagonist's monologue that I wish shonen writers would stop using: telling their entire plan, backstory, motives, etc. to our main character(s)! I find it even worse when these monologues take up minutes of an entire episode.

I like seeing the mysterious element in our antagonists. We learn about how and why they are the way they are through the writer's creative ways of showing so. An antagonist's monologue can expose these qualities, but in a way that is both lazy and not fascinating.

On top of being boring, an antagonist's monologue that exposes their plans in which the main character can hear it is utter nonsense. Why would you tell your enemy about this "ingenious" (let's face it, many of these plans are so bland and cliche that it's painful) plan you had when they can now easily foil it?

Backstories and motives are another thing. In many cases in real life, people may not expose either their backstories or motives to the public for why they commit terrible acts, keeping them under a lower profile. Unless, records and word break out about various personal information about said people. No monologues are used in these cases; they are just unnecessary in these cases.

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I strongly believe that having stories where the character has some of their thoughts exposed to fellow readers is an importance. It shows that the characters actually think things through. Depending upon these characters and their traits, some may think more than they speak (I am like this). Though I believe in the importance of internal speech in stories (and sometimes I wish authors would use it more often), I also want balance of the other attributes that make up a story.

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This was a quickly done chapter, so I do apologize for silly, grammatical errors present.
I will be inactive for a long time coming up, so I wanted to do my best to have a couple of these chapters out.