How a cliché telltales where you’re from (or what you have read)

HOW CLICHÉS ARE A NATIONAL ISSUE

I’m pregnant. He is your father. I’m getting married to her. Who can save us now? The Caucasian main characters. The billionaire and the poor girl (universal motif?). To betray family for love. The traditional single mom’s family.

Can you recognize these clichés? You have watched Mexican movies and tevenovelas.

Argentinian clichés verse about immigrants’ arrival by vessel, how things were already fucked up and how the previous worker used to do that job… Ways to give more tasks to the office’s newbie. Peruvians love stories about the oppressed turning tables on the oppressed. In India,the names Anjali-Rahul go hand by hand.

NEW YORK IS AMERICA

The United staters love New York traffic scenes for romantic movies. So much, they forget it is impossible to cross the city in a yellow cab and catch the heroine before she takes her plane to Timbuktu when she left two hours ago. The male character who destroys everything in his ambition. The teenager who only needs some makeup and a haircut to become the fanciest pretty girl on earth without any therapy session to restore her low self steem.

BISEXUAL EXPLAINS IT ALL

Do you want to be inclusive without making your story an homosexual one? Make your main character bisexual and you won’t have to explain why your character is now in a hetero-normative relationship after a long chain of boy-boy lovers or a lesbian break up.

SHARED LONG NAMES EXPERIENCES

You can even go with the long long names shared experience of all America… [Brazil too? I don’t know]; minus those native ones who don’t share the jew-christian heritage. Names such as Clark Joseph Kent or Ernesto José Víctor Pedrollo de todos los Santos.

NOT MY FAVORITE ONES BUT…

Ones you can encounter in manga^[1]. Litle pretty girls always wear long dresses and straw hats. The serial killer falls in love and becomes an empathic being…. No one would write that after CSI teaching us serial killers are killers because they lack the empathy screw in first place^[2]. However…

Girls wear long dresses plus socks. In 1920 that was common all over the world. Nowadays, you won’t see it very much. Add social pressure about couples and condition equality.The handsome guy must be with the pretty girl. The perfect and smart guy with the perfect and smart girl. Food that comes up wrapped in a big handky or the multi-leveled lacquered boxes filled with food.

The trained police girl who can’t deal with the assaulter in the end and is taken hostage —The black widow changed this cliché a little. The gallant chap who taked the seat belt to strap in on the woman. The perfect man who is handsome, intelligent and kind like a prince…A prince!? Europeans won’t write such a comparison. I mean, their princes can be intelligent and kind or handsome and intelligent but will lack in one sense or the other. Europeans do know since they have princes. The people writing these clichés have but one emperor or none.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE CLICHÉ?

If you tell me, I might know where you are from. Maybe not. I haven’t read french clichés.

Remember, anything you say can and will used to create. Have fun sliding some snitching clichés into your writing. Pasto kalo.

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^[1] Mangas either make fun or take notice of the fact, creating really inventive names that could very well exist in real life for fantasy princes. Names that sound like Phillip Mathias Benjamin Augustus.

^[2] Not mocking, just explaining. Anyways, what doesn’t work for me; works for others and the only thing I’m REALLY AGAINST is cancelation just because one has an unpopular opinion. So long it doesn’t hurt anyone’s integrity, opinions are opinions. Plus, these assassins really appear in manga or webtoonwith names such as Emmeline, John, Elios, Farah.